Writing
Essays and working ideas from more than fifteen years of writing about faith, leadership, discipleship, the church, family, and life in Austin.
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A few essays that introduce the questions and convictions behind this site.
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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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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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Four Moments in Four Days
Four days. Four moments. One thread: discipleship. Omaha, a podcast I will not name, a training in Liberty Hill, and a Sunday at The Stone, and what they showed me is that the terms and the…
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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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The Basic Commands of Jesus
The obstacle to disciple-making is usually not faith or desire, it is that we lack confidence in knowing what Jesus actually commanded. Discipleship is simple but not easy, and these are the basic commands that form…
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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…