Following up on yesterdays post… Yesterday I started writing about discouragement. Near the end of that post, I wrote an entire list of the “types of people” who make me want to jump off a bridge… The person who thinks it is their gifting to point out every problem when an idea is discussed.The person who is always having a bad day…and feels like you should know about it.The person who is an endless pit for affirmation, and
Discouragement / dis·cour·age·ment / disˈkərijmənt/ At some point, all of us face it… For me, there are plenty of days when I’m not hitting on all cylinders…especially lately. At times, COVID-19 has had me wondering if what I’m doing is actually making a difference. Back in March, I went from being a pastor to a podcaster. It sounded fun at first, but just like any podcaster, in the back of my head I know people aren’t
There was a big push for churches to reach “millennials.” Every leadership conference I attended had at least one breakout session that was supposed to teach us the secrets about how to reach this entire generation of desperately lost snowflakes. One session at a conference in North Raleigh felt more like a discovery channel commentary on a species of people who seem to have showed up out of nowhere. The blonde white girl teaching the secrets
Because of this, Oasis became a place where people truly belonged before they believed, and they were accepted even if they weren't "behaving" like a Christian. Like you, I have seen plenty of churches advertise something like "belong before you believe" or something similar, but for me this phrase was so much more than a cool slogan for a billboard. I truly wanted all the acid tripping, drug using, alcohol smelling, porn watching, church dodging people
Our church services were getting better and better. I was proud to invite my friends to church on Sundays. Joel and Matt were doing an incredible job building their ministry teams to accommodate the growth we were experiencing. There was one girl on the worship team named Kate who had been a contestant on the TV series, “The Voice,” which is basically a huge televised singing competition. Even though we were all rooting and praying for
Im sorry y'all My recent string of blog posts might be confusing, let me clarify. I'm not writing this to teach you anything or to motivate you in some way. In fact, you probably won't learn anything except how inept and unqualified I am as a leader/pastor. My intention with these posts is to present an honest, and sometimes humorous memoir of my personal weaknesses as a pastor. If you read these stories expecting me to
I was adopted in the eleventh grade and transferred from a large public school in the city to a small private Christian school in the suburbs. For the first time in my life, nobody got cut from the school baseball team. Everyone made the team, including me, and the other homeschool kid who was wearing pants that his mom hand made. There was also another kid who played right field, and he was known for taking
We followed the directions from all the church startup kits and training conferences. After a ton of marketing and Facebook hype, 396 people showed up on launch Sunday. I think most of those people were family members of the launch team from out of town, because 8 weeks later the church had less than 200 people in attendance on average. Even 200 people was too big for my britches. In retrospect, I was all around a
It was the year 2013 and I was 29 years old. I was about forty pounds overweight, sporting a faux hawk, and babbling about my dream to start a new church that would supposedly change a city. After digesting all the online starter-kit training videos for church planters, I was convinced I needed a launch team and a launch date. I had already set the date, but I still needed to build the team. Somewhere between
