Learning how to use a woodstove isn’t all that complicated until you actually buy one. You would think that, once it’s installed, all you would have to do is put wood in it, light a match, and then close its door. However, for those of us who grew up in Southern California, where people’s heaviest [...]

Pastors go to conferences and workshops to get information they can use. They go on personal retreats so that God can use them. Conferences give information about the way things should be or can be in a church. Personal retreats are where God opens your eyes to the way things really are in a church—good [...]

Many years ago, an acquaintance told me that the hardest thing to do, the first time you remodel a house, is to pick up a hammer and start tearing out your first wall. This is hard, he said, because once you start ripping out the wall, you know that you’ve just committed yourself to a [...]

Into this season of mangers, shepherds and angels comes the story of the slaughter of the innocents, the bloody horror of ancient time that now takes on a sickening relevance to our own—the Gospels’ darkest story that serves as an unwanted reality check in Matthew’s account of the Messiah’s birth and the gifts of the [...]

Isaiah 11.1-3 A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall [...]

Poor Thanksgiving. Stuck between the two biggest retail holidays of the year, Halloween and Christmas, it’s become something of a time-out in the holiday season, like the Two Minute Warning in an NFL game. Increasingly, Thanksgiving has become a time to rest before heading out at some insane hour in the middle of the night [...]

Pastor, if you think you’re essential to your church’s health, growth, and success, you may well have an inflated sense of your own importance. I’m not saying that to be insulting, mind you, but I know from 20 some odd years in pastoral ministry that being “essential” is the unexamined motive that keeps many of [...]

A good car will run a long time, if you take care of it. This is a comforting thought as I sit in a quiet corner of our local Honda dealership, so comforting that it almost makes me forget what this scheduled maintenance will cost us. Also comforting is the realization that, unless I want [...]

This post was contributed by one of our Board members, Joe Delahunt. Joe is Pastor of the First Baptist Church in New Haven, CT. He is also the Area Minister of the American Baptist Church of Connecticut. He and his wife, LaRee, have been involved in urban ministry for thirty years. Then, because so many people were [...]

One of the pitfalls of self-help is that we can often use it to avoid deep change. We like it because the self that needs help and the self that gives help are one and the same. In this loop, we are in control of defining the need, and we are in control of providing [...]