leadership
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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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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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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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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…
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Jesus Has All Authority—Stop “Releasing” People to Do Ministry
If you are in Christ, you have been commissioned, and you do not need a second opinion or a stamp of approval to make disciples. A friend recently told me he wanted to do that in…