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 that small groups are very much needed by those who need small groups. Read that sentence again slowly. The truth is that many do not need them, and may not be best served by them. We initially rebuffed this idea. Somehow it was sacrilegious to even verbalize the thought. In fact, small groups can become just as much a sacred cow to the contemporary church as Sunday school...Read More →
Category: The Well
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May 13, 2008
A Church of Small Groups? Or Just Community?
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May 12, 2008
Developing Missional Values, Programs, Budgets, Goals
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 generalized flow of thought for how we develop programs, ideas and even budgets. In fact, what you will see below came mostly from a conversation around budgets in our leadership team. We were working through some questions such as: What is a good use of the churches finances? What is a poor use of the churches finances, where do we prioritize our finances at the church? How do we...Read More →
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May 9, 2008
Missional in Suburbia Seminar in the Philly Suburbs – Time to Register
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 found it really, really helpful. Al not only gets the missional church stuff but also really gets the under the surface issues around the development of suburbia and the calleges that the church faces in this context. So, get off your over busy, suburban, individualized, consumer-driven butts and sign up for this seminar! The seminar is August 9, 2008 from 9am – 4pm. On Friday night the 8th we’ll be...Read More →
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May 9, 2008
Giving is Only as Strong as Your Mission…
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, we’re on track to double last year’s amount, and I’ve never had to beg or plead for our members to dig deep or give more. Why is this? What’s the big difference? The simple fact is that our people can tangibly connect every dollar and penny they give with how it directly assists people in need. We keep nothing for ourselves and give all of the money we receive away...Read More →
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May 7, 2008
Four Missional Movements for the Suburban Church
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 Communal As individuals we are important, very, very important. But we need to continually celebrate the individual but we must do it within the context of community. Our world is so individualized that we’ve lost a sense that there is something greater than ourselves. In our culture, this is a challenge because we are so good at isolating ourselves and disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world. Our priorities can...Read More →
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May 5, 2008
The Consuming Christian and the Consuming Church
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 being in church for a long period of time or suffering (their words) through being part of a church that is not very life-giving. At The Well, we typically do a great job of scaring off chronic church hoppers because we’re a little, uh… different. If our ugly warehouse doesn’t care them off, something else is bound to. But, when people who are Christians come into our community, we want to be sure to let...Read More →
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April 30, 2008
Church Leadership Meetings: Is it Possible Not to Hate Them?
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’ve gone back and forth between loathing out meetings and loving our meetings. Since we’re working in an atypical model with two part-time paid pastors, its a little more difficult to manage expectations and responsibilities and maintain communication as a team. Right now we’re only able to meet once a month so our time together needs to be well spent. In the past we’ve struggled with a number of things. The biggest struggle...Read More →
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April 28, 2008
On Being a Part-Time Pastor…
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 part-time as lead pastor at The Well and I also run my own freelance web design business. Giving proper attention to the two isn’t easy and its something that I am learning to do better and better. As far as being part-time at my church, I love it. As you can imagine, its not easy. But, its so rewarding. It not only frees my up to be more of a “normal person” with a...Read More →
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March 28, 2008
The Church & Suburbia Seminar with Al Hsu
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 around the topic of Suburbia and the mission of the Church. Register online here. EVENT SUMMARY “God always shows up in the most God-forsaken places.” - Alan Roxburgh In some ways, it doesn’t get any more God-forsaken than suburban America. This seminar will take a look at two important topics: Suburbia and the Church. For some people, there is a sentiment that its impossible to really be the church...Read More →
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March 21, 2008
Easter at The Well
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 best worship gathering of the year. Mostly, that’s because I don’t do much for it. It’s totally lay-led (for lack of better term) and is usually very reflective and meditative. This year those who are sharing will be focusing on four different perspectives of the resurrection. If you are in the area and are looking for a place to worship this weekend, feel free to join us. Here’s what we’ve got going...Read More →
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March 3, 2008
Don’t
JudgeDraw Final Conclusions On A Church Based on One VisitFor 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 one Sunday morning visit. A few reasons: We have a team of people who preach. I preach maybe twice a month. Because of this team approach to preaching, you can’t come once and draw specific conclusions about the preaching style of our community. I am more emotional/big picture. Gary, our other pastor, is more of an intellectual and “rubber meets the road” kind of guy. David, a seminarian, preaches about once...Read More →
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January 27, 2008
Dear Theopilus?
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.” Luke is writing to this person (whoever he is) and sharing with him the stories of the early church. So, like I said, this got me thinking. If Luke were to write narrative about our local church or better yet the group of local churches in lower Bucks County. What would he say? As Willimon pointed out, “Theophilus will be told stories of people who overcome personal anxiety, who found security in...Read More →
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January 22, 2008
Sermon on Acts 2:41-47
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.
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January 18, 2008
Leadership in Acts 2?
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 make it into my sermon , I had some interesting reflections on the leadership situation in this passage. (I guess you can consider this a sermon outtake). So, think about this for a second, if there are 12 apostles and there were 3000 people total, we now have 12 groups of 250. Hmmm… likely this isn’t how it worked since we see that they met in homes. Let’s say then that they split...Read More →
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December 19, 2007
Anybody got a van?
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. This team is building some great relationships and providing a very tangible, real expression of the Kingdom of God. Here’s the catch: We’ve been driving down personal vehicles each week which not only causes some liability issues but also is a waste beacuse we are using extra gas. And, we’ve got a bunch of people going who really can’t afford the gas each week. So, anyone know of anyone who is giving...Read More →
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December 13, 2007
Books of 2007: Missional Theology
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 all at once, but when i was done writing I had six pages of text! That’s way too much to read so I am going to post them one section at a time. Book Reviews to come in the next few days: Missional Theology General Theology Church Leadership Pastoral Leadership General Leadership (Business / Fiction Books) This first section is what I read in the area of Missional Theology. The Open Secret by...Read More →
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December 12, 2007
Guest Blogger: God is Here
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 share with you all. Here is her gift to you. Leave her more comments than you leave me! God is here. Let it ROCK your world. God is here. A commitment to intimacy. It does not have to be something I feel. It IS something I trust. It is a trust that I rest my faith on. God is here. It is true. So true, that the full comprehension of the truth, must...Read More →
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December 10, 2007
God is Here. Let it Rock Your World.
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 I actually said. I leave my notes a lot. But, it should give you a good idea of what I said. The title of this post comes from someone in my community who, after the sermon, said I should have titled it, “God is here. Let it rock your world.” Hope you enjoy. Don’t feel sorry for me. Sure this text is filled with a bunch of boring facts. Its about the building...Read More →
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November 12, 2007
An Adoption Sermon
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 am fairly sure that what I actually said is different from what I wrote here but the general idea is here (I never follow my manuscript very closely) . I would link to the audio but it just figures that this was the week that our recorder decided to take a vacation. I hope you find this enjoyable. I am going to print it out to put in our adoption box that...Read More →
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October 18, 2007
I Can’t Hide the Homeless Anymore.
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 have a bunch of things stirring in my soul from that one evening. The biggest thing that night did to me was that it made me deal with a very real problem. No longer can I ignore it. I’ve tried to push the fact that there are hundreds of homeless men, women and children 25 miles from where I sit on this nice comfortable couch from Ikea while typing on my...Read More →
