Writing
Essays and working ideas from more than fifteen years of writing about faith, leadership, discipleship, the church, family, and life in Austin.
Start here
New here? These four pieces offer a way into the writing: what shapes the church, how we lead, and how faith takes form in community. Begin with the recent essays, then explore the earlier work that helped shape those questions.
The church and the Spirit · 2026
The Organizing Principle of the Church
Start with a recent reflection on how spiritual gifts shape the church, and why I’m revisiting an old conviction about mission.
Leadership in practice · 2026
Leadership and Administration
Why leading people and bringing order to the work are gifts to recognize and steward, and what gets lost when we treat them only as skills.
Community and mission · 2013
What is a Missional Community? – Definition
A short introduction to the definition we used at The Austin Stone, and why a community of Christians is essential to a faithful witness.
Leading through change · 2013
Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
The opening of a practical series on our transition at The Austin Stone, with lessons about patience, learning, and the time real change takes.
For sustained explorations of a topic, browse the Selected Series.
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Missional community · Leadership · Christianity · Church · Personal · Austin Stone · Discipleship · Theology
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All writing
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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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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…