Todd Engstrom

Category: discipleship

  • Service, Helping, and Mercy

    Service, helping, and mercy are the gifts that make a church feel like a family. And we tend to kill them in two ways: we consume them invisibly, or we promote the people who carry them until the gift goes quiet.

  • Two Kinds of Spiritual Gifts

    The gift lists in Scripture slide between practices, gifts, and gifted people, and most of our confusion starts there. One overlooked text sorts the whole business into two kinds: speaking and serving.

  • Should I Plant a Church?

    Church planting is a particular calling, not a general one, and three questions test it: internal desire, external confirmation, and opportunity. This is the frame I taught in a workshop with The Equipping Group, and it includes what to do when only one or two of the three hold. Refusing the calling you do not…

  • Four Moments in Four Days

    Four days. Four moments. One thread: discipleship. Omaha, a podcast I will not name, a training in Liberty Hill, and a Sunday at The Stone, and what they showed me is that the terms and the vehicles and the definitions keep changing while the four ingredients do not.

  • The Basic Commands of Jesus

    The obstacle to disciple-making is usually not faith or desire, it is that we lack confidence in knowing what Jesus actually commanded. Discipleship is simple but not easy, and these are the basic commands that form a pathway of obedience.

  • When is a Group a Church?

    Church planting lives in long seasons of in between, where it is unclear whether you are forming a group or shepherding a church. Clarity does not rush that process, it gives it direction and a trajectory, so this is the minimum I think has to be true before a group is a church.

  • Why Plant Churches

    The question in Austin has shifted from why not plant a church to why we even need more of them. Austin is not a city saturated with churches, it is a city unevenly served, and the growth corridors out toward Kyle, Buda, Jarrell, and Elgin are among the least served of all. The hesitation underneath…

  • Revolutionary

    We use revolutionary to mean a leap forward, but a revolution is simply a turning, one complete cycle that brings you right back where you started. Most real change works that way, a slow turning and a steady revolution, more often a recovery of something old than a rocket launch.

  • Settled

    Settled cuts two ways. It can mean contentment or it can mean quiet resignation, what I would call spiritualized compromise, and the question I keep asking is whether I have settled into God or just settled for something less. True contentment is not the absence of longing, it is trusting God in the longing.

  • The Longing Beneath the Form: Ancient Future and Nostalgic Novelty

    Ancient future and nostalgic novelty look like opposites, but they come from the same desire, to belong to something lasting, to be from somewhere and to be going somewhere. The form is not the same as faithfulness, so the better question is not which one is right but what is forming us.

  • More Than Seen: The Better News of Being Known—and Indwelled

    I feel so seen is a phrase I hear often, and being seen by God is real and good. But it is not the fullest expression of divine love. It is good to be seen, better to be known, and best of all that God is in you.

  • Why Multiplication Feels So Far Away

    After nearly twenty years of praying for multiplication in Austin, I have come to think the barrier is not our structures or our strategies. The root is fear, and we seem to be really, really scared to engage. Multiplication is not a strategy to execute but a fruit that grows in the soil of healthy…