Glorious Mud

I have been reading through Ezekiel this month. And just for the record - this is one crazy book. Man, Ezekiel had one rough gig. I am tempted to complain when I run a 12 hour day of meetings. You know, rough stuff - St. Louis Bread Co. can get seriously old. Ezekiel, on the other hand, had to act out all these crazy judgments from God before they happened. He was God's living parable. He had to sit in a public square and build miniature cities out of bricks and then destroy them. He had to lay on his side in public for 390 days and then roll over and lay on the other side for 40 more days. He had to cook his food over human feces - well, until God recanted and allowed him to cook it over cow poop. And that is just the start. Ezekiel had it rough. But he was God's man. He loved God and he loved God's people and he was willing to suffer so that God's grace could come and bring repentance and restoration to people near to God in religious behavior but far from God i...

Church services are a lot of work to pull off. It doesn't matter if you attend a mega-church with a disneyland like children's ministry and performing monkeys onstage or a rural church of 100 people. Unless you attend a house church in your own home with no other families with kids, you will probably be confronted with the need at some point to recruit people to help you pull everything together for a church gathering. When I came on board with The Journey in 2006, I was immediately hit with the need to recruit enough volunteers to staff a new service (we were, at that point, moving from three to four services). I had a leadership team I was already developing - but I needed around 40 warm, caring, entertaining, and energetic bodies - and I needed them quickly. The problem was compounded by the fact that I didn't even have enough people to cover all the needs at the other services. So, I put in a request to God. I asked him, if he wouldn't mind, slowing down the gr...

Yes, I know I haven't finished my series on volunteer recruitment, envisioning, and leadership - but this was too good to pass up. In the 1960s, Stanford conducted some very famous psychological experiments dealing with temptation. They put kids into a room and put a marshmallow in front of them. They were told they could eat it whenever they were ready, but if they waited for the researcher, they would get second marshmallow. Studies have shown that the kids who resisted the temptation had a higher reported rate of success as adults - because they were willing delay gratification and suffer discomfort in order to turn the situation to their advantage. I believe there are numerous applications for this as we consider the gospel, but for now, let's just look at the video. It is hilarious. Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo .

I didn't always work for the church. I consider myself, in many ways, the accidental pastor. I set out to become a high school English teacher who would move into administration. Well, kind of. I didn't really set out to do anything - but that is another story. But I did land in education and I spent 17 years working with kids or with those who work with kids - as a teacher (public and private), a board member, and a principal. During this time, I worked mostly with employees, not volunteers. There are advantages to leading employees - they pretty much have to perform in order to receive a pay check. There is an internal, intrinsic motivation to move the organization toward success - "If I don't do my job, I will lose my job." There was also a freedom to lead in that environment because there was a stated agreement - you are being paid to do your job and I am being paid to make sure you are doing it well. If I push you to improve in that environment, it i...

I was leafing through one of my old notebooks today (one of the tedious benefits of unpacking after a move - I have had to look at everything I haven't thrown away and evaluate it again before stuffing it in a box or on a shelf where it won't be looked again for the next five years). This notebook was a loose, unintentional chronicle of my early days with the Journey. (Not the point of this post - but what a great ride the last three years have been. I have been destroyed and rebuilt by the gospel in ways I could never have imagined four years ago - Thank you Father God!) Now the point of this post: I took notes from my first Leadership Summit in 2006. I had not read Courageous Leadership and was still pridefully disdainful of all things "seeker friendly" and "Willow." I have since repented. I take notes in a strange way, I suppose - I doodle more than manuscript. And I found in my notes a picture of a bucket with a crack with a simple phrase: Vision L...

A good friend and gifted pastor, Jonathan McIntosh, recently launched a new web endeavor called ReThink Mission. JMac is one of the most missionally minded dudes I know and he has incredible insight into how to engage culture for the advancement of the gospel. So, do yourself a favor, and visit his new website. He is updating it daily and is landing some killer interviews and insightful topics. If you are a church planter, church leader, wannabe church planter or leader, take some time and read it. Rethink Mission

I gave a message at the Journey Metro East a couple months ago about men, women, and dating. I spoke from 1 Peter 3 and sought to reverse engineer what the Bible has to say about successful marriages and apply it to dating (since the Bible is completely silent on the issue of dating). I try to prepare every message with God's help (and if it weren't for him, I would have nothing of worth to offer - ever), but even so God doesn't tell me the topics to preach on very often. That said, this was one of those sermons that I had to preach. I wasn't planning to - I had a great sermon on what it meant to be the covenant people of God ready to go - it was already outlined and submitted to the Journey teaching team for pre-preaching discussion. I was pretty happy with myself - for once, I was ahead of the game. Then one morning, about a week before delivering that sermon, I woke up in a fog having a conversation with myself. The words followed me up out of mists of slumberland...