Category: leadership
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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 the receiving end is usually the one who pays for the imprecision.
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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 that wrestling, done out loud.
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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 includes what to do when only one or two of the three hold. Refusing the calling you do not…
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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 of low-level exposition forms people who know the parts and miss the whole.
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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 answers I gave him, mostly about disciplines built early, suffering met with joy, and callings kept in the right…
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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 an evangelistic strategy has to be relearned between churches and leaders themselves.
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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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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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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.
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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 his home but was not sure he had permission. Elders carry real authority, but it is mediated, not ultimate,…
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Forerunning, Not Competing
Ministry conversation slides too easily into who is growing fastest and reaching widest, and I do not want to play that game. A forerunner goes down the course first, not to compete but to test the ground and prepare the way. It is quiet work, but it matters deeply, and like Paul I would rather…