Month: July 2009

I preached today in Bluffton (Church of the Cross Buckwalter Campus) and then had lunch afterwards with Josh and Cali Cooke who are the new part time youth pastors for the church. Josh runs a coffee shop near the church and Cali runs a music therapy studio next door to it. Great folks! Anyway, I…

How many mission trips have you led or been on where you did not attend a local worship service with the people you were serving? We tend to figure that we are worshipping every night with our students, so we don’t need to go find a church. Yet if you have gone to serve the…

Some time ago, I began noticing a growing passion in me (which is actually be a restored passion because it has been there before) to proclaim the gospel through preaching, teaching, speaking, etc. It has drawn me to reading books on preaching and articles on gospel centered ministry. I read at one point and author’s…

by T.David Gordon What I found fascinating in this short book on the problem of modern preaching is it’s relevance to what we do in youth ministry when we stand before a group and give a talk. Gordon believes that modern preaching (generally speaking) has failed because preachers today cannot read texts carefully, cannot write…

The 500th birthday of Calvin is being celebrated widely. Good stuff out there… Check out Calvin 500

I have had some conversations lately with some of you about how we can best serve our students after they graduate from high school. The statistics are dreadful (love that word) regarding the percentage of students who stay with their faith, the church, or Christian groups on campus. One of the questions we asked this…

The D6 Conference is an opportunity to explore how we equip parents to pass the faith to the next generation. Worth looking into… D6 Website

What is the greatest hindrance to cultivating community in the American church? The first thing that comes to mind is frenetic western-culture busyness. I read a book on stress a few years back, and the author made a side comment that I thought was so insightful. He said that the highest value of materialistic western…

From Desiring God Blog Here it is again. More evidence from surveys what the Bible makes so plain: superficial, non-doctrinal, non-serious Christians sin pretty much like the world; but more serious, more doctrinally oriented Christians lead lives that are morally distinct. Two years ago Ron Sider flagged this in his book The Scandal of the…

There are ways in which there’s no difference. There’s only one gospel, not a different one for children, young people, and adults. And there’s a way the struggles of the heart are the same. These struggles play out differently depending on our stage in life, but when it comes down to it, we all want…