spreading the fame

I was in a conversation with a middle-aged lay youth leader last week. He has been serving in his church with his wife for years. He has teenagers himself. He really cares for the teenagers and goes out of his way to love them and connect them with Christ, but he still appeared a bit […]

Build it and they will come: Changing the way we do gospel ministry Changing the way we do ministry towards a gospel-centered focus is not easy. It is a paradigm shift from the cry of our culture. Or cultural proverb says, “Build it and they will come.” There is some truth to this Field of […]

What is discipleship? And what does it look like? This is a good question. There are about as many favors of definitions for discipleship as there are suckers at the candy store. To be verbosely pithy my response to what discipleship is NOT is that discipleship is followership. As Paul in his simple yet divinely […]

Sarah and I traveled to the Congo this summer where we were involved in running youth training seminars and connecting with church and youth leaders to try and get them thinking about youth issues, Christian camping and developing youth ministry training. This is my first visit to the Congo (my wife grew up there) and […]

August 14-15 A Congo Camp. For two days we are holding a half-day retreat for youth. We have about 20 youth and 20 adult leaders that are attending. This gives the leaders attending our seminars a practical application to what they are learning. Each of the adult leaders has a responsibility: teaching, leading worship, prayer, […]

August 11-13 The seminars begin. And we are off… So we had about 49 people the first day. Many more than we expected. We had a wonderful discussion about the biblical basis of youth ministry and the ground level instructions on how to structure a camp/retreat for youth. It was so wonderful to see such […]

August 10 Dust. There is dust everywhere here in Bukavu. Since it is dry season the the vehicles and people walking about stirs up clouds of red clay dust. Sarah and I walked through the city markets and streets of Bukavu. We are full of dust. People were selling anything from bait fish to sandals, […]

Early Sunday morning we got back into town. We are tired. I didn’t want to leave the ministry in the Dominican Republic. Personally, I wanted to adopt at least 5 kids from the villages or orphanages we visited. I am so proud of our team for the spiritual initiative and giftedness they pour out on […]