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Why We Observe Ash Wednesday
A few weeks ago I was asked to participate in an interview about Independent Christian Churches who observe Ash Wednesday and Lent. The facilitator, Laura Hicks Hardy of Emmanuel Christian Seminary (Johnson City, TN), asked some great questions of each of us, portions of which were quoted in her subsequent article here. I have posted…
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Top 5 Mistakes I Made In Youth Ministry
For 13 years I worked as a youth pastor in the local church. That’s 13 graduations. It was more than enough time to have learned all sorts of things about youth ministry, and about myself. When I look back on those years, my memories are mostly positive. But there are also memories of things I…
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The Pastor As Expert: A Cautionary Tale
How much do we as pastors really know about the things we’re teaching our people? When I see a 25 year old doing a sermon series on marriage and family, I roll my eyes. That’s only because I’ve been married since 1995 and I feel superior (or vintage) being much further down the road. There’s…
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Unforeseen Lessons, Part 2: The Anxiety and Depression Cocktail
Today’s post is from a chapter I wrote for a book titled, Ten Count (2016), a collaborative work from pastors across the country sharing their stories of failure and defeat. The title of this chapter is: “When The Levee Breaks”, and it is one of my many stories of dealing with anxiety and depression in…
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Unforeseen Lessons, Part 1: The Friendship Vacuum
Unforeseen Lessons is a four-part series on certain realities of pastoral life that often come as a surprise to the leader, and what steps they can take to better walk through such things. Back in my undergrad days a professor of church leadership said to us, “Never trust the person who picks you up at…
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Maundy Thursday Resource
Today is Maundy Thursday. It is a day when Christians across the world remember the Passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died, a last supper among friends. We have prepared a simple resource to be used in an at-home communion setting. Simply gather together some bread and wine or…
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The Easter sermon struggle. Some ideas.
Easter is coming. And this year, like every year before it, will have its share of stress and pressure hanging over the pastor’s desk as she struggles to build a capable sermon for the most holiest of days on the Christian calendar. Above all else, Christianity is a resurrection movement. When we speak about the…
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The church has a PR problem and there’s (almost) nothing you can do about it
First, a confession: I know almost nothing about the QAnon community. I know it’s a conspiratorial group that, among other things, appropriates Jesus within its organizational ethos, but that’s about all I know. Will I take the time to learn more about it? Probably not. Why? Three reasons: (1) there are already too many religio-political…
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Gossip As Moral Discourse And Why We Should Let It Happen
I just finished reading Richard Lischer’s Open Secrets, a memoir of his pastoral experiences in the small town of New Cana, Illinois. The whole thing is really good, but the chapter that challenged my imagination the most was the one titled, “Gossiping The Gospel.” It’s an unforeseen approach on the presence of gossip in the…
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Zoom Fatigue For The Win: Final Thoughts.
Over the past few days, I’ve shared a little about why the staff at Atlanta Christian Church decided to move to Zoom services instead of weekly videos and why we have leaned into it for the foreseeable future. You can read more about that thought process here and then read about what we noticed happen…
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For The Pastor 