How Could God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?

Read in this light, the terrible destruction recorded on the pages of Joshua in God’s Holy Word become not a “problem to solve,” but a wake-up call to all of us—to remain “pure and undefiled before God” (James 1:27), seeking him and his ways, and to faithfully share the gospel with our unbelieving neighbors and the unreached nations. Like Job, we must ultimately refrain from calling God’s goodness and justice into question, putting a hand over our mouth (Job 40:4) and marveling instead at the richness and the mystery of God’s great inscrutable mercy (Eph. 2:4).

Permission to be a Regular Preacher

I know you’ve been watching other young preachers ascend the pulpits of their gigantic churches. You’ve studied their sermons, dress style, worship elements, websites and books. We praise God for those who can reach the masses. They are needed! But most preachers will not be that kind. You know this already, don’t you? You have tried to incorporate all their ideas into your ministry, but without the same results. It has occurred to you that you can preach as good as these guys. And you’ve wondered why your church hasn’t grown by leaps and bounds. It’s time to stop trying to be someone else.

The Best Gifts

Here are ten commitments to give your beloved that will let your love blossom and grow in God-shaped ways.

1. I give you space and grace.

2. I give you tenderness of word, touch, and look.

3. I will celebrate the unique wonderfulness of you.

4. I give you my focus, my attention, and my consideration.

5. I will listen to your words, and even more to your silence.

6. I will lift you up with gentleness and kindness.

7. I will let you go first, choose your favorite, and have the biggest piece.

8. I will soak my words in joy and humility before I speak them.

9. I will keep a running count of all the ways God has blessed me through you.

10. I will tell you how proud I am of the way you look like Jesus.

9 Strategic Principles to Help You Get Unstuck

We hear a lot about vision and management. Very little is shared about developing good strategy. Recently, I finished reading The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs by Cynthia Montgomery. I’ve pulled some of the highlights from my reading to develop this list of principles to help you improve your strategic approach.

There Is No Cyberspace

Whatever its original meaning, cyberspace has come to refer to what happens when we interact with one another through our digital devices. The big trick of cyberspace, and what makes it different from every form of media before it, is that it makes us believe we can extend a sense of self beyond the body. The word “cyberspace” and the idea behind it make us believe that when we go online, we actually go somewhere.

10 Foolish Obstacles to the Foolishness of Preaching

God chose the foolishness of Gospel preaching to save them that believe (1 Cor. 1:21). The Gospel message is foolishness to the world. But so is the Gospel medium – preaching. Who in their right mind would choose a regular 30-45 minute monologue from one sinful man to many sinful hearers to communicate the most important message in the world?
God would and did.
And he did it knowing that this method of communication would upset many people and cause them to find many foolish reasons for not listening.

6 things that make your craveable as a church leader

1. Make your words appetizing.
2. Don’t be easily offended.
3. Be open to others’ ideas. When someone suggests things that are different than yours, you should welcome them, not criticize or become defensive, rather praise them for their creativity.
4. Never gossip or speak ill of others.
5. Look for opportunities to be generous!
6. Don’t be high maintenance!

What Your Silence Tells Others

For extroverts, finding silence during a week is very important even though silence is not their natural leaning. For introverts, finding silence is easy since they prefer less stimulation on any given day.
For both groups, silence speaks volumes. It tells others any number of things about them and how they approach work. It also is subjectively interpreted by those around the leader.

What matters in worship

So communal worship is about coming together in order to worship. It is coming together to continue worshiping. It is to come together to share in the death of Jesus in communion. It is to praise God. It is to be inspired and motivated to leave worshiping.
Christians do not come to worship, or leave worship. We are worship.

The Miracle Model of Youth Ministry

The core of what we do cannot be the thrill. Crosses aren’t very thrilling and neither is washing feet. What is more, I am sure Jesus would have much rather thrilled the crowd by calling a legion of angels instead of having soldiers pound nails into his hands. Needless to say, this type of ministry undermines what discipleship is all about and leaves teens woefully unprepared for life in the real world.

5 Things Every Daughter Needs to Hear From Her Dad

1. You are beautiful and you are loved.
2. Your mother is beautiful and she is loved.
3. You belong to God and were created for his glory.
4. You are forgiven.
5. You are accepted.

40 Great Church Websites of 2013

Maybe God wants your website to be simple yet effective. Maybe you need to try something radical that’s never been done before. Maybe you don’t need a website. The point is if you have any leading from the Holy Spirit, obey it even if the experts call you crazy.
At the same time, it helps to get ideas and inspiration from what others are doing in the Kingdom. To aid in this part of the process, here are 40 great church websites worth checking out in 2013.

‘Harry Potter’ Is Getting New Covers

Kibuishi said he designed the covers thinking, “If I were the author of the books—and they were like my own children—how would I want them to be seen years from now?” Well, judging by the first cover Scholastic has released, he’d want them to be seen with significantly more Hagrid than the original cover has.

8 Ways To Engage The Culture Around You

1. Start conversations
2. Hang out with people who enjoy the same things you do
3. Volunteer somewhere
4. Tell stories
5. Get to know your community by asking questions
6. Invite others to join you
7. Pray with others
8. Address physical and spiritual needs around you

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Toxic Charity

Toxic Charity is a book about doing missions right. The subtitle pretty much lays it out: “How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).” Lupton honors the mindset that compels Christians toward foreign short-term missions and inner-city projects at home, but believes that the church has failed to ask simple questions like these: Who is really benefiting? Who are we really seeking to serve? Is it the poor and those in need, or are we primarily serving ourselves?

Are Churches Any Better Than Nightclubs?

Q. What do the state, nightclubs, and worship services have in common?
A. All have rituals that people participate in willingly, though not really knowing why, and where the true self is kept safely hidden from self and others, thus empowering the institution to continue as is, without threat of revolt.

The Shadow Side of Scripture

The Bible does not hide or turn from the darkest parts of life—it holds them closely. Although the church sometimes does not know what to do with these moments, our Scriptures embrace them fully.

Why Unrestricted Discipleship Resources Are the Future of the Global Church

If the answer is “yes” to every one of these questions then the resource can be legally used. But if they get to the end and need to use the resource in ways that excede the original permissions of the contract, the process begins again from “Do I have the Intellectual Property knowledge to request permission?”

Contrast this process with the one question involved in gaining legal access to a discipleship resource released under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0):

Am I willing to give attribution for the resource and release what I create with it under the same license?

If yes, then the resource can be legally used. The simplicity of this process, contrasted with the previous, can be see in the second flowchart above.

10 Clues That The Zombie Outbreak Being Announced On Your Television Is Not A Hoax

3. At Starbucks, barista holds up a paper cup, reads what’s written on it, and says, “Soy latte for ‘GAAAAAH’? Soy latte? ‘GAAAAAAH’?”

Why Are Young Adults Leaving Church? A Comprehensive Answer

As I mentioned a few posts ago, there is a flurry of debate in blogs, facebook, etc on why young people are leaving the church in their early 20s. What you end up finding is that the experts tend to give the one thing they are most passionate about as the one reason young people are leaving. Well, there isn’t one reason. There are many. There are two big questions that are on people’s minds when it comes to this issue: 1) Why are they leaving? (what this post is about) and 2) what can we do about it? (future post).

Our Uniquely American Idols

Jesus’ insistence on highlighting God’s love for all people—not just the Israelites—touched a nerve because these people in Nazareth had turned their national identity into an idol. As my pastor noted, we have some distinctly American idols that we have allowed to master us, such that we respond fiercely when they are threatened, even by Scripture. We hold tightly our right to self-determinism, for example, or our sexual expression. But I think that many in the American church have also bowed before precisely the same idol as this crowd in Nazareth: idolizing our national identity.

How You Can Impact an Overchurched Culture

To summarize, here’s what you can do:

• show Christ at work
• serve people at work
• search for opportunities to serve people who are in the extended families of those you impact through your work

This will lend authenticity to your message.

Evangelism as a Mum

As parents of school-aged children, I’ve come to realize we inadvertently share our lives with fellow mums whilst dropping the children off, at the school gate, over coffee, and so on. Let’s not miss this opportunity to get alongside them, build relationships, and tell them the great news of Jesus

Nine Characteristics of Happy Churches

Recently I reviewed the files of 17 of the happiest churches where I consulted. As is typical in consultations, patterns emerged. In the case of these churches, I found nine common characteristics among the congregations. In each case, the characteristic seemed to contribute to the overall happiness of the churches.

Herod the Great: Israeli museum examines infamous leader

Israel’s national museum will open what it calls the world’s first exhibition devoted to the architectural legacy of biblical King Herod, the Jewish proxy monarch who ruled Jerusalem and the Holy Land under Roman occupation two millennia ago.

Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight

He took a picture of a man in a gorilla suit shaking his fist, and he superimposed that image on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they’re searching for cancer. He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide.
But they didn’t: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says.

The everyday agony of the password

And, never forget that every time that you use the same password for two different sites, services, or computers, a kitten dies.

Awesome Southwest Flight Attendant Raps the Safety Demonstration

A Gospel-Centered Church Understands the Place of Christian Liberty

In both cases Paul’s true freedom is not in what he can enjoy but what he can freely give up. He is not a slave to the weak, the Jews, the Greeks, or anyone else. He is a slave of Christ and a servant to all. This is for the sake of the gospel.

America’s Culture of Death

When a culture replaces the value of everlasting life, with the value of this life extended as far as possible, the culture has become totally myopic, unable to see beyond the immediate, the tangible, the empirical. And oddly enough when the lie that ‘this life is all there is’ is believed, it makes it much easier to allow death to rule one’s mind, one’s fears, one’s behavior. Death simply becomes the price of doing business, or surviving. A culture becomes fear based and makes decisions on the basis of fear, rather than faith and a belief in the life to come.

Any Place for the God of Job?

One of the problems with Osteen is that his theology has no place for the God of Job. But before we go after Osteen on this score, we need to ask ourselves: Does our theology have a place for such a God?

The Goal of Scripture is Not for Us to Know Scripture

Those of us groomed beneath the legal religious umbrella understand the importance of the Bible. There is no need to back off of its fascinating revelation. However, the search of many has stopped at knowing the Bible before our trek arrived at God himself.

How Do We Cherish Virginity Without Moralistic Fearmongering?

Ross is using the wakefulness language in a way not often thought about: as the way to strengthen the sexual purity of the unmarried. “Risk avoidance is a weak motivator,” he says. He reminds us that awe of Christ is “far stronger.”