I was well into my twenties before I began to discover the value of written prayers. Now I regularly use various prayer books of the church to direct my own time with God...

I had the great honor of reading the first draft of Stanley Hauerwas’ upcoming memoir, Hannah’s Child, over a year ago. It was surreal for me to read what will no doubt be a defining work from one of my favorite theologians (and biggest personal influences)—in Microsoft Word on my computer?!

I have told many times in sermons that there are more Psalms of lament than there are of celebration. But to recite them one after another, you really FEEL the lament. And I must say, I was overwhelmed by how many more words of complaint/grief/sorrow there were than words of comfort...

Was John Wesley a hypocrite? Hardly. That’s why in the American church we produce so few disciples—because we assume that anything we can’t do easily must be hypocritical...

Either way, the man was no machine. He didn’t preach the life of holiness and sanctification because it came easy. But he never stopped preaching—that sense of prophetic compulsion drove him to continue to seek and to teach the life “made perfect in love.”

When I first started reading any actual Wesley for myself, I had no taste for him. He seemed austere and humorless to me, even severe (and even now, I have never heard anybody accuse of him of being a funny guy)...

Jesus wanders into their fish and pity party, seemingly an ideal opportunity to bring some of that thunder and lightning and post-resurrection zaniness to His doubting followers. It seemed like an ideal time to morph into Sinai-form like He did on the mount of transfiguration and say “How do you like me NOW, disciples?”

The descent into hell has tremendous implications for how Christians live their lives. The reason that we are so hell bent on not giving up on people no matter what they have done or how many times they have done it is not because Christians are naïve...

Pilate’s inclusion in the creed draws me to repentance from my unwitting compliance in a world that rejects God. He also reminds me of the political consequences of following Jesus...

The suffering of death marks those of us even who have staked our claim on resurrection hope. I had a series of troubling, vivid dreams as of late about departed loved ones...

The creed is admittedly scant when it comes to providing details about the life of Jesus. Which makes it all the more fascinating that in such a sparse account one of the few images chosen is that of the Jesus who suffered...

I look to Mary not for redemption but as an exemplar of what a yielded life looks like, as a woman who physically embodied the kingdom of God by virtue of simple obedience...

To have Jesus conceived by the Holy Spirit without remembering He is born of Mary is to embrace a spirituality that lacks particularity, place, context...

To attempt to understand anything meaningful about the life of Jesus apart from the third person of the Trinity would be…well, inconceivable...

Here are 5 practical ideas to help you embed the spiritual disciplines into every aspect of your ministry...

This whole exercise has pushed me further to think about the nature of my own faith, which by no means seems irrational to me, but is decidedly trans-rational...

It might sound strange to admit as a Pastor that it took me many years to have a sense of what it means for Jesus to be at the absolute center of Christian faith the way He is in the creed...

Yet beyond all of this, there are those of us who have caught a glimpse of a Jesus that could not be easily labeled or glibly dismissed...

The greatest threat to the gospel in the first century was this kind of body denying religion, wherein God is comfortably confined to a place called heaven...

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m giving up my little black book. Names and numbers are attached, secret rendezvous are revealed. I plead guilty to all charges...

A day of community and good work thaws my icy soul, so that I’m aware of the paradoxical tenderness of the hunter like a low-grade headache. I feel the tenderness creep in as I go through the day...

This is the third time in the last year our church has embarked on a week of night and day, communal prayer. And of all of them, my time at 24/7 was decidedly my worst. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed Wednesday morning...

What makes it interesting is that their acknowledgment of evil and suffering never overrode their fundamental belief in God as the maker...

I do think the way I believe in God is fundamentally Pentecostal. That’s a way of saying my belief is more a product of being assaulted by God than convinced of God...

Like so many of the women and men who have said this creed before me, my belief in God is much more fundamental, even more primal, than many of these debates suggest...

Over against the rationalistic terms that came to dominate conversations surrounding Christian faith in the 20th century, the apostle’s creed concedes nothing to the language of defensibility. Here is a brash, audaciously simple claim that there is no reality, no apologetic, no system more fundamental than God...

When I say the apostle’s creed, I am swept again into the continuity of the Christian gospel. I am reminded that what we are doing as a church is neither novel nor new. The creed reminds me of both the smallness and the grandness of our local church...

I think Christians in America have largely accepted the terms of “freedom of indifference.” We think of freedom as being able to do what we like. Any parameters given to us are casually dismissed as archaic “law,” irrelevant to following Jesus...

Sabbath (or shabbat, translated as "cease and desist") is God's gift to His people in the wilderness. Far from drudgery, Sabbath is a primal gift of God that precedes even the giving of the law...

So my challenge for day one is simply this: CHANGE THE QUESTION. I begin with the presumption that the first and most overarching question of wilderness time is "how long do I have to be here?"...

To know that God has led me into this place of the wilderness for a time of training and testing - not a time of judgment - is hard to understand...

We think of the wilderness as a horror to avoid, when in fact God says make sure to pick up some souvenirs to remind you of how He met us there...

Looking back from the wilderness, the closest thing the people of God had to certainty was in the relentless, unwavering cruelty of Pharoah...

“Don’t look at me, just look at Jesus.” We’ve all used some variation of that phrase before. It sounds very humble, even pious. And we certainly mean it with all sincerity! Unfortunately, it’s not actually possible...

While many Christians have accepted a false choice between prayer and justice, they are inseparable in Scripture and Christian tradition...

While many Christians have accepted a false choice between prayer and justice, they are inseparable in Scripture and Christian tradition...

Lurking beneath the calm surface of quaint traditions, the Gospel texts themselves present a more apocalyptic side of resurrection...

There is only one virtue left for people in our part of the world. We are notoriously squeamish about being to concrete about what is right and wrong, not wishing to absolutize anything too strongly. The one thing we consider virtuous is sincerity, being “true to yourself"...

As global Pentecostalism continues to reshape the character of Christianity (second in size now only to Catholicism, and rapidly gaining), it is not surprising that the shape of corporate worship is transformed as well....

I made up my mind that if I was going to blog again, it would be for the sake of providing at least some modest counsel with regard to discipleship (thus not so much random blog “rants”). This is really not a rant, at least I don’t think....

Submission is a frightful word to our ears, steeped as we are in the gospel of self. But there is perhaps no more crucial discipline to a life of real gospel liberation, learning to submit to God, leaders, and ultimately to be subject to one another. Rebel against your own individualism, and follow Jesus into a life of self-emptying, God-glorifying service...

There is no instinct more primal within us than our inclination to judge. It takes us all the way back to the sin of the garden of Eden—we want to partake of the knowledge of good and evil and therefore be like God. We never feel more god-like than when we revel in analyzing, parsing and categorizing our friends, co-workers, and Christian community...

I saw a fascinating thing happen from the stage yesterday while preaching at Renovatus. In my preliminary remarks, I made the comment, “Today I am going to preach the sexiest message of the Essentials series, if you are ready.” The congregation laughed, a few cheered, a corporate way of saying “We are ready Pastor—bring it on!” So my next sentence was this: “Today I’m going to preach about giving...

One of the worst tricks I ever saw pulled in my days of youth camp was when some friends of mine sneaked into another boys’ room and staged a sort of demonic break-in. They turned his Bible to page 666, drew pentagrams, and used every Hollywood cliché we had at our disposal to make it seem real. For kids who grew up like we did, these were ideas that were alternately familiar and exotic...

As I’m preaching through the “essential” practices of a life with God, it has caused me to do a lot of reflection on why it is that so many professing Christians remain deeply unfulfilled in their own experience of spiritual disciplines. I very rarely meet a follower of Jesus who seems content that they are praying enough, reading enough, fasting enough, etc. There is always this crushing sense that I should be doing more...

I think I may have already abandoned the generally helpful rule that “Christian” works only as a noun and not as an adjective. But I am a Christian, I am a leader, and I do have a deep conviction that leadership defined in explicitly Christian terms is different than any other kind. Articulating those distinctions is crucial...

Today I went trespassing. On the journey I was heartbroken, frightened and still later, bizarrely inspired. I had just finished up with a productive but very long board meeting. I had been with my colleagues on the Western North Carolina Youth and Christian Education board, and we met for 8 hours. Mondays are never particularly great for me...

So yes, I am one of “those people” who believes that God still speaks using supernatural means. Because there seems to be as much peril as there is promise in this way, many Christians over the centuries have overreacted against abuses of “signs and wonders” (a former professor of mine was fond of saying “abuse always leads to no use)...

I found I have a lot more to say about hearing God. Some of my most lasting, formative spiritual experiences have been similar to the story I shared yesterday—men and women who took the risk of speaking a word from God into my life. Whenever you talk about hearing God, the key word is always risk...

I was about 12 years old, sitting in one of the old padded chairs in the chapel of East Coast Bible College. It was fall convocation, when all the students would gather for a week of prayer, worship, preaching, and two-hour altar services. My father was the president of East Coast for 9 years, during the most formative time of my life. I quite literally grew up on that campus—living there for 4 years, staying with my grandmother up by the lake in the summer...

There is a difference between Christian virtues that are hard fought and well-lived and purely natural dispositions. In my case, I am generally perceived as a charitable person—largely due to a naturally warm, gregarious demeanor. But I am by no means convinced that I am yet formed in the virtue of charity. The truth is, I have been frequently shocked at the raging violence that is still within me...

The last time I blogged was on November 13th of last year. So to put it mildly, it’s been awhile. My delinquency has not been incidental, nor is it entirely due to random busyness. I have been hidden away a lot these last few months, still performing all of the functions that go with my office, but stealing away like a lover to hear the voice of the Lord. I’ve been thinking through priorities, what matters ultimately to my life and calling, and what is simply irrelevant...