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“The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” ~Jesus In Douglas Adam’s classic book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a computer named Deep Thought was built to find the answer to the meaning of life. Deep Thought was the size of a planet and after seven million or so algorithmic years, the answer was discovered: 42. There followed a collective, head-scratchi

Sometime back I got an email from a church describing their discipleship pathway. They were particularly focused on “skeptics”. The way they described their generalized mission was leading people from skeptic to seeker to saved to servant. I like that continuum. I think most of us who are interested in spiritual formation tend to see people move from “seeker” to eventually what we call a “disciple”. But what if the end result was actually a “servant”? What a statement tha

How do leaders pray? Or more specifically, what do leaders pray? If our ultimate leader in this Kingdom movement is Jesus, how and what Jesus prayed seems like a critical thing for leaders to look at…and especially when conditions go south. In the worst of all circumstances, leaders have to delve deeply into what seems at surface level to be backwards: submission—a, or perhaps the, key character element in Kingdom leaders. In prayer, the depth of my submission is exposed. C

In the early days of our church, founding pastor Steve Sjogren coined a simple phrase for people to use in basic “servant evangelism” outreaches. For instance, when we did free car washes…or water bottle giveaways at busy intersections…or raked leaves or shoveled snow in neighborhoods…or cleaned bathrooms for free in local businesses…or walked along busy streets picking up trash…or anytime we did some little act of service for free for someone, the most asked question was, “S