"Some people are just wired to do this," Lanier told me. "Sometimes it's men who know they're not equipped to work in the church nursery or to sing in the church choir. But if they're like me, they can feel the smile of God as they exercise their tool skills—and because they have a chance to relate one-on-one to someone who maybe never heard the gospel of Jesus before."

Wayne Sparkman, at the PCA archives, pulled out a book of letters written by a Puritan pastor and handed it to me. He showed me a letter written to a young woman who just lost a newborn. In that, the pastor related his own pain and how God grieves with his children, but still offers hope. Reading that letter, full of real life helped me make a little sense of the mess. Five and a half years later, I hope I can help others make sense of it a little better too.

It’s time to replace an old paradigm, mission trip, with a new paradigm, empowerment. In the old paradigm, somebody comes and does something for the Africans, which they don’t maintain, because it wasn’t their idea in the first place. In the new paradigm, true development and growth take place because the Africans were involved and... Continue Reading

Then there was a major uptick in the use of the actual phrase “ask Jesus into your heart” in the 1970s, perhaps as children’s ministry became more formalized and leaders looked for very simple ways to explain to children what a decision for Christ would entail.

"It's simply impossible to preach the Gospel without words. The Gospel is inherently verbal, and preaching the Gospel is inherently verbal behavior." --D. Lifton

Every medium, and the totality of the media environment, affects, for good or ill, our relationships with God, others, the church, and God’s world; and they affect the way we perceive each of these.

Spurgeon went on to say, “It is in the pulpit that the fight will be lost or won. To us ministers, the maintenance of our power in the pulpit should be our great concern.”

Individual pastors can establish contact and relationships with pastors in other areas of the world today through social media. There are some difficulties and sacrifices associated with it but I can tell you I have been immeasurably blessed personally through my experiences in doing this

Any time a society attempted to place Christ in the center, they subtly turned the idea of Christ into an idol. Think of the “holy Roman Empire” and all of the resulting nations. A Christ who favors any nation besides the distinct Kingdom of God is not the Jesus of the New Testament. There’s a... Continue Reading

We need to think in terms of two phases of making disciples, rather than distinct tasks of evangelism and discipleship. In fact, if many of us reflect on how we were “evangelized,” it could be better described as being discipled in the context of a loving family or community of believers until we publically confessed trust in the gospel we had seen lived out in others.