If you follow this blog regularly at all, you know that church planting is one of the dominant conversations. Last fall I spent a large amount of time writing about re-imagining church planter training, etc. You can read some of those posts here. The last few weeks I’ve had conversations with a number of different [...]

In my first post in this two-post series I brought up the oft-noticed problem that every church seems to have: What do we do with the “radicals” that scare everyone else in the church? The overarching comment I made in the first post was that leaders tend to make one of two mistakes. Either they [...]

Recently I was leading a Learning Community in Minnesota with Jo Saxton and one of the topics that came up was what to do with the “radicals” that every church seems to have. You know the type. On any given day they can feel like you’re greatest gift and your greatest curse. Burning within them [...]

I know what you’re thinking. There should probably be a picture of a skinny jean clad, TOMS wearing, manigan-loving, coffee-snob sipping man with black horned rimmed glasses. This, after all, is what the “Missional Man” looks like, right? (I’m not even going to try to describe the “Missional Woman”). The issue, of course, is that [...]

It may come as a galloping surprise, but I’m a bit of a sports fanatic. Last year, a killer website called GRANTLAND was launched by my favorite sports writer, Bill Simmons. There’s basically nothing he writes that I don’t find insightful and terribly funny. It’s a great combo. (I’m arriving at the point of this [...]

Last year I wrote a post called “The Alexander Syndrome” that’s been coming back to my mind lately. This was the basic premise: At the age of 30, Alexander looked upon his Kingdom and wept for there were no more worlds to conque. In evangelical folklore, we are constantly inundated with stories of wildly successful churches (read: [...]

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post that caused a bit of a stir called “Could we plant churches with a 90% success rate?” I’ve got a webinar coming up on May 1 where I’ll outline a few of the thoughts from this post, expand on it a bit, put out some [...]

At the end of November I really sensed the Lord was asking me to give up a few things for 6 months. Not bad things, but some things that were taking too prominent a role in my life and that were increasingly things I found myself not wanting to give up. One of those things…soda. [...]

I got to spend a couple of hours with a church planter today from Sri Lanka. Because of the political and religious climate of the country, he asked that we not publish his name, church name or any pictures. But it was a fascinating and inspiring time and I wanted to share a few things [...]

Mike said something to me a to me a few years ago that I thought was really quite profound, but I forgot it. (Clearly an indication of how profound it was for me at the time!) Then, last month, I was talking to a friend very similar to me and he had gotten the same [...]