christianity
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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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Leadership and Administration
Leading and administrating are the two gifts easiest to mistake for competence, which is why they are the two most often left unnamed. And zeal is not the problem with a leader who has it. It…
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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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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…
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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…
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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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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.
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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…
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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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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…
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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…