Earlier this year, we made a video of the story of High Pointe teen Sean Dulock during our "Harvest Sunday" (outreach giving day) presentation. In this story, Sean shared how he had become addicted to video games, and so he threw them all aw ay in preparation…

Above is a video from John Dickson, author of The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission. In this video and book, Dickson talks about how sharing the gospel involves more than words and "presentations."…

Below are most all of the passage in John that use the word "sent." I have included all those referring to Jesus, with a few that refer to John the Baptist. (Thank you to www.Biblegateway.com for help with this.) Missio means "to send," and thus being missional is about being "sent" into the world to take up the mission of…

I just finished reading The Missional Church in Perspective, a work which outlines currents trends in thought in the missional conversation since the publication of Missional Church. It is an excellent reflective…

Today I dropped by the Divine Children Christian Center, the daycare center that one of my small groups has adopted. One of our new converts, Cyndi Moncada, used to take her kids to this daycare center. As we teach people to follow Jesus, we teach them to take up Christ's mission of seeking the lost, serving the community, and sharing the good news. So when…

One of the things that postmodernism has taught us is the important of language. Somewhere in the 1980s I can remember when politically correct language started entering into mainstream consciousness. Blacks became African-Americans. Airline stewardesses became flight attendants. Chairman became chairperson. There was a growing awareness that language shapes and sometimes…

This past week our nation narrowly avoided an economic meltdown when the US House and Senate passed a debt limit increase bill and President Obama signed it into law. The entire nation was frustrated over how long and messy this process was; however, it does give us some insight into human nature.



What does this crisis show? First, it shows…

Whenever I tell my story of how I got into ministry, I always include Let's Start Talking as part of this story. My dad left a very profitable career in industry when I was 14 years old to go to Oklahoma Christian University and help start the electrical engineering program there. It was a sacrifice, but one which my parents willingly made. They wanted to…

An article came out today on Time.com entitled "5 Reasons Borders Went Out of Business." Here is the article below. Under each point I make some commentary on how Borders' problems in some ways are paralleled in the church. My comments are in italics.





Forty years ago, when Borders opened its first store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the book industry was a different…

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…