School Clerk In Georgia Persuaded Gunman To Lay Down Weapons

“I just started praying for him,” Antoinette Tuff tells Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action News. “I just started talking to him … and let him know what was going on with me and that it would be OK. And then [I] let him know that he could just give himself up. … I told him to put [the guns] on the table, empty his pockets. He had me actually get on the intercom and tell everybody he was sorry, too. But I told them, ‘He was sorry, but do not come out of their rooms.’ … I give it all to God, I’m not the hero. I was terrified.”

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Love Your Enemies

Jesus came and he turned the world upside down. He ate with sinners. He envisioned a world where peace was the norm. He envisioned a world where groups like Jews and Samaritans, groups that hated each other, could come together and love each other. He did more than just dream. He did something about it. He gave us these principles to live by and he gave us an example to follow. He chose the way of the cross and willingly sacrificed his life for others. We follow a crucified Messiah. The Jesus way is the way of the cross. This means we often have to make sacrifices that are challenging and difficult. If we are serious about following Jesus, then we will choose the Jesus way over our own comfort.

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When The Doctor Calls

“Gordon, this is Doctor B. I have some difficult news for you. There’s a tumor in the back of your head in the lining of the brain. It is not malignant—you won’t die from this—but it will have to come out. And that means surgery and some recuperative time in the next few months.”
I have spent my whole life helping other people face doctor-call moments like these. Now it was my turn. And as the doctor went through further details of my situation, the very first thing that began to surge through my mind (the very first thing!) was: “Big G God is our refuge and strength comma, a very present help in trouble period. Big T therefore will not we fear period. Period. Period. Period.

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Paul and the Unquestioned Authority of the “Old Testament”

I could provide numerous other specific examples of Paul’s apostolic example on using the unquestioned authority of the “Old Testament” to support his Gospel and the practice of his congregations. I have already made this musing longer than I intended so I will bring it to a close. But we must realize that every time we read Paul we are reading his own interaction with Scripture on a multitude of levels. His practice shows he believed the words he penned to Timothy regarding what we call the Old Testament but he simply called “Scriptures.” Our practice and his practice are as far removed from one another as east is from the west …

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Counting the Cost (Accurately)

“There is a huge gray area around the question of ‘martyrs,’ ” said Veerman. “When Christians are isolated and denied clean drinking water and medical care because they are Christians and refuse to become Muslims—[and thus] they perish quicker than others—are they martyrs? In a strict sense, they aren’t. But when the whole mechanism behind [their deaths] is studied, we can say they are.”

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Maturing vs. Growing Older

Age, it seems, can either harden or renew dependent upon whether one is natural or spiritual. To me, a mark could be whether one is growing dim in kingdom vision (old) or increasingly wide-eyed (younger and enthused) about matters of the God-Life.
Some age in crusty stuckness; others in pliable openness.

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The Serious Business of Giving Thanks

It may not be too much of a stretch to say that for Paul giving thanks is nearly revolutionary. It’s quite subversive in the first century. Rather than naming all the parts of one’s life as good gifts provided by the Roman gods, early Christians named the various aspects of their lives as good gifts from God who is the Father of Jesus Christ, the one who gave up everything that God’s people might have everything.

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Group Leaders Want Direction

As a church meets for worship gatherings on Sunday, a wise pastor will not hand the microphone over to just anybody to teach. The pastor values the sermon—and the people—too much to haphazardly allow the teaching to “just sort of happen.” Yet every single week, in some of those same churches, groups gather and form community around studies that are disjointed from any type of discipleship plan, or worse, are disconnected from the doctrine and beliefs of the church.

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The Ex-Con Factor

Black men’s overrepresentation is no accident. Felony disenfranchisement laws trace back to the post-Reconstruction era when former Confederates and white Southern Democrats rolled back the political gains made by free slaves after the war. The whole point of these laws was the mass exclusion of black men from mainstream civic life. It still is.

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Five Reasons We Don’t Evangelize

But it seems like something has gone wrong. Many Christians do not live like fishers of men. Not many people ask us about the hope that we have in Christ, and when they do we’re not really ready to give an answer. Evangelical churches talk a lot about evangelism, but according to popular surveys and anecdotal impressions most church members don’t share their faith very often.

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The Number One Reason for the Decline in Church Attendance and Five Ways to Address It

Stated simply, the number one reason for the decline in church attendance is that members attend with less frequency than they did just a few years ago. Allow me to explain.
If the frequency of attendance changes, then attendance will respond accordingly. For example, if 200 members attend every week the average attendance is, obviously, 200. But if one-half of those members miss only one out of four weeks, the attendance drops to 175.
Did you catch that? No members left the church. Everyone is still relatively active in the church. But attendance declined over 12 percent because half the members changed their attendance behavior slightly.

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From Moral Majority to ‘Prophetic Minority

‘The Bible Belt is collapsing,” says Russell Moore. Oddly, the incoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission doesn’t seem upset. In a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Moore explains that he thinks the Bible Belt’s decline may be “bad for America, but it’s good for the church.”
Why? Because “we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority.”

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Love Does

I still struggle with this, oh so much. See, I would do anything, anything, anything for my kids. You name it, I’ll do it if it’s for their own good. Anything. However, sometimes I can’t say the same about what I’d be willing to do for God and His people. And when that’s how I feel, I know I need to stop and think and consider what I am doing to grow in a personal, intimate relationship with my Creator and Father, to the point where I can also say “I will do anything for you. Anything!”

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Why We Talk in Tongues

As a technique, tongues capture the attention but focus it on something meaningless (but understood by the speaker to be divine). So it is like meditation — but without the monkey mind. And the practice changes people. They report that as their prayer continues, they feel increasingly more involved. They feel lighter, freer and better. The scientific data suggest that tongue speakers enter a different mental state. The neuroscientist Andrew B. Newberg and his colleagues took M.R.I. scans of tongue speakers singing worship songs, and then speaking in tongues. When they did the latter, they experienced less blood flow to the frontal cerebral cortex. That is, their brain behaved as if they were less in a normal decision-making state — consistent with the claim that praying in tongues is not under conscious control..

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Till Duck Do Us Part

And there is one last aspect to Duck Dynasty that has made it such a big hit: It shows Christian men and women living ordinary lives that are informed by their faith — informed by their commitment to God, and each other. These are not the dour, joyless Christians you so often see on the screen, and too often run into in life. They don’t go around quoting Scripture or heaping judgment on others; they’re too busy having fun and living good lives.

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Ministry, and All Things Not Being Equal

There are some days you will remember why you keep doing this. There are some days you will forget who you are. Those days won’t always equal out.

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3 Lessons Every Writer, Speaker, Blogger, and Musician Can Learn from Led Zeppelin

1. Don’t sell out to pop culture.
2. Don’t be afraid to debunk the conventional wisdom.
3. Speak well of your competitors.

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The Craziest Statistic You’ll Read About North American Missions

It’s new research in Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity’s Christianity in its Global Context, 1970-2020. Missiologist Todd M. Johnson and his team found that 20 percent of non-Christians in North America really do not “personally know” any Christians.
That’s 13,447,000 people—about the population of metropolitan Los Angeles or Istanbul—most of them in the United States

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After Military Kills 500 Protesters, Islamists Take Out Anger on Egyptian Christians

The New York Times notes how “the steady drumbeat of sectarian incidents since Mr. Mubarak’s downfall appears to have been eclipsed by the explosion of anti-Christian attacks over the last three days.”
The NYT highlights two efforts to document reprisal attacks on Christian targets, currently estimated to be 37 churches and 14 schools. USA Today offers an interactive map of such attacks in nine provinces.

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Historical Amnesia

While there is some truth to that description, we’ve also selectively forgotten a lot about the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. They didn’t all learn English the day that they stepped off the boat: like today’s immigrants, most learned over time, but they started with enough “survival English” to get by. They (or their children) eventually did integrate into American society, but many initially lived in ethnic-specific tenements, isolated from the larger society not only because they felt more comfortable amongst those who could understand their languages but also because there were many American citizens that did not want them in their neighborhoods.

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What People Quote vs. What They Read

The Bible is not just one text — a large, user-unfriendly quotebook. The Bible contains many texts that have been edited, combined, and arranged in particular ways. Understanding the place of Micah 6:8 within the whole book of Micah, indeed within the larger prophetic proclamation, is the only way to make sense of that (highly quotable) statement. I would suggest that if you do not know what leads up to and follows Micah 6:8, you do not understand that verse.

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The Millennial Traits of Jesus

It can be easy to point out the weaknesses of a generation while overlooking the strengths. But, as William Strauss and Neil Howe pointed out in their book Millennials Go to College, Gen Y has many positive characteristics. And just like any individual or generation, there are aspects of Millennial’s generational stereotypes that, in a small part, reflect characteristics of Jesus. Here are four reasons I think Jesus would be proud to roll with Millennials.

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Our Love of Mayhem

It seems our culture loves to watch mayhem and destruction unfold on the big screen. The sheer amount of death and destruction in Hollywood led comic author Mark Waid to note that even in the newest Superman movie, we don’t get “a win so much as a stop-loss.” Our heroes don’t save the day anymore, they simply limit the death toll.

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Born in the Fire of Contemplative Prayer: Richard Peace on “Contemplative Evangelism”

I’ve never really thought of it as “evangelism” no doubt because like many folks who grew up in the American south, I saw the concept of evangelism abused so much that I’ve grown rather allergic to the word, let alone the concept. But if we can shake off the baggage and simply see evangelism (or, as Catholics prefer to say, evangelization) as a vulnerable sharing of joy and yearning for God, rather than a manipulative attempt to control another’s religious behavior — then, I think, this idea of contemplative evangelism makes all sorts of sense.

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Conn. police: Cable outage not 911-worthy

Fairfield police say they received numerous 911 calls about a cable outage that hit parts of southwestern Connecticut on Sunday night.
The message on the department’s Facebook page says the outage is “neither an emergency or a police related concern.”
The post warns that 911 should be used for life-threatening emergencies only and misuse of the 911 system may result in an arrest.

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Beating AK47s into Shovels

A year or so later we heard about a group of blacksmiths who had also started melting down donated guns to make tools, after being troubled by the fact that some of the metal from the Twin Towers was used to make a battleship. Inspired by the prophets’ vision of “beating swords into plows”, these Mennonite metal-workers started turning guns into garden tools. They call themselves RAW tools (turning “war” around and forging peace).

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Fight: “Erasing Hell” co-author defends nonviolence in a new book!

One of the things that he repeatedly comes back to is that he became a pacifist not by some philosophical/political influence but because of what he actually began to see as clear in the bible. For him (and also for me), this conversation starts with honoring the Scriptures and the God they portray.

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A Prayer for Teachers

This morning I spoke at Ouachita Christian School, offering some devotional thoughts as they had a teacher’s in service day. I used this prayer to end my talk this morning, and thought I would share it here. I wish I had written it. In fact I do not know who wrote it. I found it HERE and thought I’d share it.

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Do You Really Need Church?

After giving it much consideration, I’ve decided that there is at least one very good reason why I need Church: I have a really bad memory.
It’s true. I have a terrible memory. Especially when it comes to remembering who I am as a child of God. Especially when it comes to remembering what God has done, and continues to do, in and through Jesus Christ.
I forget who I am. I forget who God is. I forget God’s Epic Story of Redemption and Liberation and Renewal and Beauty and Hope.

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Seven Expectations of Every Church Member

I have a high view of church membership, and I hope I lead my church to have the same view. As we assimilate new people into the body of Christ, the goal is to maintain a culture of high expectations of every church member. I believe the best starting point for setting these expectations is a new member class. Whatever descriptor you use for the class, whatever timeslot you choose to teach the class, every new member class should communicate three key points about your church: information, doctrine, and expectations.

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Further on Elders (Getting Rid of Bad Elders: Prevention)

I learned years ago (and have re-learned more than once since then, being a slow study and all) that if you hire someone you have doubts about, it’ll be a bad hire — and one you’ll regret. The same is true of elders. No one is ever 100% qualified for the job. No one but Jesus is Jesus. But when you have doubts about whether a man is suited for the calling, it’s likely a mistake to ordain him.

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Why Disciple in Groups?

While the Bible never prescribes a particular model for discipling others, Jesus invested in groups of varying sizes. Larger groups learned from his teachings and miracles, while his closest followers benefited from personal discipleship and specific instruction. While one-on-one discipling is valid and has it purposes, I want you to consider five reasons to meet in a group of three to five instead of privately with one.

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The Importance of Telling Your Story and the Importance of Listening to Others

Regardless of the ups and downs of missions, the successes and failures, when learning occurs, no one can be considered a failure. Missionaries gain wisdom when they make sense out of their experiences by examining their thoughts and feelings and by applying the principles they have discovered and sharing them with others. Telling their stories to someone who has is able to listen and who can help the missionary process the Why, What if, What and How encourage learning. Learning implies becoming more effective as a missionary and as a person. Sometimes it is exactly what some need to be made whole again.

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Ministry Hack: BibleGateway.com + Alfred App

The trick is to use the (free) Alfred App along with BibleGateway.com to search for passages or words in the Bible quickly and easily, using only keyboard shortcuts.

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Respect and Likeability: A Leader’s Balancing Act

If you are respected and not liked, then your influence will be limited and short-lived. People will not fully trust you and will only follow you at a distance. In fact, they will circle around like vultures, waiting for you to fail. Your team will also have a high rate of turnover because no one enjoys working for an unlikeable leader. Eventually, you will burnout since no one is close enough for you to be able to share their care.
The remedy? Let people see your heart. Convince them you care about their lives.
If you are liked and not respected, your influence will also be limited and short-lived. People will follow you closely, but with insecurity and lack of confidence. They will question you constantly and will soon grow restless under your leadership. In the long run, they will become apathetic and lose enthusiasm.
The remedy? Let people see your vision. Convince them you have a solid plan for the future.

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Nine Reasons to Run from a Church

So here are my suggestions for behaviors that should cause people to RUN from a congregation EVEN IF it is perfectly orthodox doctrinally and even though its reputation is evangelical

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Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes: Honor, Part 6

It’s the same question. Whether we’re teaching gospel to Muslims or our own children, there’s a cultural gap that must be bridged — and we’re the ones called to do it. We are the ones who must submit and sacrifice and pay the price to learn to see the world as others do so that we may teach the unchanging gospel in words and ways that those from a different culture can hear and appreciate.

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Immigration: A Test of Christian Faith

There is one more way in which immigration is a test of Christian faith, and this builds off the previous point. The immigration reform issue forces believers to choose sides based on what we think the Word teaches. If one is convinced of the call to work for reform based on what the Bible says, that determination means embracing an Acts 4:19 decision moment. That is, this is the time and place to stand up for and speak out on God’s love of immigrants. This conviction can prove to be uncomfortable. It may lead to rejection; it might spur some to challenge unjust and inefficient laws and to get involved in various forms of activism. Immigration reform becomes the test, in other words, not only to others but also to ourselves, of fundamental beliefs about the Gospel, the mission of the Church, and the Christian life.

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What To Say When There Is Nothing To Say

However, in the past couple of years I have heard and read quite a bit from people who have experienced catastrophic losses. And what I have gathered from them confirms what I think and feel myself. So I believe that my suggestions are broadly true for many of the people whose pain will cross your path.

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The Evangelism Spark

I’m glad I couldn’t succeed because this lets me know how many in the church feel at this moment.
I’m glad again because God helped me learn. Today I live in that dream world of productive outreach.
What lights the spark? Inner reconstruction? Outer education? Godly props? Lucky breaks?
Hint: how would the empty tomb sound to you?

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Four Steps to Community Engagement

When we took on the comprehensive study at LifeWay Research known as the Transformational Church Initiative, we surveyed over 7,000 churches and conducted hundreds of on-site interviews with pastors. We wanted to change the scorecard from strictly looking at numbers to one that really asks if churches and people are being changed. We found that the churches that could be known as “transformational” had a number of characteristics in common. One of those traits was that transformational churches engaged their respective communities on mission.
We found that the common thread was that these churches were willing to invest deeper in the mission than other churches. They wanted to move the mission forward. The priorities were engaging the lost, winning the lost, and maturing believers to repeat the process. What does that process look like? Four steps are clear.

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All the Radical I Can Manage

The push to be radical, on mission, a world-changer can seem like a crushing weight. Sometimes life is just too hard and stuff is too broken. It’s all I can manage just to keep my world from flying to bits, let alone change anyone else’s. That’s so far outside of reality it sounds more like the twilight zone. No — reality is simply clinging to what I do know of God, His Son, and His faithfulness and just not letting go.

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6 Mistakes I Made as a Family Pastor

I am now in a new role here at my church leading our staff as the Executive Pastor and it’s full of new challenges. I have had time to look back and process mistakes I made from my role as Family Pastor. Every mistake I made is just a chance for me to help another leader avoid that same trap so why not share what I have learned.

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Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational

Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer’s third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.

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Explore TARDIS! Amazing Dr. Who Easter Egg found in Google Maps

If you take Google Streetview for a ride down Earl’s Court Road in London, you will come across a Police Telephone Box with a double arrow pointing to it. The box is real; it’s been in Earl’s Court for years. Click on through and you will find yourself inside an exquisitely detailed explorable panorama of the good Doctor’s TARDIS including control panel.

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