I’m a friend of many women who have had to wrestle through trying to discern their calling into pastoral ministry. Discerning this isn’t easy no matter your sex, but when you are a women its infinitely more difficult. I’m one who advocates for women being able to serve in any capacity in the local church. It’s funny, for readers of mine who weren’t brought up in church, they probably find it strange that I even have to say that. But, the church has a long history of arguing about this very topic. That said, I totally understand the complexity of the issue. I was raised in a tradition that believed women were not t0 teach or be involved in leadership. Well, that’s not totally true....Read More →
Category: Book Reviews
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December 13, 2011
Junia is Not Alone
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July 28, 2011
The Necessity of Community for Witness
In light of my post yesterday on the problem of isolation and individualism in our culture I offer you this short expert from Darrel Guder’s excellent book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church. This is an older book (published in 2000), but I read this in 2001 and it single-handedly recalibrated my understanding of the nature and purpose of the church. It is probably one of the most formative books I’ve read over the years. The invitation to respond to the gospel, however, must naturally lead to incorporation into the community of witness. It is clear from the New Testament that God’s Spirit forms a community of people for mission. God’s call has always formed a people, a community, within which God was known, worshiped,...Read More →
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February 28, 2011
Submission in Leadership
One of the major early themes in The Imitation of Christ is that of humility. I will be honest. I am not a big fan of humility. Humility is one of those things that constantly seems desperately out of grasp. Just when I feel like I am getting close to understanding it and getting it, it moves further away from me. As a pastor however, I know its the one thing that I need the most. It is the one thing that fights against most pastor’s greatest temptation: Pride. It is a strange thing that pastors and leaders struggle so much with pride. We are supposed to be the ones who are most grounded in the scriptures, grace and truth. I think therein lies the...Read More →
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January 25, 2011
Recovering God’s Story in Worship
From Robert Webber’s Book, Ancient-Future Worship In the postmodern world of violence and uncertainty, there is a great need to recover the Christus Victor theme that God in Christ has defeated all the powers of evil, that he has conclusively abolished sin, death, and all that is evil in the world, and that because of his death and resurrection, he will return for his final victory over all that is evil and set up his kingdom and reign over all the earth. The church is called to witness to this truth by its very existence and in its worship to remember these past saving events of God in history that assures the new world we anticipate. Definitely a book worth reading…
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January 1, 2011
Top 5 Books of 2010
This has not been my best reading year in terms of number of books. However, I was able to read a few great books that are worth mentioning. So, I proudly present to you my top five books of 2010. Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ Eugene Peterson I love Eugene Peterson’s writing. I consider him one of my “author mentors”. I rarely have anything bad to say about anything he has written and this is no exception. In fact, I think that this is his best book yet. Yes, that is saying a lot. This book is essentially an exposition of Ephesians and he offers an stunningly realistic look at the reality of the thing we call “church.” I read this...Read More →
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December 7, 2010
Give the Gift of Hope For Christmas
I was part of an awesome book project called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and Everything in Between). It was edited by my good friend JR Woodward and was published on Ecclesia Press. This book is a collection of a lot (I forget the number!) of short essays on the good news. The great part is that each author wrote their chapter as if it were being submitted to their local paper. I wrote mine to the people in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I focused it on global nature of the gospel because I am convinced that suburban folks tend to get lost in their own world and so dang focused on ourselves. I wanted to show us suburbanites that while...Read More →
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December 6, 2010
ReWork: Creating Leadership Culture
Earlier this year I wrote a series of posts called “Cultivating a Leadership Culture.” You can read this series in it’s entirety here. That series developed out of the nine years that I have been learning along the way as Pastor at The Well. I love the challenge and opportunity of creating community and culture, especially in the area of leadership. I’ve become somewhat of a leadership junkie and nerd and I have grown to love the sociology of the leadership task. That’s why the book ReWork by Jason Fried and David Heinemier Hansson, founders of 37signals, was such a refreshing book. This book is essentially a series of short reflections and essays on creating a healthy leadership culture. It seems to me that in...Read More →
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December 3, 2010
Finding Out Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
I’ve been reading a great book by Margaret J Wheatley called, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. I love learning as much as I can about leadership and healthy organizational development. The best way to describe this book is with the word “rich.” It’s really, really helpful and she’s putting words to some things I’ve been feeling for a long time. Here is one of my favorite quotes so far: “We act as if humans are motivated by selfishness, greed, and fear. That we exist as individuals, free of the obligation of interdependence. That hierarchy and bureaucracy are the best forms of organizing. That efficiency is the premier measure of value. That people work best under controls and regulations. That diversity is a...Read More →
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August 4, 2010
And: The Gathered and Scattered Church
A few weeks ago the book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church showed up on my front step (that’s because I bought it of course). This book was written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay of Adullam Church in Denver, CO. I was interested in this book for a few reasons. First of all, we use the phrase “shaping and sending” in our congregation as a short description of what we are doing. I respect (from afar) what these guys are doing so I was hoping this book would be a bit of the struggles and successes they’ve had in trying to work this out in the context of their community. I wasn’t disappointed. I really, really appreciated hearing their story. They didn’t approach the...Read More →
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July 21, 2010
ViralHope Video
This year I was part of a book project called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs. You can get it off the Ecclesia Press Website or Amazon. This is the description of the book: “In ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs, fifty authors take on the task of sharing the good news for their city, together weaving a beautiful tapestry of the gospel in all its depth and complexity. These essays reveal how the gospel lives and breathes in neighborhoods around the world.” EcclesiaPress just published a video about the book which includes some of the centent from the book as the content of the video. Here it is…
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April 26, 2010
ViralHope & What is the Good News to Suburbia?
I am honored to have been able to contribute to a really exciting book project called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Suburbs. This is exciting for a few reasons, it is the first time I’ve been published so that’s pretty fun. But more importantly, its a a fantastic book and that goes well beyond my small contribution. Fifty pastors and practitioners each wrote short essays on the “good news” of the gospel. The assignment was to write something that would be publishable in the writers local newspaper. The entries are short and make for some very deep, light reading. The book was edited by JR Woodward and published by Ecclesia Press, the new publishing arm of our church network, The Ecclesia Network....Read More →
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March 25, 2010
David Bosch on The Church and the World
David Bosch outlines five important characteristics of the church’s relationship to the world in his landmark book “Transforming Mission.” This stuff is so fantastic (and I think important) that I am just going to copy what he wrote here. Also, if you haven’t read this book. Get it and spend the next three years slowing reading through it. It’s that good. The church cannot be viewed as the ground of mission, it cannot be considered the goal of mission either – certainly not the only goal. The church should continually be aware of its provisional character. The church is not the kingdom of God. The church is “on earth the seed and the beginning of that kingdom” and “the sign and instrument of the reign of God that is to come. The church...Read More →
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February 25, 2010
Letters and Papers from Prison – Bonhoeffer
One of the great things about being at the Ecclesia Network last week was the challenging teaching from Dallas Willard. He really pushed me on some of my thinking and caused me to think outside of my normal boxes. This was refreshing! One of the biggest critiques I have of many of the pastors conferences out there these days is that its just the same people saying the same things. I guess this isn’t really mean to call out those who are on the speaking circuit. I’m more critical of those who attend every conference on the circuit. While I like to be critical of the speaking/conferences I realized again last week that my reading patterns can be accused of the same things. I can...Read More →
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November 18, 2009
Three Questions Worth Spending Significant Time Contemplating
In his excellent book The Monkey and the Fish, Dave Gibbons asks three questions as he talks about the massive shift that is going on in our world. How are we to figure out how to navigation this rapidly changing world as followers of Jesus and as faith communities? Alan Roxburgh has referred to the kind of change we are in as “discontinuous change.” This phrase is defined by Webster as, “Non-incremental, sudden change that threatens existing or traditional authority or power structure, because it drastically alters the way things are currently done or have been done for years.” In light of this, Dave Gibbons brings up three excellent questions that I think we would do well to spend a lot of time pondering the...Read More →
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November 17, 2009
Newbigin on Leadership
I read Lesslie Newbigin’s chapter on Leadership from his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society once every few months. It’s that good. Here is an excellent excerpt: “The task of ministry is to lead the congregation as a whole in a mission to the community as a whole, to claim its whole public life, as well as the personal lives of all its people, for God’s rule. It means equipping all the members of the congregation to understand and fulfill their several roles in this mission through their faithfulness in their daily work. It means training and equipping them to be active followers of Jesus in His assault on the principalities and powers which he has disarmed on his cross. And it means sustaining...Read More →
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October 20, 2009
What Story Are You Living? Reflections on Don Miller’s Book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”
Like many others, I read Donald Miller’s book, “Blue Like Jazz” in about three sittings. That’s not only cause it’s an easy read, but mostly because he’s a great story teller. I enjoyed Don’s first book a lot (I can call him Don, after all, like everyone else who reads his book, I feel like I know him). But, I’ll admit I mostly enjoyed Blue Like Jazz, it wasn’t too life changing or transforming for me. But in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he really struck a chord with me. In fact, I was hooked on the first page where he wrote, If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for a few years to get it,...Read More →
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October 9, 2009
This is Salvation.
I am just getting into the book Sin and Salvation from Lesslie Newbigin. It’s not one of his more famous books but I recently heard it described as the most important book that he’s written. He actually wrote in response to a need when he was a missionary in India. He wrote it for “village teachers of elementary grade who – although without training – have to bear a heavy share of the responsibility for the pastoral care of several thousand village congregations in the Tamil country.” Upon hearing that, I decided I needed to read it. Also, it’s an old book, written in 1956. (The copy i am reading looks about that old). So you know its good (be sure to read that last sentence...Read More →
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May 23, 2009
Pastors in their Offices
“The initial locus and primary focus of [pastors] work is in their offices. Time-management studies again and again have confirmed that pastors invest a large percentage of their time in their offices – in meetings, in doing administrative work, and in taking care of administrative details…Pastors continue to spend so much time their offices because it is a familiar and habitual behavior pattern that has been nurtured and reinforced for many, many years. And the foundation underlying that behavior pattern is an understanding of the nature of leadership that is no longer helpful.” - Kennon Callahan, Effective Church Leadership Of course. I wrote this post from my office (which is actually a starbucks).
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May 21, 2009
The Furious Longing of God
I’m almost embrassed to say that I have never actually read a book by Brennan Manning. From what I gather a lot of his books are the same lyrics but just to a different tune. If that’s true, its just fine with me because he’s writing about something that seeminly takes a lifetime to grasp. And, if I can summarize this book (The Furious Longing of God) in one sentance, its this: God loves you like crazy. To me, that’s one message that we just can’t hear enough and can’t be reminded of enough. Someone, i forget who, once said that “Sometimes we need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed.” Brennan Manning seems to take this advice and I’m thankful. God....Read More →
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May 21, 2009
What Role Does Confession Play in Your Life?
I’ve been working with someone in our church to take a long hard look at the culture and practices of we’ve developed in our church around the issue of spiritual formation, spiritual direction and discipleship. In this, I’ve been doign some reading about how other denominations and traditions have approached this topic throughout the history of the church. One book that has been immensely helpful is Gary Moon and David Benner’s book Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls. In this book, they give an overview of how spiritual direction is approached from different traditions. One thing that has surprised me has been how almost every tradition has a strong emphasis on some form of confession. Now, this probably shouldn’t have surprised me. But, its no secret...Read More →
