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The closing of a year typically engenders a reflective look back and some prognostication for the next one. I would prefer to not look back at 2020; I can only handle so much masochism. So here are our Top 4 Predictions for 2021 and beyond. Keep your rocks to yourself—we’re not prophets by any stretch—but I think these may have legs. This is much longer than our usual weekly emails—apologies for that in advance. Back to normal next week. The first three here are obvious… 1.

Think about this: the most important event in human history happens and who learns about it first? Shepherds. Of course. The guys on the third shift sidestepping sheep poop. Truth is: shepherds were at the bottom of the food chain. The book of Genesis tells us that the highly-cultured Egyptians considered shepherds “detestable.” How about that for some cosmic irony? I’m not sure anything has changed much. Don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I look around the “Big C” Church and

At one point in my pastoring, we purchased a demographic study based on a ten-mile radius of our church. It was filled with extremely helpful information derived from census material and several other surveys. One of the questions was a multiple choice response to a query about personal faith: “I am involved in my faith, I am somewhat involved in my faith, I have no faith involvement.” Within that ten-mile radius were approximately 667,000 people. Out of that number, nearly a

Though I’ve never really spoken about it publicly, the church I pastored had a number of run-ins with disturbed people. When you open your church doors wide and promote a “come as you are” mantra, you should expect it. And when a church grows exponentially and emphasizes an open invitation to broken people while pushing the envelope on grace, it’s not always a walk in the park. Our church was certainly the target of vitriolic hate mail. And not from outsiders, but those atten

According to some neuropsychologists, part of the way our brain functions in order to not burn out is by creating neural pathways so as not to expend energy on what is routine, thereby allowing us to focus on things that need specific attention. But over time, these can become neural ruts. We all have them. And as you might imagine, the older you get, the harder it is to develop new patterns and climb out of old ruts. Recently, scientists have experimented with replacing the