Todd Engstrom home

Category: christianity

  • 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 is the gift.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • Extra Ordinary Prayer

    Praying with groups across Austin these last weeks, I have found embers of the Spirit’s presence but not yet a fire. Extraordinary prayer is just extra ordinary, so whatever is ordinary for you, add something extra. It is not a destination, it is a direction.