Sometimes Christians don't get along. This is more than just unfortunate. It is bad for our witness. Our job as gospel-proclaimers is to urge people to reconcile. We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, 'Be reconciled to God.' 2 Corinthians 5:20 The essence of the gospel is that is resolves a conflict between us and …
Church Intensive Training
It's easy to keep doing the same things by default. If you want to rethink church and think deeply about what makes the church the church, take a look at this training! Last year, my wife and I went through a Church Intensive Labs Training, put on by Francis Chan's organization called Crazy Love. It all started with Chan's book Letters to the Church. I found the book resonated with me …
Amplify Outreach Conference 2021
I'm attending the Amplify Outreach conference again this year. I've been a regular attendee to this conference for several years now. This year the conference is rebranded a little bit, and has an official partnership with Outreach Magazine. Many conferences feel like they go stale after a while. They host many of the same speakers year after year, and it just doesn't feel very fresh …
Christianity Explained Evangelism Course Review
This is an excellent resource for sharing the gospel. Here's why I like it, and how I think it could be used effectively. A friend pointed me to this high-quality evangelism course called Christianity Explained. It is based around the Gospel of Mark. A training manual I was thrown off a little bit by them calling it a "course." It's not a course in the normal sense, where you order …
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God Loves Telemarketers
Don't slam the phone down like everyone else does. Take a minute. You're annoyed, but the person on the other end of the line is someone who Jesus died for. Last week I was the target of a scam. My wife and I own some apartments that we rent out, and I found out that someone was posing as a leasing agent for an available apartment, asking for a non-refundable application fee and pretending to …
What is Christianity? A Video by Christianity Explored
I'm always on the lookout for new gospel presentations. Here's one that I just came across. What do you think? Visit the What is Christianity? page where this video came from → I like this presentation. It's clear, and the graphics are really nice! I don't like the way they wrote the first few lines, though: "Who is Jesus? He’s the Christ. The King who God himself had promised to send, …
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Why We Are Terrible at Sharing the Gospel (And How to Fix It)
Sometimes it’s hard to explain the good news, but it gets easier with some practice. You know how Major League Baseball has a celebrity throw a ceremonial first pitch? You’ve seen videos of some of those celebrities completely bombing the throw. These celebrities might be amazing at singing or at basketball, but MLB pitchers they are not. They have no practice! They’re likely thinking, …
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Meet Rocky
I'm humbled and thrilled to be a part of someone's journey of faith. Here's Rocky's story. Our friendly atheist neighbor Meet my friend Rocky. He was our neighbor when we first moved to this town. We got to know him a little bit. He was raised as a Catholic, but was now an atheist, he said. And although he was happy to talk about spiritual things, he was clearly not interested in …
The Gospel is Hard to Believe
Sometimes I feel discouraged about sharing my faith, but I came across something recently that encouraged me. It's just this: humanly speaking, the gospel is unbelievable. It's so incredible that the only way anyone could possibly come to faith is through the work of the Holy Spirit. If you ever forget this truth, like I do, just take a look at the disciples and how bad they were at …
Counting Seeds
How can we encourage a culture of evangelism in our church? We launched a very simple idea recently that I'm excited about! A couple of years ago I heard a speaker at the Amplify evangelism conference. He told us about something they did at their young church and I thought it was a brilliant idea. A brilliant idea The pastors wanted to encourage the church to share their faith. So they …
How to Exemplify Christ During Election Season
As followers of Jesus, I believe we have a big opportunity to show Christ's love, especially during times of division and strife, like election season! The Bible has a lot to say about getting along with other people. And, importantly, how to treat people with whom we disagree. As Christians, we are to: Love our neighbor. (Neighbor = everyone.) Mark 12Love our enemies. Luke 6Do …
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Book Review: How to Reach the West Again by Timothy Keller
I recently read How to Reach the West Again by Timothy Keller. I learned a lot from this short book. Tim is a deep thinker and unfolds these ideas like very few people can. The book is not a list of practical steps. It is an exploration of how to adapt our approach to outreach in 2020 and beyond. Here are some main takeaways for me: 1. Instead of lamenting Christianity's …
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