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Years ago we went through a very difficult season at our church. After a time of crazy growth, we had a number of people leave as a result of some challenging changes we had implemented. Primarily, it was around developing a discipleship model that shut down many of our affinity groups as well as introducing a membership process in order to identify who was really with us in our mission. It was a lot of simultaneous change to manage in a relatively short span of time…and fran

One of the more sobering passages for me in the New Testament is the story of John the baptizer’s painful deconstruction. Please apply some grace to my interpretation of the story, but John had been thrown in prison because of his fiery rhetoric regarding the religious hypocrisy of Herod Antipas. John was the prophesied forerunner of the coming messiah. He is recorded as witnessing Jesus’ affirmation from God as the “beloved son.” But after his imprisonment, he apparently w

Any form of movement requires energy. Energy, however, is hard to come by. As biological creatures, human beings will naturally seek to conserve their energies, and will expend them only when motivated by some outside stimulus. We need money, so we work. We need food, so we go shopping. We don’t like how we look or feel, so we exercise. We’re content with how the house looks, but not content for our in-laws to know that it looks that way, so we clean. If we can figure a way