Archive | Community RSS feed for this section
Why Do We Make It So Complicated?

Jesus at the Fringes

It’s amazing how Jesus takes root in the fringes of society when you empower Christ in folks rather than trying to bring “church” to them, take them to “church” or do “church” for them.

Read more
The Thinker

A Multilingual Jesus

God speaks to some subjectively, and to others objectively, and each often forgets that Jesus is multilingual.

Read more
Embrace

Room at the Inn

This Christmas, the question yet remains: Is there still no room at the inn? Take a chance. Embrace the Joseph’s and Mary’s of our age.

Read more
Choices

The Question of Leadership

We do it all backwards. We expect fellowship to emerge from leaders. In God’s providence, leaders emerge from fellowship.

Read more
McChurch?

Going Organic

Going to enjoy a sermon and the worship team in an institutional church is like going to McDonald’s, while forming community and participating in organic church is like cultivating and enjoying a healthy, wonderful garden.

Read more
Crossing Over Chasm

Church?

Have we drifted so far from Biblical norms that we can’t even call a group of Christians who are fulfilling the Biblical mandates for “church” a “church” because the word “church” has become so corrupted?

Read more
Post-Modernity

Understanding the Seven Motivational Gifts

This PowerPoint presentation looks at the seven gifts listed in Romans 12, and the motivations and ways that different people use those differing gifts.

Read more

Diverse Gifts and Church Meetings, Part 1: The Motivational Gifts

It’s one thing to embrace Paul’s metaphor of the church being the Body of Christ, where everyone participates and ministers one to another according to our unique spiritual gifts. It’s quite another thing to figure out how to do that in practical terms, especially when we meet together and abstract principles hit cold, hard reality.

Read more

The Church in the New Testament: Its Form, Function and Purpose

Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride! In this PowerPoint presentation, all that you think of as “church” is about to be challenged so God can woo us back to being, once more, the multi-faceted, wonderful, exciting Body of Christ.

Read more

Life!

My greatest joy is walking with guys as they learn to stop being knuckleheads and become men; to minister to hurt and wounded women as they find not just healing, but health and wholeness; to let others come forth into life and gifting as they exceed me in the Kingdom. For all of this, Lord, [...]

Read more

Reboot

God seems to be laying a foundation for yet another of His periodic, history-changing interventions in the affairs of man. Over the last two thousand years there have been many such paradigm shifts, and it’s naive to think that our current, settled status quo will somehow be exempt from the unsettling but progressive advance of [...]

Read more

True Ministry

Last night, we had one of our best times of “participatory church” as we seamlessly shared a meal, partook of communion, fellowshipped and ministered one with another — and none of it depended on me! The last several weeks have been very emotionally and physically exhausting for me. On top of my best friend dying, [...]

Read more
Final Product!

Improbable Church

If you saw the church that meets in my home, you would laugh and wonder: “What can God do with these people?” Yet, isn’t that God’s way: to establish his Kingdom on earth by transforming lives, cultures, nations and history not with the ordained, but with the ordinary?

Read more
Jesus In Us and Through Us

Participatory Church

My journey from traditional “church”, and some of what I’ve learned about being the church – the exciting, enticing, enthralling and multi-faceted Body of Christ!

Read more

The Sunday "God Show" at Your Friendly Podium Church

When did “church” become a podium-focused “God Show” watched by passive spectators for an hour or so each Sunday morning? Where do we even find that in Scripture? I believe that the days of the “podium church” and the Sunday “God show”are passing — where we gaze each Sunday past the back of the head [...]

Read more

New Wine Sucks

As God brings forth new wine in a new generation, there’s a fundamental dynamic that can’t be ignored. To put it bluntly, new wine sucks! In my younger days, I was an amateur wine maker. So I know what Jesus means when he says, “no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he [...]

Read more

New Wine And Old Skins

Here’s an interesting article, reprinted below, on how people will stick to what they believe or think even in the face of contrary facts or circumstances. As I’ve watched people react to challenges and controversies over the last couple of months, and to God bursting old wine skins as he brings forth new wine, I can [...]

Read more

Post-Release Community

I’ve been meeting with various brothers who also minister in the informal Christian networks I’m part of, along with others, to discuss starting a weekly fellowship (possibly in my home) for ex-inmates. My burden is for men whose lives are dramatically captured by God in jail, but then stumble when they get out because they [...]

Read more
Unexpected Slip

Rethinking Missions

If evangelical Christians have the equivalent of a “sacred cow,” it must be foreign missions. At the risk of martyrdom, I hereby declare that it’s time to slay that cow (or at least herd it into a different pasture!).

Read more