When you strike a match to light thirty candles, you focus on the match, not the candles. Matches burn quickly and fingers feel pain. When you’re on vacation for a week, Monday is relaxed, Thursday is purposeful, and Saturday is too late — you’re packing for home. If you’re given six weeks to live, every […]
Tag: Church
What would Jesus say if He sat down next to me?*
“I’m nothing like Jesus,” Larry asserted. “I’m not even close to being like Him.” “You’re closer than you think, Larry. I can see Jesus in your life! You think about Him, you act on your convictions, you talk about Him to your friends and neighbors, and you demonstrated Him to me when I was just […]
The Sanctification House.
Building a house takes time. There are endless steps, all sequenced, specialized, and permitted. Some stages call for machinery, while others demand painstaking, knuckle-bruising labor. Expertise and exertion, struggle and time. We’re watching this unfold in our neighborhood, cinder block by cinder block. What began as an empty lot suddenly featured a large cement pad […]
Board Reports & Jesus’ Return.
As the cliché goes, the best time to prepare for next quarter’s board meeting is the day after you leave this quarter’s board meeting. That’s when the board’s interests are clear and compelling, and you can harness all the seasoned wisdom and savvy anecdotes you just gleaned from a curated team of experts. Which elements […]
Doing discipleship as a church
Let’s say the goal of church is to help us become like Jesus Christ. Not just a few of us, but all of us, together. This theme is signaled by Jesus and repeated elsewhere in the New Testament. But what does it look like? A friend and I once interviewed scores of authors, pastors, and ministry […]