Hello everyone. I hope that you have had a great week. I wanted to pass on a few of this week's highlights on the Missional Outreach Network!

1. New members - It is a great to have several new people join MON this week, including Frank Viola, author of Pagan Christianity and several other books. Frank has a great blog, …

Time. 

None of us seem to have any. We talk about how precious it is. We speak of it as a commodity when we talk about "saving time" or "borrowing time" or "giving up our time."

With long commutes and both parents working in most families (or single parents trying to do it all), there is no doubt that there is a time crunch in the…

The major focus of this year's Exponential New Churches conference (a church planting conference) was on missional communities. Besides people like Alan Hirsch laying down a foundation for this, many of these sessions were led by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom, authors of…

The past couple of weeks I have gone to the Exponential conference and the Pepperdine lectures. Both events were filled with speakers saying the same thing--that we are losing people to the world in droves, and that the church must wake up, stop being inward-focused, and become outward-focused or "missional."

On this subject, I was also reading last week The Externally Focused Quest: Becoming the Best Church for the Community by Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw. In this…

Can an established church make the missional church transition? This is a good question. 

In The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch says that the missional church “is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, the real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic…

Unless you are a church where all of the young people leave to go see their parents, your highest worship attendance this year will most likely be on Easter. I would guess that the average church receives at least a 20% bump in…

The Story of Redemption is an eight part evangelistic Bible study that I have written to help lead unchurched, postmodern people to faith in Jesus Christ. This story is largely narrative in form, which is appropriate for many reasons. [1]

• Humans are storytellers, and they make sense of their lives through narrative.[2]
• Most of Scripture is narrative, and the Christian faith was presented…

J esus said to his disciples, "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you" (Jn. 20:21). Being sent is a part of who and what God does.

The more that the missional understanding is taking hold, the more this understanding causes us to rethink all of our daily lives and church life and practice. Mission was once relegated to a side ministry of the church. In…

Back in 2008, David Laubach presented some statistics at the Baptist World Alliance gathering in Prague. There he stated that church attendance was stagnant or declining in 75% of churches in America. Of the remaining churches, 24% of churches were “growing” by getting members from the declining churches. Only 1% of churches are growing from reaching the unchurched.…

If your church one day ceased to exist, what would people in the community say? 

• Good! I'm glad to get rid of those mean-spirited, difficult people; or
• I didn't even know they existed; or
• Oh no. What will we do? This church has meant everything to do this community!

When I first heard this question years ago, it struck me. Perhaps it was because most churches I was a part of growing up seemed to be little known in the community. …

In our fellowship, usually the only thing that people ask about to determine if someone is Christian and part of the body of Christ is, have they been baptized?

There are several problems with this, but the one that comes to mind right now has to do with Mormonism. Mormons baptize. They even immerse and baptize for the forgiveness of sins. Are they…

In the Old Testament, God's Spirit was given only to select leaders. In the New Testament, however, it is clear that the Spirit of God has been given to all of God's people. On the Day of Pentecost, the Spirit was outpoured:

¹⁷ “‘In the last days, God says, 

   I will pour out my Spirit on all people. 

Your sons and daughters will prophesy, 

   your young men will see…

Last night I got this message from a contact form on our website:

"I've recently moved to McKinney and I'm looking for a new church home and would like to visit this Sunday if possible. I didn't know if notice was necessary? Any info would be helpful. Please feel free to email…

In Matthew 28:18-20 we find what is typically referred to as "The Great Commission." Here it is:

¹⁹Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of…

A Japanese woman hangs her pray on a slatted-wall surrounding a "divine" tree outside a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. The woman's prayer asks for protection in the ongoing nuclear crisis.  BP Photo by Susie Rain.

A recent Baptist Press article, Disaster pushes Japanese…

Yesterday, my wife and I and our two girls, Gina (10) and Emily (6), went to eat at Shogun's, a Japanese steak house in McKinney. Our kids love it there, as the chefs make the food right at your table and do all kinds of interesting little tricks, like burning an onion and making it a chu chu train. 

As the chef was making our food, we talked with him about his…

Last Sunday morning I was out of town. But I found out later that there was a baptism, and one that I did not know was going to happen. The teen that was baptized was Chay Johnson (see above, baptized by Lantz Howard). She was brought to faith by her Christian friend Shawnee, the daughter of Dan and Dalana Squires (Dalana works in our clothes closet and faithfully…

This week I had an interesting encounter. A middle aged man came into the church to get some food. He had been in before, and this time he also said that he was wanting to meet with me.

He had some things that he wanted to share with me. He had some various personal struggles that were giving him a lot of anxiety. He was out of work, and he had always worked before (as an engineer salesman). He had some struggles with some of his family relationships and some health issues in…

The gospel can at times can be successfully shared in personal conversation or in one-on-one study; however, there are several reasons that a more ideal way to share the study is through seeker small groups. A seeker small group is a group composed of a mix of Christians and "seekers"--non-Christians or the unchurched--who come together to study a particular spiritual topic…