Welcome to the Table

For most Christians, worship is something that happens on Sunday. There is music, maybe some hands raised, a moment of feeling — and then the week begins and worship disappears into the background. If that is where worship lives for you, the issue is not your attitude. You are missing a discipline. Worship is not primarily a feeling. It is a practice — something that can be cultivated, scheduled,...

Faithful Christians who love people in the LGBTQ community often get caught between two responses that both fail: silence born of fear and arguments born of certainty that produce only distance. There is a third way, and it requires rethinking everything from the ground up. Drew Berryessa has spent twenty-three years in ministry to the LGBTQ community through Living Letter Ministries, walking alon...

When people say they want to know God more, they usually mean they want to feel him more — more present, more real. But knowing God more deeply requires understanding who he actually is, not just what we imagine him to be. The classical doctrine of divine simplicity states that God is not made of parts. He is not partly love and partly holiness — he is wholly and entirely each of his attributes at...

You have heard the phrase Imago Dei. You may have even used it. But if someone asked you right now what it means for how you actually live, you might struggle to answer. Most Christians carry the phrase without carrying the framework. The doctrine of Imago Dei is not a piece of theological trivia. It is the foundation for everything the Bible says about identity, sin, and redemption. Khalil unpack...

Most Christians who feel stuck in their faith have one thing in common: they are trying to obey a God they do not know well enough. They are faithful — they show up, they try to pray, they want to change — but something is missing. Richard Foster put it plainly: many believers remain in bondage to fears and anxieties simply because they have never taken up the discipline of study. Not because they...

You are leading people. You have a vision, a team, and a calendar full of commitments. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you stopped leading yourself. The ministry is moving. You might not be. The people you lead are getting your output, but the people at home are getting what is left — and you have told yourself that is the cost of calling. Pastor Stan Russell has built a life that looks...

Most Christians believe in the Trinity. Far fewer could tell you why it matters for how they live on a Tuesday. The Trinity can feel like a theological technicality — something to affirm in a statement of faith and then file away. But what you believe about the Trinity is not a minor detail. It is the foundation of everything you believe about God, about yourself, and about how prayer works. Who G...

You have said something online that you would never say to someone's face. Or you have read something about someone — a leader, a church, a person you do not know — and passed it along before you knew whether it was true. Most Christians know this is a problem. Almost nobody has a framework for why it is so easy, why it matters this much, or how to stop. Slander is not a new sin — it is one of the...

You have probably heard that you should journal. You may have started and stopped more than once. Most people dismiss it as something for a certain personality type — the reflective, the artistic, the person with extra margin. But Khalil started journaling with none of those qualities and now calls it one of the most essential parts of his daily formation. What he had was not natural inclination....

The word deconstruction is everywhere. What it almost never comes with is a framework that helps people question well rather than just question faster. Khalil and Sean welcome Dr. AJ Swoboda, Bible and theology professor at Bushnell University and author of "After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It," for one of the most substantive conversations on deconstruction in the Christian...

Are you looking to learn how to share your faith and evangelize like Jesus would? This is part two of a conversation about the heart and how of practicing the spiritual discipline of evangelism. Evangelism is a spiritual discipline because of the work and discipline it takes to do it diligently. Show Notes: The Essential Elements: Present the Gospel - God Loves Us - We are estranged from God - Jes...

Your faith feels solid in certain seasons and shaky in others. It holds under normal conditions and wobbles when life gets hard enough. And somewhere in the back of your mind is the uncomfortable question: what would it actually take to break it? Sticky faith is not blind faith — it is faith that has been tested enough to become durable. The believers throughout Scripture whose faith held under pr...

Christmas comes and goes, and "Immanuel, God with us" gets attached to a song and a season. But what would it mean to actually live in the reality of that phrase every day — not as a theological doctrine but as a present, lived experience? The incarnation of Jesus is the most radical statement in all of religious history: the Creator became a creature. The One who holds the universe together took...

There are over three billion people on earth who have no meaningful access to the Gospel — not because they rejected it, but because no one has gone. They have not heard a bad presentation and walked away. They live in places where the church does not exist, where missionaries have not gone, where the name of Jesus has never been spoken. Most Western Christians will spend their entire lives withou...

You believe the Gospel. You believe people need to hear it. And when the moment comes — when someone actually asks, or when you sense the door is open — something in you freezes. It is not that you do not care. It is that you do not feel ready. And you keep waiting for ready in a way that ready has never actually come. The spiritual discipline of evangelism does not wait for confidence — it produc...

Most Christians want to share their faith. Most Christians freeze when they get the chance. The problem is rarely a lack of desire — it is a framework that treats evangelism as a performance you have to be ready for instead of a lifestyle you are already positioned for. Andy Ziesmer is a touring rock musician who turned his platform into a mission field. He co-founded “A Jesus’ Mission,” a 501(c)(...

You serve because you think you have to. You sign up for the volunteer slot because you feel guilty if you do not. And most of the time, serving feels like something you give rather than something that gives back — which makes it hard to sustain. The spiritual discipline of service is not about getting things done for God. It is about what happens in you as you give yourself away. Jesus said the g...

Somewhere along the way, mealtime became a logistics problem. Drive-throughs replaced dinner tables. Screens replaced conversation. Without realizing it, we traded one of the most formative spaces in human life for efficiency. In Jewish culture, the table has never been just about food. It is where identity is formed, where history is retold, where the next generation is discipled, and where recon...

You memorized Bible verses as a kid and forgot most of them by college. Now the idea of memorizing Scripture feels like a school assignment for people with a lot of time and a good memory — which probably leaves you out. But Scripture memorization is not a test. It is a practice of internalization — taking the Word of God from the page and placing it in the only location where it can do its most t...

You may have started a discipleship relationship. But at some point it loses momentum — the meetings start to feel repetitive, you run out of things to cover, or life gets busy and it quietly dissolves. The person you were walking with drifts back to where they started. The difference between a discipleship relationship that produces lasting change and one that does not usually comes down to struc...

You probably do not think of celebration as a spiritual discipline. It does not feel serious enough. Disciplines are hard things — fasting, silence, confession. Celebration feels like the reward you get after doing them. But what if your inability to celebrate is itself a spiritual problem? Dallas Willard placed celebration in his list of disciplines of engagement because joy is not just an emotio...

You have been told to find balance. Balance your work and your family. Balance your serving and your resting. And yet you always feel like you are tilting too far in one direction, scrambling to compensate in the other. Balance is a myth — not because rhythms do not matter, but because the image of a perfectly level scale was never the biblical model for a well-ordered life. Jesus was not balanced...

Your home is full, your calendar is full, your notifications are full — and your soul is somehow still empty. You keep adding things hoping one of them will finally satisfy, and the pile just keeps growing. The spiritual discipline of simplicity is the intentional removal of anything — possessions, commitments, digital noise — that is crowding out your capacity to be with God, present with people,...

You sense there is something you were made to do — but you cannot quite put your finger on what it is, or you know what it is but have no idea how to develop it. Ministry often feels like a gap between who you are and who you are supposed to become. Calling is not a mystical destination you arrive at after the right spiritual experience. It is something that gets clarified over time through commun...

The number one thing people say when you ask how they're doing is "busy." You say it too. And somewhere in the middle of all that motion — the calendar, the noise, the constant output — you've started to wonder if what you're actually missing isn't more time to do things, but permission to stop. That's not weakness. It's your soul telling you something important. Silence and solitude are not passi...