Todd Engstrom

Author: Todd Engstrom

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Lessons I Shared With a Younger Leader

    What sustains a leader over decades is slow formation rather than visible success, a long obedience in the same direction. A younger pastor in Austin came with a notebook full of questions, and these are the answers I gave him, mostly about disciplines built early, suffering met with joy, and callings kept in the right…

  • 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.

  • Who Do You Love?

    Networking asks who you know. Kingdom building asks who you love. I keep coming back to John 17, and after the fracturing of the last few years I think the community apologetic I once taught as an evangelistic strategy has to be relearned between churches and leaders themselves.

  • 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…