Author: Todd Engstrom
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2025 in Review
Three words kept rising to the surface as I looked back over the year: striving, selling, serving. More of a posture than a plan, and the thread running through them is that planning has begun to feel less like control and more like trust.
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Weakness is Not Inability
Weakness is capacity under strain. Inability is capacity removed. I confused the two for years and it cost me, so when I quit a run this week and walked the last quarter, I took it as growth rather than failure.
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The Church Isn’t a Safe Place
The church was never meant to be a safe place as the world defines safety. It exists to make you holy and obedient, not comfortable, and my worry is that the mood of the day is shaping the church more than the Word of God. Not safe, but secure.
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Gratitude for Partnership in the Gospel
Christian community is not built on consumerism but on covenant partnership, sustained not by preference but by promise. I used to teach at The Stone that we should aim for mission over community, and I have come to think that was short-sighted. What Paul commends in Philippians is neither one first, it is partnership in…
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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 a steady revolution, more often a recovery of something old than a rocket launch.
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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 for something less. True contentment is not the absence of longing, it is trusting God in the longing.
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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 faithfulness, so the better question is not which one is right but what is forming us.
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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.
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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…
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When Life Seems Strange
Leaving The Austin Stone for the Greater Austin Mission Society has felt uncertain, disorienting, and foreign, and I kept telling myself life should not feel this way. But Scripture calls us strangers and exiles on the earth, and the discomfort may not be a sign of failure. It may be the beginning of growth.
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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…
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Re-Formation: How is God Reshaping the Church Today?
What if we thought of reformation less as a revolution and more as a re-formation, the same materials molded differently for a new season? Watching five years of church movement in Austin, I do not think we are seeing decline or sheep swapping. Divine redistribution is often how the mission advances.