Follow Jesus. Lead the church. Change the world.
In my last post, I suggested that Leaders are Pot-Stirrers. Before I get into some specific ways that leaders stir the pot, I should say that being a pot-stirrer is not a license to be a jerk. I’m not talking about making life difficult for people for the sake of being difficult. It’s all about … Read more
A number of years ago, I stopped on a channel long enough to catch part of the movie, Runaway Bride. In one particular scene, the “runaway bride” (played by Julia Roberts) yelled at a reporter (played by Richard Gere). The reporter made her life difficult by writing in a newspaper column about her practice of … Read more
The worship song, “Change My Heart, Oh God” (by Eddie Espinosa, 1982) has been a meaningful and challenging song for me ever since I first heard it a couple decades ago. Lately, I’ve been thinking about it in regard to sermon preparation. A common pitfall for preachers is to preach to others but not to … Read more
In their book, Prayer-Saturated Kids, Cheryl Sacks and Arlyn Lawrence report … A 1993 Gallup poll revealed that among married couples who attend church together regularly, the divorce rate is one out of two. That’s the same statistic as for marriages outside the church. However, among married couples who pray together daily, the divorce rate … Read more
February 12 is a special day in our family—it’s “gotcha day,” the day we got Ethan (we got Sarah on October 22). Three years ago, Joleen and I were in Korea to get Ethan, then an 8-month-old baby boy. Each year, we’re able to talk about the meaning of the day a bit more. You … Read more
In the last couple of years, we (and our congregations) have been impacted by Bishop Robert Schnase’s book Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations (see posts we’ve written on Five Practices). Bishop Schnase, who blogs, also wrote a small book that can be used as a 30-day devotional called The Balancing Act: A Daily Rediscovery of … Read more
In the The United Methodist Church, ordained pastors must commit to the itinerant system. Nearly three years ago, just before we moved to Clearfield to assume new ministry appointments, I reflected on The Itinerant System of the UMC (i.e., pastors are appointed to congregations as opposed to being called by congregations). I love what Bishop … Read more
Over the last three years, I’ve written several posts on preaching, including: StoryMapping, One-Point Preaching (two of the most popular links on the blog), It Takes 20 Years to Make a Sermon, The Role of Preaching, The Preaching Challenge, The Preaching Process, 5 Stages of Sermon Preparation, and What is Preaching?. Five years ago, I … Read more
One of the books we read before writing our theology papers for ordination was Mainline or Methodist?: Rediscovering Our Evangelistic Mission by Scott Kisker, who teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary. We both loved the book. As the title suggests, the book addresses an identity problem in the UMC. In the foreword, Bishop Timothy Whitaker writes: … Read more
A few days ago while in New York City, I wrote, Bracing for the Storm. A monster storm, which moved across the country, went through New York City dumping snow and ice. There were concerns about how the weather would impact the final day of our seminar, but we were, in act, able to complete … Read more