Todd Engstrom

Category: theology

  • 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.

  • Three Things We Mean by “Apostolic”

    People use the word “apostolic” for three different things: a passion, a gift, and a calling. Pulling them apart matters, because a word carrying three jobs eventually does none of them well, and the person on the receiving end is usually the one who pays for the imprecision.

  • Gifts or Gifted People?

    Ephesians 4:11 doesn’t name capacities; it names people. And whether apostleship is a capacity the Spirit distributes or a person Christ appoints is a question I’ve been wrestling with for almost twenty years. This post is that wrestling, done out loud.

  • 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.

  • The Organizing Principle of the Church

    For most of my ministry life I have said that mission is the organizing principle of the church. I have come to think the gifts of the Holy Spirit are, and that the difference is structural.

  • 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…

  • When Exposition Is Not Enough

    Expositional preaching is a real gift, and I have been shaped by it. But teaching passages well is not the same as teaching the story, and Richard Lints’ three horizons help explain why a steady diet of low-level exposition forms people who know the parts and miss the whole.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Fluent in Feelings, Silent in the Spirit?

    We have grown fluent in the language of feelings and gone quiet about the Spirit. Caution has crept into hesitation, and hesitation has led to a kind of spiritual muteness, so that almost nobody in our rooms has to say I think the Spirit may be prompting this. Obedience is not pressure, it is the…

  • The Difficulty of Balancing Ministry and Discipleship

    I’ve found that it can be extremely difficult to continually cultivate the centrality of discipleship, or the process of selectively investing a small number of individuals in order to teach obedience to what Jesus taught (Matthew 28:18-20). I tend to think of Ministry and Discipleship in two different grids: Ministry Discipleship Reactive Proactive Low relational…

  • The Church and The Surprising Offense of God’s Love

    I’ve been reading The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love by Jonathan Leeman, and although I’ve had some disagreements with the book, it has been an excellent read.   I wanted to share a few quotes that have been particularly challenging for me. Below is a good challenge to teaching “community” as the solution…