This is a different kind of post: a brief look at my week. Why, you ask? Well, I was thinking, it’s already November. Where does the time go? Here’s where mine went this week. Saturday We successfully hosted our second ever church conference; as noted about 150 people, including our own ministry leaders and others […]
This weekend was our second ever, and hopefully annual, conference. Because of our forthcoming book, Rebuilt, we organized the conference’s main and break out sessions, on the book’s chapters. The main morning session, which I gave, was all about articulating the basic problem when it comes to churchworld these days. What is going on, what’s […]
The English idiom, “don’t judge a book by its cover” is a kind of moral admonition advising us not to prejudge the worth or value of anything (or anyone) based on appearances alone. Nice idea…except everybody does it, we all do it. We’re constantly doing it. Especially when it comes to books. Anyway, the process […]
From time to time, I like to give my faithful blog readers a little more information on what’s going on at our church behind the scenes and what is coming up. Here you go, in no particular order: New Series This weekend we begin a new series, “How to Be Rich.” It is a five-week […]
This is the final week of our current message series, “Life Apps.” We’ve been talking about the application of God’s word in our lives. Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at forgiveness, confession, encouragement and trust as life applications, basics in our approach to life and relationships. I have really enjoyed this series because […]
In little less than a month we host our second ever church conference. Saturday, November 3 will be a great day of worship, fellowship and discipleship, as well as going deeper in ministry and mission. Al and Rob and our house band will be there with unexpected as well as familiar favorites. Chris and Kristin […]
About a month ago our Pastor announced the second annual Matter Conference (November 3rd, 2012) right here on his blog. (To see that post go here) I’ll admit the first time he mentioned to the staff that we were going to host a conference I had to do a double take. I thought, “Who are […]
I have been reading Pastor Andy Stanley’s new book, out this week, “Deep & Wide.” He says it’s a book about “creating churches unchurched people love to attend.” My kind of book about my kind of church. The only time the word “church” is used in the four Gospels comes in the Gospel of Matthew. […]
In graduate school, my specialization was “ecclesiology” which is the study of the Church itself: what it is, how it is constituted and how it grows. Ever since, my abiding interest, as regular readers know, is growing healthy churches. The so-called “mega-church” movement therefore, and not surprisingly, holds special interest for me. “Mega-church” is a […]
Every weekend around here is interesting, engaging and eventually exhausting (for me anyway). This past weekend was at another level. Besides everything we do every weekend, this past weekend we welcomed Archbishop William Lori, who made visiting Nativity one of his early priorities. As he told me, he hears so much about our parish (one […]
