(See the previous posts, Part 1 - Study the Past and Part 2 - Study Mistakes)

Guess what I know about you? You think that what you’re involved in is the best thing God is doing right now. You think you’ve got something desperately needed in the church. Of course you do. Why else would you give, serve, sacrifice for it?! The guys over in the PCA, EV Free, SBC and Acts 29 all think the same thing. Me too. We all think we’ve figured it out.  It’s a wonderful thing about how God organizes the body of Christ. We’re all part of the best thing around.

Faith for church planting assumes we believe God is at work in what we’re doing. I’m not just talking about gospel truth either, but the creation…

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I would like to help you distinguish between God’s moral will and his sovereign will. This will help you make sense of the apparent contradiction between these two statements:

1. God does all things according to his will (sovereign will).

“He does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand” (Daniel 4:35).

“Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalms 115:3).

2. Some things happen that are not God’s will (moral will).

“Whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17)—implying some don’t.

“The Lord is not willing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3…

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(See the previous post, Planting Churches That Last  (Part 1) - Study the Past )

As a teenager, my buddy fancied himself a hotshot skateboarder. Trying to do an ollie (a jump and board flip in midair) he landed badly and snapped the bone in his arm. The real ache was 6 weeks of summer spent in a cast. Finally he got the cast off and … well, he immediately went back to the same spot and tried the same thing … and broke his arm. Same move, same bone, same result.

He’s an adult now and he’s vowed to never stand on anything that has wheels. He also has this weird place on his arm where it still feels broken when you touch it. Moral of the story is the old adage: “Those who fail to learn the …

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Large spiritual passion with small doctrinal understanding is large sails and tall masts on a tiny boat in high winds. It will dart wildly over the surface for a hundred yards. Then one wave, or one crosswind, will bring it all crashing into the unforgiving sea.

Give as much attention to enlarging the depth of your ballast as you do to the height of your sails.

Of course, if you are a sixty-ton flat-surfaced barge, with a broken engine, pray for God to give you sails and wind.

Notes and full audio and video from each session are now available.

Joel Beeke — Cultivating Private Prayer as a Pastor

Beeke says, "Prayer is often treated as the appendix to our work rather than the foundation. . . . The problem is not that we don't pray, but rather it is that we seldom pray prayerfully." He explains two parts required for prayerful praying: taking hold of yourself and taking hold of God.

Paul Miller — Helping Your People Discover the Praying Life

Miller exhorts us, "God wants the 'muddy you'—you in all your brokenness—to come to him as a child in prayer." He says that when most people try to create a habit of prayer, they create a 'spiritual' version of them to …

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The best car I ever owned was a ’72 Chrysler Valiant. My wife, Kimm, called it the “Wonder V,” as in, “I wonder why you think I want to ride in that.” But it was a tank on tires—so solidly built, I used it as a backstop for pitching practice. A baseball into the side of my present car would total it. It was a sad day when the “Wonder V” gave up the ghost. When something is solid, well-built, and passes the test of time, we need to value it.

That’s the way we need to understand church planting strategies. In a world where “new” gets the buzz, we need to value that which has proven itself over time. I’m part of a family of churches that has been planting churches for over three decades, but …

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We just finished a conference on prayer. To keep fanning the flames of zeal for a life of prayer, here is the most remarkable poem on prayer I know. It was written by George Herbert.

For me, the phrase “reversed thunder,” as a description of prayer, is worth more than a hundred explanations.

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world-transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, …

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Byron Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. In the most recent First Things, he writes The Good News About Evangelicalism, and gives some of the results of The Baylor Religious Survey.

The results contradict recent claims that evangelicalism is shrinking and the younger generation is becoming more secular. I suspect the main value of empirical research like this is to keep other researchers honest. If you get discouraged by the latest report that things are going badly, take heart. Here is a better report.

Leading religious observers claim that evangelicalism is shrinking and the next generation of evangelicals is becoming less religious and mor…

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Phillis Wheatley was the first black person to publish a book of poetry in English. There is a story behind it.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, had to be published in London because the Boston publishers, where she lived as a slave, did not believe a young black woman could have written them. The British publishers required an official “Attestation” from leaders in Boston that the poems were hers.

So on a spring morning in 1771, “a young African girl walked demurely into the courthouse at Boston to undergo an oral examination, the results of which would determine the direction of her life and work. Perhaps she was shocked upon entering the appointed room.

There, gathere…

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In their 2010 year-end report, the Barna Group identified six major patterns emerging among Christians in America:

1. The Christian Church is becoming less theologically literate.
2. Christians are becoming more ingrown and less outreach-oriented.
3. Growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of learning pragmatic solutions for life.
4. Among Christians, interest in participating in community action is escalating.
5. The postmodern insistence on tolerance is winning over the Christian Church.
6. The influence of Christianity on culture and individual lives is largely invisible.

Much could be said (and done!) about each of these. In response to the drift away from…

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