I have been a pastor for 20 years and am closing in on 100 weddings that I’ve officiated. And there a couple of trends I have seen in the past several years that I think are worthy of note.

Most weddings are now outdoors. I don’t have a STRONG opinion about this, but just an opinion. A church building is meant to evoke thoughts about the presence of God. I will be the first to admit that He is NOT any more present in a church than He is in a vineyard, or on a farm, or at an outdoor wedding venue . . .

Long before ReCAST Church ever had a Sunday gathering in Mattawan, we had spent hours and hours praying for the community. I began to work from a coffee shop there and I began to get to know people and even invited people to join us. Our goal was to be a church in a community that needed one.

One of the largest task of any leader is to clarify the answer to the question “why!?” I have been listening to the book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Leif participated in many of the missions to regain the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

The Christian who believes the Bible is true, knows that this world is NOT the way it was supposed to be. We know we are frail. We know disease is real. We know we are dying. I start in this place, regarding the topic of holistic health, simply to set the field of play for this discussion.

I went through a yo-yo phase. I could walk the dog, I could rock the baby, and do the elevator. All of these are fairly entry level tricks, but I thought I was cool . . . If yo-yos could be called ‘cool’.

[11] so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.   I just finished a podcast series on the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s. I enjoyed listening in, because it was a trip down memory lane. The decades of the 80’s and 90’s were formative…

I was raised by wolves.  Just kidding.  But I was not raised in a context anchored to any tradition.  My spiritual formation took place in a non-denominational Bible church.  I was raised by a single mom who remarried after my dad died.  Even after my mother remarried, I had little to no stability in my…

I often tell people in my role as a pastor that we need to keep reading the Bible in order to keep exercising our faith.  I think many of us have a tendency to think of faith as a static thing.  Either I have it, or I don’t.  But faith, as evidence of things not…

While I was rereading ‘The Pastor’ by Eugene Peterson last week, I was struck again by the nature of my full time role as a pastor.  I have a strange job.  I am employed in the service of a people in order to shine as a consistent spotlight on the invisible God.  He is there.…

God has created a world in which we experience time as past, present, and future. I cannot conceive of any other type of world, but I’m sure God can. For some reason, God seems interested in the progress of His creation. We learn from the past. We live in the present. And we anticipate the…

ReCAST Church has continued to grow.  From about 30 people meeting in a basement in 2009 to a store front, to renting school space, to building a building, to going to two services it has been amazing to see the growth.  There was once a time when I was the only paid staff member.  Things…

Everything we see going on around us is merely the tip of the iceberg. You never really know another person. That waitress that brings you your coffee and your eggs and bacon is a person with a deep history, and deep internal thoughts and struggles. You see her smile. She is more than what you…