a spiritual oasis

Contemplating the significance of life…
Well known 19th century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote many things about the human experience. One rolls off of my lips often, because it seems to summarize his philosophy regarding life most succinctly. By now, many of you know what it is. Thoreau stated: The masses of humanity live lives […]

The Gospel is astonishingly good news! In Romans 10:13 we read: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” This quote from Joel 2:32 serves as a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole (a synecdoche, to be precise). It speaks of a person’s acceptance of Jesus as […]

This is the fifth post in a series focusing on habits of highly effective churches.
To begin with, a bit of contextualization is in order. We are living in consumer-driven times. This impacts the Christian community in many different ways. One of which has to do with the fact that not a few church shoppers expect […]

While preparing to teach a Bible class recently, I ran across a little gem I would like to share. As part of an on-going study of the one another passages I was looking at Romans 15:7, where Paul admonishes the followers of Christ to:
“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to […]

Habit #4: Encouraging a sense of
Christian community and mutually
beneficial one another relationships.
As we continue this series, our fictional characters help us to contextualize the discussion…
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Russell had been sitting in his car in the parking lot outside the church building. He had prayed that tonight’s meeting would go well. As he closed […]

With this post we continue the series focusing on Habits of Highly Effective Churches. These thoughts are being presented in the context of a narrative, featuring two fictional characters. This results in posts that are a bit longer than usual. But, I’m going with this technique in hopes that it will help us to contextualize […]

Two fictional characters introduced this topic in a previous post. To be specific, we are talking about the vast topic of worship, as we continue our discussion of the Habits of Highly Effective Churches. But, we are looking at something much broader than an analysis of what most believers do during a few hours out of the […]

In the previous post, which is the first in this series (Habits…), I stated that ”effective churches are characterized by a healthy environment which fosters spiritual formation and are continuously cultivating a missional mentality with respect to the world.” Hopefully this gives you a sense of where this discussion is headed.
Who doesn’t want to be effective?
Given the fact that effectiveness is […]

Over the next few weeks, the Lord willing, we will be discussing habits of highly effective churches. When I developed this series a few years ago, it entailed seven habits. It subsequently expanded to eight habits. Who knows? By the time we finish discussing it here, we may come up with a few additional habits of highly effective churches. You should know that I’ve […]