You might have heard about Mike McKinley’s recent book on church planting: Church Planting Is for Wimps (Crossway, 2010). If you haven’t, it’s a great read.
Mike is the senior pastor of Guilford Baptist Church in Sterling, Virginia. In God’s grace, he oversaw the revitalization of the church. Church Planting Is for Wimps is the story of how that all happened. Though the book is ostensibly about church planting/revitalization, it is an encouraging account of church life and Christian ministry. I don’t think you would need to be a pastor to enjoy it and profit from it. Uplifting stories about God’s work through His local church can be hard to find–particularly doctrinally savvy ones–but this text is exciting, easy-to-read, and quite funny.
My favorite section of the text involved McKinley’s account of how his church, planted from Capitol Hill Baptist Church of Washington, DC, reached out to local Hispanics. At one point, McKinley and his wife hosted a dinner for a number of folks from their diverse neighborhood. One of them told the couple as he left the house that he had never been inside an American home except to work. That was a stunning story, one that shows just how wide natural divides are–and how incredible the power of …
]]>You might have heard about Mike McKinley’s recent book on church planting: Church Planting Is for Wimps (Crossway, 2010). If you haven’t, it’s a great read.
Mike is the senior pastor of Guilford Baptist Church in Sterling, Virginia. In God’s grace, he oversaw the revitalization of the church. Church Planting Is for Wimps is the story of how that all happened. Though the book is ostensibly about church planting/revitalization, it is an encouraging account of church life and Christian ministry. I don’t think you would need to be a pastor to enjoy it and profit from it. Uplifting stories about God’s work through His local church can be hard to find–particularly doctrinally savvy ones–but this text is exciting, easy-to-read, and quite funny.
My favorite section of the text involved McKinley’s account of how his church, planted from Capitol Hill Baptist Church of Washington, DC, reached out to local Hispanics. At one point, McKinley and his wife hosted a dinner for a number of folks from their diverse neighborhood. One of them told the couple as he left the house that he had never been inside an American home except to work. That was a stunning story, one that shows just how wide natural divides are–and how incredible the power of …
]]>Do you struggle with guilt related to evangelism? Do you feel like you do very little as a Christian to “draw” lost people? I sometimes struggle with this feeling–and sometimes, it’s justified. It’s a very healthy thing to examine one’s evangelistic witness, and to push oneself out of one’s comfort zone (read: the evangelical church/parachurch bubble, oftentimes) into the pathways and patterns of lost people.
But it is also possible to carry the weight of the lostness of the world on your back. If so, here’s a helpful text from John 3:20-21:
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
Sometimes, we can think that we are repelling lost people by living a God-glorifying life. In fact, this may be true. People don’t want to be around the light when they live in darkness. They want to stay in the darkness. They are justly ashamed. They hate the light.
This doesn’t give us a permanent excuse for not evangelizing lost people, of course. Just as Jesus did, we need to
…]]>Do you struggle with guilt related to evangelism? Do you feel like you do very little as a Christian to “draw” lost people? I sometimes struggle with this feeling–and sometimes, it’s justified. It’s a very healthy thing to examine one’s evangelistic witness, and to push oneself out of one’s comfort zone (read: the evangelical church/parachurch bubble, oftentimes) into the pathways and patterns of lost people.
But it is also possible to carry the weight of the lostness of the world on your back. If so, here’s a helpful text from John 3:20-21:
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
Sometimes, we can think that we are repelling lost people by living a God-glorifying life. In fact, this may be true. People don’t want to be around the light when they live in darkness. They want to stay in the darkness. They are justly ashamed. They hate the light.
This doesn’t give us a permanent excuse for not evangelizing lost people, of course. Just as Jesus did, we need to
…]]>…]]>Thanks to Jiffy Lube, most of us know the drill by now: either do it yourself, or take your car in for a regular tune-up and oil change every three months or three thousand miles. Fail to maintain your vehicle in this fashion, and you run the risk of your engine locking up and stranding you on the side of the road somewhere in the middle of rush hour traffic. How odd, then, that many of us would be so committed to the routine maintenance of our vehicles, and yet so often overlook the necessity of giving similar routine attention to our marriages. Clearly, one of the main purposes of marriage is to function as a
…]]>Thanks to Jiffy Lube, most of us know the drill by now: either do it yourself, or take your car in for a regular tune-up and oil change every three months or three thousand miles. Fail to maintain your vehicle in this fashion, and you run the risk of your engine locking up and stranding you on the side of the road somewhere in the middle of rush hour traffic. How odd, then, that many of us would be so committed to the routine maintenance of our vehicles, and yet so often overlook the necessity of giving similar routine attention to our marriages. Clearly, one of the main purposes of marriage is to function as a