Mental Musings

Why would anyone leave the security of a paid position at an established church in order to go into church planting? The obvious and possibly only valid answer is that they are called to it by God. If they are not called by God, they most likely will not last very long. However, there are often other underlying reasons. Some of these could be that: they don't like the design of most established churches, which are based on the traditional model of congregational control, or even worse, committee control with a few key individuals  holding all of the real authority of the church; they fell in love with a hurting community that has no real evangelical church; they are tired of working with a senior pastor that is focused more on caring for the needs of the members rather than reaching the community around them (for reasons why senior pastors do this, see number 1 above); they have a vision for something different than what they are currently doing; they don't fit in wit...

There are many fallacies when it comes to church polity; the operational and governance structure of a church or denomination-also denoting the ministerial structure of the church and the authority relationships thereof. In fact, it could be said that the almost every concept of church polity in the modern church is based on false teachings. The Catholic Church believes that all catholic churches fall under their authority and conversely the authority of the Pope. There begat the hierarchy that ensued flowing from Christ to the Pope to the rest of the authoritative collection. Each subsequent leader is ordained as a spokesperson for the Church, but only the Pope is a spokesperson for God. There is no Biblical evidence that shows this structure existed for the early church. The closest approximation to this design would be during the Jerusalem Council as seen in Acts 15, but it falls far short of initiating a hierarchy in the church or as a denomination. In this setti...

"As it is written: There is no one righteous, no not one." Romans 3:10 Dumpster diving has been very beneficial to artsy people. Finding items that were someone else's trash for free and turning it into a creative piece of art that can then be sold. You can tell a great deal about a person from the things they throw away, but sometimes that info can lead you to some false assumptions. If you were to go through my garbage right now, you would find a bunch of trash from McDonald's, a bunch of beer cans/bottles and those little plastic bottles of 80 proof alcohol, and a bunch of little broken items. Based on our garbage, it would be possible for somebody to put together enough evidence to convince people that we recently threw a wild party serving McDonald's food and lots of alcohol that led to some drunken revelry causing items to get broken in our home. It would be difficult to make that evidence stick, however, since anyone who knows me could tell y...

Too many Christians hide within the confines of the church. They attend every church function, every church training, every church everything. And then take pride in the fact that they were at church every time the door was open. We are told that we are to be in the world, but not of the world, yet many Christians do everything they can to avoid the world. My challenge for Christians is to get outside of the church and start making an impact on your community for Christ: show His love, be His hands and feet, share His light with a world that is no longer walking toward the darkness, but running headlong into it. We have been called to be salt and light. Salt left inside the cabinet does no good. A light that never enters the darkness is of little use. It is time to put on your spiritual big boy/girl pants (the armor of God) and get out on the battlefield. And stop trying to force non-Christians to act like Christians. You must first help people come to know Christ befo...

I can remember the first garden that I helped my dad plant. I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was a lot of hard work. We didn’t have modern gas-powered tools. We used spades and hoes to brake up the ground. This is a process called harrowing the ground. After that, we cultivated the ground by running a garden rake over it to break up clumps of dirt, remove rocks, weeds, and grass from among the dirt. Our hands  and clothes were smeared with dirt and we had splotches of mud on our face from the mixture of dirt and sweat. After the ground was cultivated, we would use hoes to furrow the ground in long, straight rows. Some of my rows were not very straight, but, hey, I was 7. Then we each took handfuls of seeds, got on our knees and crawled down each row so that we could poke little holes in the mounds created by furrowing the ground, dropped a seed into the hole, and then covered the hole with dirt. After all of the dirty work we watered the garden. Then we stood back ...

An Open Letter to the American Church: Political rights and doing the right thing often have nothing in common. Currently in the United States individuals, with varying ages of consent, have the right to kill their unborn baby, to marry a person of the same sex, to use the f-word in public, to have premarital sex, to pig out with fatty foods, to purchase pornography, and in some states to smoke marijuanna. These are rights endowed, not by our creator, but by our government. Yes, as Christians we can do whatever we want because God has given us free will. But this does not mean that it is pleasing to God just because it feels right or it makes us happy. "Everything is permissible, but not everything is helpful. Everything is permissible, but not everything builds up." 1 Corinthians 10:23 (HCSB) We were given specific guidelines by God as to what constitutes sin. That word is, or at least it should be, important to Christians because it was our sin that separated...

My dad with my brother and sister in 1963 If only I could have been a perfect dad. Imagine all of the wonderful accolades that I would receive from my family and my community and even the media. There might even be books written about my life and people would be requesting that I write a book sharing my secret to raising children and being a good dad. But I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact. Any man that becomes a dad will experience the same thing. You will be amazed that someone as smart as you could possible say something as dumb as what you just said to your daughter. You will regret many things that you did and things you failed to do. There will be days when you will feel as though you have ruined your son's life. And if not, he will probably be more than happy to tell you that you have ruined his life. No, father's are not perfect, but, in a day when so many children have absentee dads, those fathers who stay the course and put in the effort regardless of...