The Goodness of God

Fresh Expressions, creating small, focused, creative, meaningful pockets of religious community beyond the church walls isn't meant to be one more thing on the pastor's schedule. It's not meant to be pastor led at all. Normal lay folks should be one the ones taking lead, and the pastor serves as trainer, permission giver, and recruiter. This has deep roots both in New Testament history and in Meth...

Even the good Biblical kings weren't great. The bad ones were truly terrible. In 1 Samuel 8, God and the prophet Samuel both know, deep down, that having a king won't go well. They warn the people. The people still want a king. God intended for it to just be God and the people - with little separation. The people wanted something else. So often, we do too. We appoint people to tell us what God wan...

It's easy to get a clear image in your mind of what a church is. It's got a sanctuary, sound system, parking lot, classrooms, kitchen, kids area, youth area, and if you're really ambitious, more activity space. in those spaces, we do the churchy things: worship services, Bible Studies, small groups (or whatever cool rebranding that you've given them), meals, meetings. We build more boxes. We repea...

As humans, we like simplicity and black and white choices. Do this, and it's good. Don't do that because it's bad. We turn the faith into that too. God clearly says do this, and God clearly says don't do that. It doesn't actually work that way, but we sure want it to. In reality, Jesus lived the spirit behind the Law - love God and love neighbor, and when letter of the Law conflicted with its spir...

Churches, generally, have WAY more space than they need. We invested heavily in real estate for a hundred years, and for a lot of us, that investment didn't pay off. So what do we do with it all? Well, there are a lot of organizations literally dying for want of space, so if you invite in the right partner, tens of thousands of square feet can get re-deployed for the Kingdom. However, as with all...

Nicodemus gets given one of Christ's all time greatest lines, John 3:16. Modern Christians have adopted it as a go to verse for understanding and hope. God loves. God moved first on our behalf. It's not clear how far Nicodemus gets down his faith journey. He's certainly not Christ's enemy, but he's no outspoken defender either. It may be an unsatisfying ending for such a great line, but it is a re...

Campus ministry can no longer just be Youth Group 2,0. A lot of the folks arriving on college campus never went to Youth Group 1.0. We need new models, and one pastor doing just that is Rev. Kyle Tremblay of the Wesley Foundation at Lamar University. He joins Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily to talk about how to build a truly inclusive space, demonstrate love that invites, and ministry with Gen Z. Fin...

We seem like to act like we have two truly important holiday, Christmas and Easter, but in reality, we have a third: Pentecost. The decent of the Holy Spirit kicks off the era that we still in live, where the Holy Spirit moves among us, binds us together, and empowers us to do something. It's an amazing gift that we got that day - one that we continue to have. We should value it and us it accordin...

The Human Flourishing study follows 200,000 people across a couple of dozen countries, and they plan to do check in with the same people for years to come. As the name implies, the study wants to capture how people feel about their lives and what factors influence that feeling. This first run of the study found something interesting about religious life. Being a part of a religious community measu...

Christ's ascension changed the nature of God's work in the world. The Disciples could no longer observe what was happening. They had to shift to taking a much more active role. That's still the case. God sends us power, grace, and ability, but we have to do something with it. If you feeling like something is missing in your faith life, ask yourself, how are you putting that faith into action? Host...

Campus ministry, like a lot of things in former times, had an understood model. Student would need something like a youth group 2.0 to be a part of during college to hopefully prevent a break in their Christian journey. This has changed. The bulk of students now arrive on college campuses without an previous church experience, and if anything, on a more amorphous spiritual journey. This will need...

To call love a "commandment" should probably means something more to us than it seems to. In the Old Testament, a quick way to become a hero was to die for the sake of following God's law. If all of that love got summed up in a command to love, do we treat it with the safe seriousness? Would be die for the sake of love? We like to wave God's instructions at others, but will we take on the most cor...

The postponed 2020 United Methodist General Conference being held in 2024 just ended and A LOT happened. The headlines most places focus on the end of the same-sex marriage ban, the lifting of the ban on ordaining LBTBQIA+ folks , and a more regional structure. It's more than that though. It's a move a way from a rules based way of living together to hopeful one more full of grace, peace, and flex...

Love. Love. Love. Love. This text repeats the word love to a comical degree. It's like every other word, but the repetition makes the point that love sits at the core of it all - literally. At the center of creation sits a being described as the motivating force of love. God is love. Love has such power because it carries with it the very power of God. Love is a verb. It motivates and moves. Love...

Pastor Trey is in Charlotte, North Carolina for the United Methodist 2020 General Conference being held in 2024. That is its actual name. One of the hot topics that the delegates are working on is worldwide regionalization. This sounds like some sort of bureaucratic shifting, but it actually a fundamental reordering of the denomination toward contextual ministry across its global reach. It's a way...

Sheep die for the sake of the shepherd's way of life. Similarly, kings are served. They aren't servants. Jesus turns all of those things on their heads. In being the Good Shepherd, he turns shepherding on its head just as he turns kingship on its head. We should at some point start conceptualizing a better reality than they one we create for ourselves. The one that God creates for us was made for...

This week Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily are joined by author and speaker Paul Nixon. He spends his life helping churches find new life, get weird, and get going. Just this week, he put out a totally revised version of his book "I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church," because he wrote the first edition in 2008 and clearly saw that we live in a totally different world now. His work and this conversation ar...

A lot of energy gets poured into declaring Scripture super important. It is, but what if you have a hard time connecting with what it contains? As with a lot of things, you're in good company. The Disciples had been hearing endlessly from Christ, before he died and rose, about the Scripture surrounding his journey. Only now, staring the resurrection in the face do they have a mind to contain it. C...

ChatGPT and its friends the other Large Language Models promise a lot of things and have a near religious fervor in the tech sector. They offer a way to lift the burden of creative work with just a simple prompt. The writing part of church is a huge sink of time. Could AI be the answer to massively overworked preachers? No. Not if we want to actually make real connections with real people. Hosted...

Thomas gets the bad reputation, but all four Gospel lay out the elaborate series of proofs that Christ offers after the Resurrection. We get these windows into the Disciples processing it in real time, and even with literal Jesus literally in front of them, they struggle. Jesus chides them by blessing those who don't have such direct access - us. Rather than judging our doubts, Jesus blesses that...

We live in a world where human attention is the most valuable commodity on the planet. Many trillion dollar corporations derive their income solely off capturing your attention and selling the data it generates to others. This has only made the church growth question harder. We're not only up against the normal distractions of life, but Meta, Google, etc. and their never ending drive to hoover up...

John relays one of the most important events in human history, the rising of Christ from the grave and the defeat of all the cosmic forces that put him there, with a series of intimate and personal interactions. Two men race to his the empty tomb. A woman weeps in a garden, and Jesus calls her by name. This intimacy is also about the power of God. God is not a distance ruler, although God has more...

Money holds back a lot of great church ideas. The costs of staff and buildings make church way less nimble than it could be. You might have a great idea, but if it can't help with the cost problem, you might not be able to do it. Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily look at an article on the joy, health, and nimbleness that from a shift to part time clergy. Could it be a healthier model for all involved?...

The week leading up to Jesus's death on a cross is one of wild extremes - the height of entering in triumph, the ignominy of a cross. It's meant to remind us of the depth of God's love for and God's fundamental ability to empathize with us, God's creation. It also shows us just how all encompassing God's grace is. Christ went through absolute horrors on behalf of the crowd that subjected him to it...

The future of the Church is happening in a Night Club in Nashville. Christians in their late teens, twenties, and thirties are dancing together, praying together, and experiencing tremendous joy. This amazing thing is being put on by a group of seven entrepreneurial and deeply faithful men, who seem to know what the human soul longs for and what makes a good Night Club experience. The Cove can be...