I was reading an article on Christianity Today and came across my exact understanding of small groups laid out in a really simple few paragraphs:
Okay, let’s all say it together: “We don’t want to be a church with small groups, but a church of small groups.” Everybody says it. Well, everybody but Mecklenburg.
We have found [...]
I am continually trying to work out how to better think through and organize our community in a natural and semi-organic way so that we can best live out or mission and our values.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this “organizing for mission” concept and as part of my thinking I brainstormed a [...]
A few months ago I made an early announcement of a seminar we are hosting at The Well on the topic of the missional church in suburbia. We are honored to be able to bring in Al Hsu. Al is the author of the book, The Suburban Christian. I read this book last year and [...]
From an article on The Ooze:
Our house church has been thriving now for over 2 years and I can honestly say I’ve not once had to preach a sermon on tithing or giving, and yet our small gathering gave thousands of dollars to the help the poor in our community last year. In fact, [...]
At The Well, we’ve been studying the book of Acts. Its been a very, very formative and challenging book for us to work through. For me, there have been four ways that my life, and I think our life, has been challenged so far.
Here are four movements that I’ve seen:
From Individual to [...]
I was thinking Sunday morning as I was getting ready for church. I do that sometimes… think, that is. Anyways, we’ve had a number of new people visiting our community recently. There is a general theme going on with their story. Many of these folk have come from either not [...]
Meetings. We typically don’t like them. In fact, most of us hate them. This is true for many reasons. I’ve blogged about this before.
At The Well we’ve been on a journey to figure out how to best form our meet time so that our time is well spent. I’ll be honest, [...]
I am a part-time pastor. Well, I am paid part time to be a pastor.
Many people have asked me over e-mail or in person, how this part time in two worlds thing works. In case you are new here and have no clue what I am talking about, I am [...]
I know this is early, but with vacations in the summer, I’m trying to get the word our early.
So here it goes…On August 8-9, 2008, my church The Well, in partnership with the Ecclesia Network and C4ML at Biblical Seminary, will be hosting a one-day conference with Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian [...]
Easter Weekend at The Well is fast becoming one of my favorite weekends of the year. Not only do we get to remember and celebrate Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection but we get to do it together. I have come to believe that our service tonight (Good Friday) is our most worshipful and [...]
For whatever reason, we have a lot of people who visit our community on Sunday mornings. This is all fine and dandy. But, a thought occurred to me recently. I often want to tell those visitors that you can’t judge draw final conclusions about The Well (or any church for that matter) based on [...]
Reading this post by JR Woodword got me thinking. We are studying through the book of Acts together as a community. We’re in chapter 4 this week so we’re still fairly early on in the narrative. If you’ve read or studied the book of Acts you know that it is addressed to “Theophilus.” [...]
I am sicker than a dog, so this will be short. But my sermon from last week is up on our church’s website here. Except for a few others, I haven’t enjoyed preaching a text much more than I did this one.
I’ve been studying Acts 2:42-47 for the past week. I’m realizing that I could preach this passage 20 weeks straight and wouldn’t run out of material. So, I am trying to narrow my sermon down to the thing that I think is most pertinent for our specific community. While this likely won’t [...]
For the last three months a team of people have been driving down to Philadelphia every monday night to serve and get to know the homeless population down there. Just last week we even brought a few of friends we’ve gotten to know well back to our building and had dinner with them. [...]
I was looking at my bookshelf the other day and realized that this year was a fairly good reading year for me. So, I started trying to remember what I read and how I liked what I read. So, I’ve decided to share that here. I was going to post my thoughts [...]
I’ve not ever had someone else post on my blog before. But there is a first time for everything. Shanna Cummings is a member of The Well and we had some neat discussion around the topic of the presence of God. So, I asked her if she wanted to write something to [...]
This is my sermon manuscript from Sunday, December 10. I had the daunting task of preaching Exodus 35-40 this week. While the text looked to be a bore, it turned out to be a very, very fun text to study and preach. As always, this manuscript is only a glimpse of what [...]
Intro: Below is the sermon manuscript that I preached on August 10, 2007 after my wife and I and our new son Mason got home from Guatemala. I meant to post this a long time ago, but I had to make a few edits. I didn’t really make all the edits and I [...]
My friend Tim from The Well has been doing some reflecting on his experiences of recently serving the homeless down in the city. Anna from our church leads a group of people down the Love Park area each Monday night. I went down a few weeks ago and look forward to going again.
I [...]