At Redemption City Church, the church I pastor, we just launched the “Planting Roots Initiative,” which is an initiative to increase people’s love for Jesus as we build infrastructure and a building on our church property that will help us make disciples, train leaders, and feed the hungry. We’re so excited about what we believe […]
Why do churches like Redemption City Church have membership? It’s a question I’ve heard a few times over the years. It’s a question I wrestled with at one point in my life too. To me, the idea of church membership, whatever you call it (stakeholders, partners, etc.) sounded weird and a bit scary. And as […]
Chris and I were finishing up a short meeting with a time of prayer. Although we weren’t meeting about evangelistic efforts, my prayers included a prayer that that God would provide each of us an opportunity to share the gospel with someone by the end of the week, that we couldn’t miss. Then I headed […]
Rod Dreher wrote Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents to equip people to face “soft totalitarianism” that is coming. The title, “Live Not By Lies,” comes from the title of a speech that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave just before he was exiled from Russia. The speech was an effort to help ordinary Russians […]
As I was reading Rod Dreher’s, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, I came across a story about a specific answer to prayer that I had to pass along to you. It’s the story about how Alexander Ogorodnikov, who was unjustly thrown into prison by an oppressive Soviet government, saw God work […]
Is your view of God’s love big enough that you believe he actually cares about the small things in your life? Our prayer lives are usually the most accurate answer to that question. When we only pray for “big” things, we show that the answer to that question is “no.” When we pray “small” things, […]
Specificity leads to visibility. When we get specific with our prayers we give the invisible God an opportunity to become visible to us in a way he wouldn’t without our specific prayers. And when God becomes visible to the eyes of our hearts and minds, hope, peace, and so many other life giving realities increase. […]
Robert Murray M’Cheyne lived a short, impactful life. He was 29 when he died in 1843. At the time, he was the pastor of a 1000 person church in Scotland. D.A. Carson says that he is one of the “overlooked shapers of evangelicalism” (2). I recently read David Beaty’s excellent book about M’Cheyne, called, An […]
When I was younger, I thought the people writing on topics were “experts” who had it all figured out. But after years of working in the publishing industry and getting to know online heroes, I’ve learned I was wrong. It turns out that every blog or book was written by people still trying to figure […]