Glorious Mud

I was talking with one my leaders at church the other day about why we want to move away from traditional accountability groups specifically for our men (though we are doing the same for our women).    We are moving to a gospel-centered Fight Club model instead. Why? Because in a street fight, the gospel-centered Fight Club will beat the traditional Accountability Group into submission every time. It is just better and more effective. Why? First – accountability groups tend to be single-issue focused. Guys join accountability groups to help them because they look at porn or they spend too much money or they have problems controling their temper. The result is a group of guys who are all struggling (and failing) with the same thing in the same ways. This causes the guys involved to start looking at their struggle as an isolated unhealthy behavior instead of as a manefestation of a deeper heart issue. Gospel-centered Fight Clubs, on the other hand, pool guys togethe...

In 2007, I taught a parenting forum at The Journey .  I posted the audio for that forum here, but The Journey has since cleaned up their media archives and this forum was taken down.  For some reason, though, this blog entry continues to be one of the most popular on my site. So, in an attempt to offer something of value, I am going to update this blog to reflect some of the best information we explored at that forum years ago.  Many blessings to you in your parenting journey. ..... Too often we as parents discipline out of wrong motives or for wrong goals. We want others to think we have it all together. We don't want to embarrassed in public places. We sure don't want to look like those "other" parents who have no control over their kids. How do we enter into parenting with true humility and raise "good" kids who are no more than legalistic moralists or moral relativists? The gospel tells us that we are both more broken and sinful than we care ...

Aren't grandparents the cutest thing ever? They stand in the background with their eyes sparkling as their grandchildren toddle around making strange cooing and gurgling noises. They buy way too much stuff for the kids at Christmas and then brush aside their own children's complaints with comments like, "Oh, dear, it is a grandmother's job to spoil her grandkids." The whole thing feels reminiscent of the Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom from Want - warm, fuzzy, and lots of good food. If you had grandparents like these, count yourself lucky. If your own parents are like these, your kids will have a richer and more joyful childhood because of them. Loving grandparents are one of life's great blessings, and our kids are likely to grow up thinking that our parents are perfect. The reality is, though, that we know our parents weren't perfect. Hopefully we can all assert that they did the best that they could (and, tragically, there ar...

Want advice on parenting? A quick search at Amazon.com for books on parenting will give you over 40,000 titles to chose from - each book promises to help you become a successful parent. You can learn how to enjoy scream-free parenting, how to avoid conflict by being a playful parent, how to be a positive parent or an unconditional parent, or you can even be a clinically-proven parent who can solve your kids' problems in just five weeks. The bottom line (as we all already know) is that there are no five easy steps to perfect parenthood. Even if we were given a perfect plan, we still wouldn't get it right because we are imperfect people raising imperfect children. There is just too much sin on everyone's part to hope for perfection. So if we have already been disqualified from being perfect parents, what can (and should) we hope for? Is it good enough to just be "good" parents? Well, that is certainly better than being bad parents - but it is not the best th...