I am back after a month long sabbatical. I have been to the mountain top, and I have returned with many words of wisdom. Or put in a less dramatic way, I am back after a refreshing break. God did impress upon me several things while I was away. Some of them more personal in…
Through the various stages of church planting, I have often had to dig deep and ask some tough questions. Why start another church . . . in West Michigan of all places? Where is this thing going? Now that we have some stability, have we arrived? Why isn’t there a good Mexican restaurant in…
Every once in a while I get the chance to go to a professional conference or an afternoon lecture for pastors. This past week Cornerstone University (where I completed my bachelor’s degree) had a conference for pastors on Mackinac Island at the Grand Hotel. It was an amazing time away of reflection and networking…
In light of entering my seventh year as the lead pastor, the board of ReCAST church decided to offer me a month long sabbatical and a bonus. I am so grateful for this opportunity to take the month of November to read, pray, and spend some time away in reflection. I do not know…
A church is a gathering of people. People need organization. Pastor’s are either very organized or very not organized. I am not very organized. So in the vacuum left by our associate pastor’s move to a new ministry and our office administrator’s move to South Korea, we had some huge gaps at the start…
The new clothes have been purchased and are all lined up in the closet. The pencil top erasers are all ready to remove some rare mistakes. The trapper keepers are all stocked with lined and ruled notebook paper. Okay, maybe not trapper keepers . . . But some of you knew what I was…
I have been a member of Anytime Fitness since January and have been there doing cardio or lifting a few times a week. Fitness and motivational speeches go together like coffee and doughnuts! And sometimes I roll my eyes and find the posters and “you can do it, rah, rah” type stuff a bit…
For a handful of us, we remember that awkward talk with our parents. THE talk. The one where many parents blushed and searched for words, mumbled some things under their breath and talked about the act of procreation. For many of us we never had that talk. We just kinda pieced things together from…
I just read a jarring headline that will be effecting my running routine for months to come. I am running low on podcasts and another pastor that I listen to regularly just resigned due to an affair. It makes me both sad and angry . . . I guess kinda “”sangry”. I am not so much…
I cannot speak to the topic of fatherhood as an expert. I do not have a degree in sociology nor psychology. But I have been a son and am now a dad. Further, I can speak to what it has meant to be a young man growing up without my dad in my life. My…
So I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you didn’t love coffee the first time you tasted it . . . amirite? But somehow, over time your body acclimated to the caffeine, you sugared it up, added flavored creams, discovered lattes and cappuccinos and mochas . . .…
“This is the way God made me . . . ” seems to be the battle cry of our culture. It seems like his name is useful for something other than just cursing. But what I think most people mean when they say that this is the way God made me is something more…
