LESSON #10: SPIRITUAL WARFARE IS REAL.I grew up in a smorgasborg of church flavors.  I was baptized as an infant in a covenant church, attended baptist and community churches, then went to college at a Pentecostal school. All of these groups approach the spiritual realities of our lives differently, some don't mention spirits or demons at all, while others find one under every rock and sniffle.  When we first planted the church, we read all [...]

LESSON #9: IT IS HARD TO TO WALK THE LINEI wrote this article some time ago. It is, I think, about what it means to live out our faith in the tension. Typically, we're more apt to live out our faith with ease resulting in either in liberal indulgence or legalism. We are supposed to walk the line between self-indulgence and self-righteousness...it's called self-denial...a life like Jesus. But self-denial is much more than just depriving [...]

LESSON #8:  NOT EVEN JESUS HELPED EVERYONE.There is a tendency for pastors to pretend they are superman.  I used to wonder what pastors did with all of their time.  I imagined them sitting like some old-school Rabbi spending every waking hour studying scrolls.  Getting paid to read the Bible didn't seem like that hard of a job.  Then I became a pastor.  I realized very quickly that a pastor is synonomous with "brokeness magnet".  It's [...]

My family and I just returned from a trip to Disneyland.  We probably walked a marathon as we traversed the "magic kingdom".  Not too much has changed since I first went there nearly 30 years ago. For some things this is good for others it is bad.  The old Swiss Family Robinson House is now the "Tarzan" house because no one has ever heard of that famous family.  The 20,000 Leagues under the Sea sub [...]

LESSON #7:  YOU'LL NEVER FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.After people ask my why I wanted to plant a church (read lesson #1), quite often the next question is, "how are you qualified?" This isn't asked directly like this mind you, it is more cryptic like, "where did you go to seminary?" or "where were you a pastor before?".  Early on I was very intimidated by this question because I didn't really know what [...]

LESSON #6:  THOSE EXCITED MOST QUICKLY EXIST JUST AS FASTWhen your first starting church and you want to determine "how big" you are, you count every adult, child, and dog that is nearby.  No matter what a pastor tells you, numbers do matter in their mind.  They say they don't think about them, but it is incredibly hard not to.  I am not suggesting that numbers mean everything only that they meaning something--not all good [...]

A lot of young church plants, in an effort to declare their freedom in Jesus, have missed the point entirely.  Mounting their attack against the legalists of the world, they fail to heed to Apostle Peter's warning to, "Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God." (1Peter 2.16). Within the first 6 months of our church plant, we appeared in an article [...]

LESSON #4 - HUMOR & MARKETINGWhen we first planted the church we produced some humorous ads to shake things up a bit.  The ads ran the gambit of appropriateness--all of them made me laugh.  We found that they were well received by the non-Christian culture and that Christians completely hated them.  We only mailed out a few one time, but most of the time we left them in the hands of our people to distribute [...]

LESSON #3 - THE SIN OF AUTONOMY..guiltyI probably would have been too prideful to admit this the first year we planted.  The truth is, we live in largely a reactionary culture, or at least we live like we do.  We make many of our decision not because we have determined them as right, biblical, or wise, rather, because they fit what we have already determined is right.  We make decision to avoid bad experiences, little [...]

I don't know what Jesus feels about facebook, but my guess is that he thinks it is from the devil.  I realize that everyone has their own personal "reconnection" story where their long lost __________ was found.  I still find it curious that people who have hundreds of "friends" don't realize that they actually don't have that many friends, or that the world cares what they had for breakfast, what their frustrated with or looking [...]

LESSON #2 - YOU HAVE TO LOVE JESUS MORE THAN YOU LOVE PEOPLE.I've heard it said that you cannot love God without loving people.  I couldn't disagree more.  I don't believe you can love people unless you love God, more accurately, unless you know God's love as seen in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  There is a reason why Jesus said the greatest and first commandment was to "Love God".  If we love [...]

Some day I'll probably write a book.  I don't want to write a book so that I can make a name for myself, but becuase writing is how I process. You ask me a question, I'll respond with a 10 page paper.  It is what I do.  So, in the next few weeks I am going to process online the goods and bads of church planting over the last three years. Who am I kidding, [...]

After all the talk, I finally got my first tattoo.  Until I planted a church I never really considered getting tattoo. In other words, this wasn't an event I have been looking forward to for 15 years.  It seems that tattoos have become a bit more culturally acceptable which has resulted in everyone getting really stupid things permanently embossed on their bodies.  As a high school English teacher, I used to make fun of students [...]