Today I met one of our shepherds, Bill Green, at Starbucks. We often get together to pray and study through the passage of Scripture that I'm preaching on. This Sunday I'm preaching on John 5:1-14. Here is the story:

In order to be able to share our faith, we have to be able to talk about our faith. Ironically, however, the best way to share our faith is to ask others about their faith and spiritual journey--and listen! Jesus was a master at this, as shown in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

I found the following spiritual conversation starter questions at http://home.snu.edu/~HCULBERT/assess.htm. See what…

In his new book, The Nuts and Bolts of Church Planting, Aubrey Malphurs summarizes research by Win Arn on average drive times of those "going to church" (attending a worship service). The average drive times are:



- Less than 5 minutes - 20%

- 5 to 15 minutes -…

This Sunday I am speaking from John 4 and the story of the woman at the well. In this story, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman who is ostracized from her community, going to draw water in the heat of the day.

Jesus is able to engage this woman in a spiritual conversation that so impacted her that she went back and told her whole village about Jesus. And they came to believe that Jesus was the Savior of the World because of this woman's testimony--which is ironic, for as a…

I n his recent book, The End of Evangelicalism? Towards A New Faithfulness for Mission, David Fitch talks about three of the main tenets of evangelicalism:

1. The inerrancy of…

Here is a shocking news article:

California School District cancels fundraiser selling memorial bricks after two women submit their tributes with Bible verses printed on them.

"Officials at…

Below is a news article from IPI, a policy think tank where my friend Bart Cleland works (whatever your politics, this article brings up some of the issues of concern.) As this article shows, the government "came out" for LGBT youth--lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth. CNN also posted an article this week on this coverage entitled,…

I found this article today entitled, Church buys apartment complex for intentional ministry. It is about a church in Greenville, NC, that had maxed out its 7 acre campus and its two worship services and three Sunday school. They still had significant building, so building a whole new campus someplace…

Unless you have been in a cave, you have heard that New York US Rep. Anthony Weiner, after a week of denial, confessed in a press conference that he had sent naked pictures of himself and engaged in online sex talk with about six women. 

The details of this story--and the pictures--have started to come out, and they are, well, unspeakable. Why…

There are whole books and seminars given on how to break the "200 barrier" in church attendance. I'm not necessarily impressed with making attendance the goal. I would prefer for churches to look at missional markers such as the number of people baptized, the number of people served in the community (whether people fed and clothed or people helped in marriage, etc.), or the…

In 1979, Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition, in which he recognized this seismic change that was sweeping across culture and philosophy. The postmodern condition “pertains to one’s awareness of the deconstructibility of all systems of meaning and truth.”[1] Postmodernism is a condition rather than a singular definition, for every system of meaning…

Born to Buy is a throughly researched book on how corporations are marketing to young children in often harmful and shocking ways. Companies have found that the most effective way to get families to buy things is to bypass…

I am a big proponent of people being a light to the world in their individual, daily lives. One of the reasons for this is that people spend so much of their time out on their own. If we take people's daily lives out of the missional sphere, we have made the majority of their lives secular and missionless. And the fact is, that some people truly do have work travel schedules…

I am not opposed to "advertising" for the church, particularly if it is tied to offering to meet a felt need in the community. But the most powerful form of "advertising" is the sharing of the gospel person to person through social networking. Today, obviously, we have tremendous online social networking tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that we need to utilize to reach the lost. But even without these tools, the early church grew from a small band of disciples in the first century…

A few months ago, our group "adopted" the…

A Missional Gathering - High Pointe in the Park - Last night was our “High Pointe in the Park.” On this night we allowed McKinney High School to use our building for its baccalaureate while we headed out to Towne Lake park. This accomplished two things.

First, it let us be a servant to our community by letting them use our…

Weekly church attendance in the US is 17.5% and dropping. Why is this? Why is it that "church" just is not working for the majority of people?

One of the new members on the Missional Outreach Network told me that she found this site through reading Mike Slaughter's book, Change the World: Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus. Naturally, I checked the…

I read a recent post from the Christian Standard, the leading periodical for the Christian church on baptisms and megachurches that was eye opening. Click here for the article. Here is a quote:

A new trend in 2009 was for megachurches and emerging megachurches to hold…

I was asking a young woman in Starbucks the other day where she went to church. Her name is Katie.

Katie said that she had started going to a church. She had only been only been going one time, but she liked how the minister was interactive and applied to lesson to real life.

Her co-worker asked her, you don't know which church it was or it's…

On Sunday, I will begin preaching through the book of John. As the missional crowd knows, John contains some of the most explicitly missional themes in the NT, including John 20:21, where Jesus says to his disciples, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."

Recently, I sat down with a good elder friend of mine, and we went through the first 18…