Last week at the conference I attended at the mega-mega church Willow Creek, I took a stroll around their massive campus. At one point I found myself walking across the back of their “old” sanctuary, worship center, whatever they call it, a room that has been replaced in the past few years by a much [...]

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One of my reasons for skepticism about megachurches has been that I thought of it mostly as a white-suburban concept. Go somewhere where the population is exploding, start an excellent seeker service and you’ve got a pretty good chance of tapping into the same public preference that is creating larger and larger Wal-Marts, Home Depots [...]

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“The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.” James Truslow Adams. Last week at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit, I heard Bill Hybels interview rock superstar Bono on his faith and his passionate work against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bono is one of the world’s most [...]

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I’m not a big fan of church message signs, but I can at least ignore them when their messages are cute, trite, sappy or irrelevant. This one makes me mad. Of course the problem isn’t with “Share your faith with others” but with “Keep your doubts to yourself”. This advice makes us look like anti-thinking, [...]

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Dave Terpstra has an interesting post at Out of Ur about the contradictory way Christian react to movies. When the first Harry Potter movie came out, there was considerable debate about whether Christians should see a film featuring a wizard-boy hero. One local church here in Kingston put an anti-witchcraft Scripture on its sign [...]

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My previous post defined the “missional” church as one that understands it exists in a culture alien to the Kingdom of God. That’s easy to get a handle on when the church is new, but what about when it grows to include several thousand disciples who are growing in the knowledge of God’s Word? Our [...]

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Someone recently asked me what I thought about “the missional church” (thanks to Jessica Friesen). “Missional” is a buzzword I have heard kicked around a little, but I had to do a little research to find out what it means. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. Like most buzzwords, many use it and few define it. [...]

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Have you ever heard of Vernon Grounds? Probably not, but you owe him more than you realize. Grounds, now 90, was the president of Denver Seminary, a pioneer in Christian counseling and education. He’s a beloved man of prayer, faith, and especially love. Grounds played a large part in healing the [...]

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On Sunday, May 14 (which is Mother’s Day) we will begin a two-week series at church called “Escape the Debt Trap” based on a book of that name by Dr. Kregg Hood.
Since MHCC just signed for a large loan on our new building, you might wonder about the consistency of talking about debt as a [...]

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When I attended the annual conference of Peacemaker Ministires in 2003, I was very impressed with the keynote speaker Mark Dever, a Washington D. C. pastor and founder of a ministry called 9 Marks. Basically 9 Marks is about teaching nine marks of a healthy, Biblically functioning church. I invite you to visit [...]

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