ChurchPlanting.com

A few weeks ago, Georgia, my wife and I went to downtown Berlin to do some shopping. We had seven different stops to make. As we were leaving the house I told my wife that I wanted to “add value” to the employees of the places where we were going to shop. I prepared myself inside, [...]

African gazelles can jump over a ten foot fence, but they can be contained at a zoo behind a six foot wall.  You see, they won’t jump if they can’t see where they are going to land.  It makes sense.  What if there was a hungry lion on the other side of the wall.  Most [...]

Every year a number of our family and friends send a Christmas card with a family summary. I really love getting those, especially from folks I don’t have much contact with during the year. The kids are always amazingly taller, our friends’ hair is thinner or grayer, and it’s fun to see who traveled to [...]

Un-met Expectations can KILL! You know the feeling… You were expecting with all of your heart for “this”, instead you got “That!” We all have expectations, we have them in marriage, kids, team mates, weather, restaurants and friends..etc… The problem is when our expectations are not met, then we get mad, hurt, disappointed or worse… Disengage or become bitter. I have experiences [...]

Over the years we’ve launched just under 70 churches from our own. Those congregations have planted others and the number of churches that we know of exceeds 700. They often don’t use our name or join our parent denomination. Right or wrong, we have intentionally tried to build the Kingdom of Heaven rather than shoot [...]

Most of us, when we go on a trip, do a bit of thinking beforehand about what it will be like when we get there. We don’t just show up in Rome and then think, “Hmmm what is there to do here?”  Aside from the rare nomad who considers that kind of travel fun, most [...]

I met an interesting congregation on one of my recent teaching trips. They call themselves “The Oregon Community.” They are a fairly recent church plant with an intense focus on meeting the needs of their local community. Outgrowing a rented facility gave a whole new opportunity for the church to link itself to the community. [...]