In January 2006, I officially left my position as a youth pastor and set off full-time as a church planter in Lansing, MI. I was 22 when I went to the assessment center in August 2005 and was ready to save the world a few months later at 23. I was naive, arrogant, insecure and […]
What Does the Bible Say About Ministry Success?
What Does the Bible Say About Ministry Success? Worshiping Ministry Success like Gideon’s Golden Ephod Gideon is most well known for using the moisture level of a fleece to determine if God wanted him to attack an army or not. All in all, he is typically known as one of the good guys, someone who […]
Being a Christian apart from the local church is much worse than it seems
There’s a lot of reasons Christians don’t go to church. Some seem legitimate on the surface, others don’t. The Church is not perfect by any means and you’ll never find a perfect local church, but is any one Christian perfect? Can an imperfect Christian exclude themselves from the local church based on its imperfection, when […]
The Best Ministry to Singles Has Nothing to do with Your Singles Ministry
There are tons of singles’ ministry resources out there for churches. Many large churches have a full-time pastor or director in charge of their singles ministry (sometimes called “College and Career” or another pseudonym). Effectively shepherding singles is a difficult tension. Singles often ask, “What do you have for me?” but the programmatic efforts to […]
Interview with Ruth Haley Barton on Performance-Oriented Drivenness, Ego, Pace, Soul & Spiritual Transformation
Ruth Haley Barton is the award winning author of 7 books and the founder of The Transforming Center. Her book Sacred Rhythms won the Logos Book Award for Best Book Award on Spirituality and her book Invitation to Solitude and Silence won the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award for Spirituality. In this interview, […]
A Solution to the Kim Davis Debacle, and the Many More that Will Follow
Kim Davis is just the beginning folks. There will be more Kim Davis’s, more protests, more anger, more butting of heads and shouting over top of one another. Whatever side you’re on, I think all agree the Kim Davis situation is a debacle. A debacle for different reasons depending on your side, but a debacle […]