I spent part of last Saturday morning listening to a man from Good Shepherd deliver a creative and engaging devotion to our BigHouse students and their guests from the Children's Attention Home in Rock Hill.As he began, I had a twinge of guilt. Should I be the one...

Pastoral ministry goes better when you are in love with Jesus than when you aren't.I know this to be the case because I've tried it both ways.

On occasion, I give phone calls to people I haven't seen around church in awhile.My responses to their reponses have me a bit conflicted.If they respond to my "hey, I've missed seeing you and want to make sure everything is OK" with "oh, sorry, I've just gotten out of...

Yesterday we concluded the sermon with one sentence testimonies by seven different people from the Good Shepherd community, each of whom is in the process of being "delivered" from the Pharaoh that has plagued their lives.But that wasn't the best part.The best part...

We have a number of pastors who attend Good Shepherd.Some of them are missionaries who have returned from overseas and are in the midst of discerning their next steps in ministry.Others are pastors-in-training, studying either at bible college or seminary and in...

I recently heard a pastor I respect very much say that church leaders who place a high value on progress are typically very poor at pastoral counseling. What he was saying made intuitive sense: people who have a bias for progress by definition look to the future. They...

A friend told me recently, "There is so much freedom in preparation."That sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? We think of preparation as . . . drudgery. Monotony. Repetition. Whether it's preparing a sermon, report, or song, the work of getting ready is filled with...

From 1990-1999, I served in what Methodists call a "two-point charge": Mt. Carmel & Midway United Methodist Churches in Union County.At 9:45, I would preach at Midway, an open country church that averaged about 30 people per Sunday when I arrived. By the time I...

Tim Stevens of Granger Church had an interesting post recently called "How To Leave Your Church." Written for lay people from the perspective of a staff person, the post is worth reading for the lengthy comment section alone.But it got me thinking . . . what about the...

I don't know if I heard it somewhere or thought of it myself (probably the former, hopefully the latter), but in any event I wrote it down:Ministry happens when your fear of disappointing God is greater than your fear of disappointing people.Whew.As a recovering...