Every year Outreach magazine publishes a list of the hundred largest and fastest growing churches in the United States. Ed Stetzer has published an excellent summary of the findings: Learning from America’s Largest and Fastest-Growing Churches.

The th...

Ervin Stutzman of Eastern Mennonite Seminary has written a useful article on the place of preaching within the missional church. The article is helpful in that it offers a great deal of research into what key missional thinkers are saying about preaching and how t...

Today begins the 25th anniversary of Missionsfest Vancouver. Missionsfest is one of the largest missionary conferences in the world. It began when a group of churches determined that they could do a better job of their annual missions conferences if they came tog...

I just had a conversation with one of my students about the relationship of preaching to sales. My student spent part of his life selling cars. He was quick to recognize the ways in which his sales training could enhance his work as a preacher. We’re in the ...

Mark Galli at Christianity Today is suggesting that we have better things to do than “transform the world.” There are a lot of people calling on the church to work to change the world, Galli says, which is going to lead to a very big disappoin...

Understanding the Bible requires a nuanced appreciation of the original cultures to which the text was given. I don’t like to overplay the distance between text and today. We are all, then and now, humans after all. Still, just like we moderate our communica...

Yesterday I was able to spend a little time at a conference for missional church leaders let by the Allelon crowd. Allelon is a movement of missional leaders influenced largely by Alan and Cam Roxburgh. I got a chance to hear Alan wax eloquent about the kind of le...

I had a conversation over lunch with Ken Castor, one of my Doctor of Ministry students, and a pastor at Brentview Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta. Ken is beginning work on his dissertation project, trying to think about how to stimulate new directions in an ex...

I promised a report on this past weekend’s conference on ‘being church’ hosted by Northwest Baptist Seminary at Trinity Western University. The keynote speakers were Eddie Gibbs from Fuller Seminary and Craig van Gelder from Luther Seminary. Othe...

Today I’m engaged in a seminar entitled, “The Church Between Gospel and Culture: Contemporary Ways of Being Church” featuring Eddie Gibbs, Craig Van Gelder, and several other presenters including yours truly. This conference, hosted by our own se...

A church from my denomination has come under fire for hosting a professed former Islamic terrorist. Zachariah Anani gave a lecture at Campbell Baptist Church in Windsor, Ontario, titled “The Deadly Threat of Islam.” The speech created a firestorm resul...

The September 2006 issues of the Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society offers an interesting article by Nicholas Gatzke on the practice of preaching within the Emerging church. As with everything else in the Emerging movement, there is a variety of opinion...

Last week’s issue of Macleans’ magazine carried an ominous headline on its cover: “Why the Future Belongs to Islam.” The article, an extended excerpt from Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, makes its case largely on demogr...

Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, was one of the original conversation partners that led to the development of the so-called “Emerging Church.” I recently discovered this piece he wrote for the Criswell Theological Review: “A ...