discipleship
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Giving and Faith
The gift of giving is not a bigger number, and the gift of faith is not an optimistic personality. Both of these gifts get explained away by natural causes before anyone asks what the Spirit might…
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Teaching and Exhortation
We decided a long time ago what these two gifts look like. Teaching means the sermon and exhortation means being encouraging, and both of those definitions are too small. The second one is doing real damage.
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…