The Reformation – 500 Years Later

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The Reformation – 500 Years Later

October 31st marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. I hope I didn’t lose you on that sentence. Perhaps you are saying, “Things that happened 500 years ago are history (school/boring), and those other words are long and capitalized. Are you going to give me a history lesson using big words I have to Google?” No (Well, maybe). The Protestant Reformation was simply a movement to address corruption in the Church. Five hundred years ago, there were only two kinds of churches—there had been only one church split in the entire history of the church! One church dominated Europe and it was not pretty. There was political corruption, moral decay, and doctrinal error...

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Theology of Interruption

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Theology of Interruption

Interruption is God’s invitation. God is inviting us to see him all around us, in the lives of others, in our conversations, in our serving those in need. Interruption is not simply a matter of our hearts developing patience, it’s about experiencing life! It is one of God’s ways of waking us up to what’s around us to see there’s perhaps more to be done than our task for the day, as important as it may be. Interruption is God’s enhancement of our art and his tender way of encouraging his creatures to be a part of the kingdom come...

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Preaching Jesus with Our Songs

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Preaching Jesus with Our Songs

Music is an ongoing exercise that, at its best, creates channels for the gospel to illuminate our lives in light of who God is. God gave Moses a song in Deuteronomy 31 so that when the children of Israel went through various trials and troubles, the song would confront them as a testimony to whom their God was. This is true of all great music; it speaks with clarity of the God of beauty behind the music...

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Worship Is an Act of Reversal

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Worship Is an Act of Reversal

Augustine defined sin as disordered love. Sin has everything to do with love. God created us to worship him as an end in himself, and he designed us to love people and this planet in a way that would magnify his goodness and greatness. Such a disposition would create the deepest happiness in our souls. But sin entered our hearts, and those loves became reversed. We now love the world and ourselves as an end, and we view God as a means to that end...

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Self-Promotion and Our Fear of Obscurity

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Self-Promotion and Our Fear of Obscurity

It can be easy to forget that we pastors are not salesmen. We're not pushing a product called “the gospel.” We can’t develop an elevator pitch clever and concise enough to secure the sale. The oddity comes when we do create products that we then market and push — for worship pastors, our albums, and preaching pastors, our books. In that moment, we inch our way to becoming salespeople. And if we’re going to be good salespeople, then we need a marketing strategy and a platform, lots of followers, etc...

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