One of my struggles of working at a church and also attending seminary is that many I interact with seem to think of church ministry as the height of faithfulness and ministry to God. Think of the phrase, “I’m going into the ministry,” and it’s common use in our culture today. Yet it comes across…
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A Message on Living Selfishly
-Sermon Given on 11/23/2010. About 4 years ago I got married to my wife Rose. Shortly after our honeymoon I started my 60 hour-a-week sales job. It was an extremely exhausting and demanding job. I remember within my first week on the job coming home from work absolutely dead to the world. Rose was making…
How Blogging Taught Me to Preach
This semester I took my first preaching course in seminary. Taking the course was a big step for me, in a weird way. I’m in front of people all the time. Sometimes leading smaller groups, other times leading thousands. But the thought of getting up and speaking for a long period of time is so…
The Leader Needed Today (Part One)
Over the past year I’ve taken several classes in seminary on Biblical leadership and church management. Those classes have included several papers on the subject of the kind of leader that is needed today. I thought I’d condense those papers into a short series I’ve titled “The Leader Needed Today.” There are thousands of books…
Knowledge of God
One thing I find interesting about Christianity is the strong emphasis on study and knowledge. I, more than most, come to experience this emphasis in my seminary classes and studies. Over the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed reading a modern classic, The Knowledge of the Holy, by A.W. Tozer. It was written in 1961 but…
Seminary Is Still Valuable
LifeWay research recently had the following to say about how today’s pastors view seminary: “Only 10 percent of Protestant pastors say they would require a candidate to have a seminary degree and instead place emphasis on other qualifications, such as experience and beliefs” (read more about the study) For someone in seminary, like me, this…