Can a regular old Christian baptize a new believer? Do they need a title? Or does that need to be the part of an ordained clergy person? Neil Cole would lift the authority and power of lay-led ministry to the extent of saying there doesn’t need to be a clergy person around. A missional community [...]
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Have you ever wanted a quiet, sane moment just sipping Hot Chocolate rather than figuring out what to do next to reach unchurched folks? Or worse yet, writing another report for the Conference? Rev. Fred Decker shared an interesting graph with me recently. It’s the graph of missionary encounters as the missionary travels from uni-cultural [...]
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My people ask this question of the church: Why do you have to make life so hard for regular people? Why all of the gridlock? They don’t like the way we “do business.” Guess what? The Church planter needs to laugh more than worry! Although I understand the need for order out of chaos, church [...]
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My people work and live perfectly happily outside of church! In fact, they are not interested in church. I should modify that somewhat: They are not interested in church the way they know “our” church (global church). But they have very good reasons. Over the next several articles, I’d like to share what I’m hearing [...]
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I attended a Northern Virginia Board of Missions meeting yesterday and it was one of the most exciting meetings I’ve ever attended! The people around the table were “normal” people – i.e. not some super-pastor who has the awe and funding to do anything he or she wants to do. What was so exciting? The [...]
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What are the things which will take the wind out of your sails while building a new church community? Bottom line: Stuff won’t go as planned … but don’t stop planting and networking. How do you respond? I’m a planner. It’s not a bad thing, but it could be. I work much better when I [...]
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I was sitting around the dinner table with friends the other day, who knew me as the pastor of their church previously. They asked something like, “So, how many have you got coming on Sundays now?” I had to grab my brain and pull it into their world fast. We don’t do “church” like most [...]
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I remember my grandma teaching me to bake a pie. She didn’t use measuring cups, but I can attest to the fact that she made the best pies in the whole world. What was her measuring cup? By the pure pleasure-mounting groans of the people eating them! What people said about her pies made her [...]
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Nose into the wind. Stalled. Phew! Now, I can work on getting this blog back up, under a new system. Going below to the cabin to work out the navigation ahead. Hold your course, and I’ll be back soon with a new chart.
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We were honored by the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church coming out to hear our story. Their reporter wrote up the culmination of this visit. You can access the pdf file of the published article here.
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