While on my very very very very long drive from Seattle to Austin last week, I was reminded of the first time I went rappelling…
Early in the morning, we parked our church vans full of students near the base of the cliffs. After our guides went over some safety precautions and got it all set […]

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One of these days, we might once again have a place we can call our own.
Last week, the same day we left Seattle, someone looked at our house. They liked it enough to put an offer on it. After a few shenanigans, we reached an agreement at the end of the week. Monday, we […]

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The call of community isn’t about finding people just like us, or at the exclusion of any people. Community in the biblical sense is clearly about unlike people finding Christ at the center of their inclusive life together. — Hugh Halter & Matt Smay, The Tangible Kingdom

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A few months ago, my friend Doug Paul posted this prayer of Thomas Merton. It grabbed a hold of me when I first read it. It seems ever more suitable this week as we are packing up our life to move into a foggy future:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. […]

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Below is my first go at writing some values that will help shape a new church community in Austin. I think they still need some molding, but I’m excited about the potential of these, and have a number of ideas about how we can shape the life of the community around them:
Story
At the heart of […]

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There is all sorts of talk about the need for churches to be creative. While I agree, I think the assumption is usually that this creativity happens in the form of programmed expressions from the stage in a Sunday service. This quote reminds us why creativity should be so much more that that:
The reality is […]

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Belong. Believe. Become.
I think it was first in

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Though I read a fair number of books, I usually only blog about those that I find noteworty and worth recommending, or those I received for review. Usually, if I read a book and don’t like it, it doesn’t make it to the blog — today’s an expception.
I’m not sure I yet understand why, but […]

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I’ve spent most of my time in the car the last few weeks listening my way through an Audible version of The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom. From my experience, I have found that audio books are a worthwhile replacement for print books, but this is one that I think […]

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Much of the dialogue I have been around in recent years about the church carries an emphasis to return to the teachings of Jesus. Many have described how the church has tended to overemphasize the epistles of Paul in recent decades, and there is a definite push to spend more time with the Gospels. After […]

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Between our experience with Pathways, classes at school, personal studies, and our dreams of a future church plant, I’ve spent a lot of time processing the mission of the church. And yet those thoughts still seem so unfinished…
Dean gave me the month of May to put some of those thoughts into a teaching series which […]

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We believe that church should happen wherever life happens. You shouldn’t have to leave life to go to church.
I had high hopes I would really dig what this book had to say. With statements like the one above in the early parts of the book (pg 24), I knew the heart of the book would […]

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The following is cross posted from The Great Omission study blog. Comments are closed here, but you are welcome to comment on the original post…
I’m sorry to say this, but too much of what we call Christian is not a manifestation of the supernatural life of God in our souls. Too much of what we […]

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