Call Your People to Believe
Last year I went skydiving for the first time. It was something I’d wanted to do for years and it did not disappoint. While I don’t consider myself an adrenaline junkie, free-falling at 120 mph was by far one of the greatest experiences of my life. Because skydiving is inherently dangerous, I was asked numerous times how scared I was to jump.
The Need for Expository Preaching in Student Ministry
Teenagers are hungry for the glory of God and they don’t even know it (John 4:10).Often in student ministry, we lower the bar for our teenagers. We assume that they are coming to our gatherings merely to enjoy games and hype instead of Christ and him crucified. In reality, teenagers are searching for a joy that is greater than the cheap pleasure the world is offering them.
Preaching to Make Disciples
You and your family are going to take a trip…a long trip. So you pull up Google Maps on your computer just to get an idea of how long your trip is going to take and what it might look like. But what you find is not one suggested path, but four. You now have four legitimate ways to get to your final destination.
Book Review: Homiletics and Hermeneutics (Four Views on Preaching Today), edited by Scott Gibson and Matthew Kim
What is the influence of hermeneutics to the task of preaching? Scott M. Gibson, the David E. Garland Chair of Preaching and director of the Ph.D. program in preaching at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, and Matthew D. Kim, the associate professor of preaching and ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, have collected…
Three Wrong Motives for Pursuing Theological Education
Have you ever found yourself guilty of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons?By saying that you “found yourself,” I mean that you were surprised by the sight of wrong motives in your heart. You genuinely thought you were doing the right things for the right reasons but further reflection revealed mixed motives.
Reclaim Your Meetings, Retain Your Time
As a pastor, your time is a hot commodity. One major time-taker is meetings. Many leaders dread meetings as a necessary evil, feeling a strong connection to Lencioni’s best-selling title, Death by Meeting. While meetings are an inevitable necessity in leadership, they can become time-consuming.
Leading with Bias
Our current world is talking constantly about bias. You can be sure that you reveal your biases to others as they watch, listen, and learn from you. While it is essential that we are aware of our biases, we must be careful not to throw out all bias. We likely cannot and arguably should not avoid all types of bias.
Brothers, We Are Not Rivals
Nothing beats a good rivalry. The athletics world is full of them. In my neck of the woods, one of the greatest rivalries is between two college football teams: The University of Georgia and the University of Florida (or truthfully, whoever UGA is playing at the time). The Bulldogs and the Gators fight it out on the field every year, gridlocked against each other. Rivalry also extends to other areas of life.
4 Ways to Pray for Your Pastor During Pastor Appreciation Month
Time has seemingly scrapped by since quarantine swept over all of us back in March. But even with the days slowly marching by, we have finally landed in October. This month we celebrate the Reformation and our kids get to run around our neighborhoods (hopefully) to chase after the spoils of Trick or Treating. October is also the month that many churches have set aside to encourage and uplift their pastoral staff through Pastor Appreciation month.
Shepherding Families Who Lose a Child through Miscarriage
October 15th—Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day—is an important day for me and my family because of what happened to us on September 9th, 2015. My wife was pregnant with our second child.
Book Review: Prayer (How Praying Together Shapes the Church), by John Onwuchekwa
In his book Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church, John Onwuchekwa addresses deficiencies of corporate prayer in an ecclesiastical context. In 2015 Onwuchekwa helped plant Cornerstone Church in Atlanta, Georgia where he currently serves as the lead pastor.
Faithfulness is Still the Goal
For years, I have heard other pastors, seminary professors, and popular conference speakers encourage pastors to pursue ministry faithfulness over “success.” This encouragement is needed because of the dangers of chasing arbitrary successes over trusting that our faithfulness is enough.
Why Preach Through Exodus?
Exodus can be an intimidating book to preach through exegetically. It contains long narrative passages (the 10 plagues in Egypt cover 5 chapters) as well as discourses on law, ceremonial rites and routines and lengthy instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle and its components. Furthermore, the story that begins in Exodus does not conclude until Joshua leads the people of Israel into the Promised Land, which, of course, is described in the book of Joshua.
Escaping the Burden of Pastoral Work
Pastor, do you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders? Do you toss and turn at night, restless over lagging attendance, non-existent baptisms, and deficient offerings? Do you stress and worry, half-present at the family dinner table because your mind is still at the office or the last deacon meeting?
Square Boards from Round Trees: The Challenge of Theological Preaching
When I was a kid my father owned a small lumber mill. As he explained it, the sawyer (i.e., the person who sawed the logs) faced a challenge. The main challenge for the sawyer was deciding the best way to produce square boards out of round logs.
Pastor’s Wife: Check Your Mental Temperature
We live in an age where we check our temperatures to go to work, school, the dentist, and even inside a restaurant. This external thermometer gauges how healthy our physical body is, but is no help in gauging our mental and emotional health.
Preaching a Suicide Funeral
Pastoral ministry is full of first-time experiences — from the first nursing home visit to one’s first baptism. Since I entered “full-time vocational ministry” over ten years ago, seldom does a month go by where I don’t learn something new or do something for the first time.
Pastor, Remember to Apply
In Chapter 15 of Engaging Exposition, Danny Akin makes this statement, “Exposition that is faithful to Scripture will […]
Chapel Rewind: Ministry by the Mercy of God
Shane Shaddix, Pastor for Discipleship at Imago Dei Church, preaches from 2 Corinthians 4:1-6 about how God’s mercy is the foundational and controlling principle for everything we do in ministry.
Preachers of the People: Spurgeon and His Men
In 1857, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) officially founded the Pastors’ College, a training center for gospel ministers that revolved largely around the preaching genius of its founder. Between 1857 and 1892, Spurgeon oversaw the training of 863 pastors, the planting of nearly 200 new churches in Britain alone
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