Knowing and Doing

Interesting that I would be reading this yellow pages of a book entitled Family Ministry and that there would a big section on stress in families that really caught my attention.  A good question is posed to the family….what does the family value the most????  You and should carefully answer this and come up with several answers.  If it is the Lord, then what are our families doing to show that value.  Are we teaching about how to have a relationship with God to our children?  Are we keeping our relationship with God healthy and vibrant?  Marriage stress…parenting stress…work stress……Instant stress as we think of what to do. If it is education, we work hard at helping our children with their homework, communicating with their teachers, or some even homeschool their children in order to spend a great amount of time educating their children themselves.  We even tell our kids that “this is their job they are to focus on”.  But what if a child comes h...

I enjoy reading books. Telephone Baptist Church has a wonderful library with a wonderful librarian that keeps everything organized and in most cases current. Lately, I found one of the current books written by a well-known Southern Baptist pastor in 2005 that would be similar reading to The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. I saw that I could tackle this book in a week or so, and found that I was the first one to check it out. Oh boy!! Until I got to the first chapter or "principle" if you will. I have found that throughout the years, I have tried to train my senses to throw up serious theological flags if I hear or read something against God's Word. In some instances I have been successful at it, then at other times, things can whiz by me or completely take me surprise. I am still working on that!! The place I read when I slammed on the brakes is: "Three days after the Crucifixion, He rose from the grave. Today He lives within those who pray a simple pray...

I must admit that through the years, I have collected many books to define what church is. The User Friendly Church, the Purpose Driven Church, Simple Church, recently Transformational Church, and many more. All telling us what the author's view of church from Scripture and how they relate to that view. It obviously was a defining moment in their life as they have written a book on those moments of knowledge and understanding. Gene Mim's writes in his book, The Kingdom-Focused Church, that the definition of a Kingdom-Focused Church is: (drum roll...please) It is a church that exists to transform unbelievers into Christlike believers and mature these believers into kingdom multipliers of the message of Christ. What activites of the church can you pull out of this definition? I can pull out presenting the gospel message to unbelievers, transforming unbelievers by teaching and preaching the Word, mature believers by understanding of Scripture and spiritual biblical discipline...

Have you ever heard, "We just do this around here" or "we can't do that" or "we don't that for a reason"? I have heard this in churches I have served more than I have heard...."GO FOR IT!" You don't know how much time I have spent over the years thinking and praying and reading and thinking and praying and reading over how to accomplish spiritual growth, making disciples and multiplying them, and leading the church to be "missional" in all that we do. Many books that other pastors that have written about their success at their church REALLY only works at their church. It's like a chemistry that is put together with community, culture, willingness and with passion. So what works for one, under that pastor and leadership, in that community, may or may not work for another. (I know they are all to work the same, Scripture says so..:)) So here is how it may or may not work: Church has it's identity, country club o...

Look, I have to vent!!! Recently I have several friends in ministry that are pastors that are leaving a church that have blamed them for "NOT growing" the church. Attendance is starting to decline after they have been there for over two years and some church members either starve them out by cutting their pay or start making negative comments to other church members about their performance (in other words, they arent happy and they will get vocal). Where is the passage that the pastor is supposed to PHYSICALLY grow the church? Someone please show me. My heart breaks for these godly men that spend their weeks preparing the Word of God to preach and teach. They spend time in prayer. They have office hours so that they can be available to answer the phone when people need their pastor. They have sweet wives and children that they sacrifice their time with, in order to serve God and their church. I read in Ephesians 4 that "equipping the saints" is the priority. ...

So recently, I have been diving into discipleship and gettting to the heart of the matter in the church and the responsibility of the pastor. (It helps when you do research with Barna's Growing True Disciples and Bill Hull's The Disciple Making Pastor for your doctoral work) Here is the crisis: What kind of people is the church producing today? The American church (claims to be 350,000 evangelical churches) is weak, self-indulgent, superficial and has been transformed by culture. That's it; plain and simple. In the part of the NE Texas where I live, there are 7 evangelical churches for 3500 people in population and the church that I am called as pastor roughly has 125 in attendance every Lord's Day for worship. But the trend is several people dying each year that equals the number we have join either by conversion and baptism or by transfer. This staggering fact ought to alarm us!!! We are not reproducing......we are trying to multiply!! If we multiply, we are bei...

I have done some research on the history of Christianity and baptism wanting to understand what was taking place after Acts and the Epistles of Paul (third century church) : NOTE: Remember in the book of Acts, we read that converts were being baptized immediately. According to the History of Christianity written by Justo Gonzalez, many people who were converted at this time were either those who lived Judiasm all their life and had some basic framework of living for God, or others that were from the Gentile population that had some background in worshipping many gods. The Gentile population grew quickly in churches as they were starting across the land. It was vital that as people were converted, a period of preparation, instruction, and trial took place before baptism. Baptism took place once a year. It took place on Easter Sunday. The "catechumans" were the baptismal, newly converted, candidates that went through intensive training and shortly before their baptism they...