Books

The one thing a faltering church typically has is space: empty classrooms, parking lots, education buildings, or offices. How can your local church leverage that area to help the community?

How do we get so caught up in believing this journey is all about us? The pressure’s off, friend; all the glory belongs to Christ.

The antidote to pride is still humility, but a kind of humility that’s different from what we’re used to. We typically think of humility as thinking lowly of oneself, and we don’t struggle to think lowly of ourselves.

The way the world measures effectiveness must not become the way the church does. The scorecard that the church has used for decades has become broken.

Many scholars describe the civil rights movement as a political movement with religious dressing—useful for the movement’s purposes but not central to the message. But the work of historian David L. Chappell, based on testimonies by civil rights activists and leaders, contradicts this. Their accounts indicate that “it was, for them, primarily a religious event.”

No matter what I did, every attempt ended without any signs that a youth ministry would get off the ground. I was at a complete loss.

Prepare your heart by preparing your mind, body and soul. Read the Word, remember the Word, recite the Word, and live out the Word.

Hope—the future state of time that our minds long to occupy—must begin with a relationally grounded, material experience with Jesus mediated through the Spirit, the Scriptures, and, often most powerfully, his body.