Baptism: Wading the Waters Together

My last post—The Power of Presence—was about the power of God’s presence with us and our presence with each other, and I want to share with you a beautiful moment from last week that illustrates again the gift of God’s presence through his people… The story begins with AJ, who walked into the church where

The Power of Presence

I’ll never forget where I first learned about the power of presence. It was in a hospice care facility in east Texas where my sweet grandmother, Jo, was dying. My grandfather, her husband of 58 years, never left her bedside. He comforted her, supported her, and helped ready her for eternity with the simple power

Not Opposed to Effort: Solutions for Better Discipleship (solution #2)

(This post is the 5th and final blog in a series about the nature of discipleship in our churches today.)   Making disciples is what the Church was made by God to do. In this series I explain why we aren’t doing it well (Read it here)  and two things that stand in our way

Not Opposed to Effort: Solutions for Better Discipleship (solution #1)

(This post is the 4th blog in a series about the nature of discipleship in our churches today.)   In the first post of this series (Read it here) I argued that the American church’s misunderstanding of the phrase “grace is enough” causes us to miss out on what it truly means to be disciples of

Not Opposed to Effort: Two Roadblocks to Discipleship

(This post is the 2nd in a series about the nature of discipleship in our churches today. Click here to read the first post.)  In last week’s post (Read it here) I argued that our misunderstanding of the oft-used phrase “grace is enough” causes us to misrepresent the Christian life and miss out on what

Not Opposed to Effort: The Work of Discipleship

Grace is not enough. That sentence alone will send the reformed crowd into orbit, and it just might make the rest of you scramble for Bible verses that refute works-based righteousness. But when I was recently asked to comment on Christian discipleship today, I could not help but think that grace is not enough. Obviously

My First Baptism

Photo Credit: Jewels654 via CC Actually, it was Zack’s first baptism. And I did the honors. For the first time. For the last 4 months, a small crew of like-minded Christian fellas have been meeting at my house. It’s a typical church small group. Or community group. Or life group. Or whatever your church may

We’re Not Very Good at Being the Church (The Second Thing I Learned in Egypt about Being a Christian)

Last week I posted the first lesson I learned about being a Christian while I was in Egypt. Believe it or not, it was this: Political Unrest is Good for the Church. (click here to read what I mean)  The second lesson I recently learned in Egypt about being a Christian is… Lesson #2 –

Political Unrest is Good for the Church (What Egypt Taught Me about being a Christian)

I was recently in the Middle East for a vacation in Iraq. Kidding. I was indeed in the Middle East, but it wasn’t Iraq, and nobody goes to the Middle East for vacation these days. The truth is two weeks ago I traveled to Egypt with a friend who has been involved in mission work there

My Nine Year Old Mentor

Brad, the 50 year old leader of our group looked me in the eye and sternly said, “If I tell you to get on the bus, get on the bus.” Ten minutes later his voice rose above the noise as he said, “Get all the Americans inside right now.” And the somewhat agitated crowd of