Author Archive | jh

Ortberg: everybody’s weird

One of the most ironic remarks about the Bible I hear from time to time is when someone says that it’s a book about pious, stained-glass characters who do not reflect the real world. I always know that means they haven’t read it. Have you ever noticed how many messed-up families there are in Genesis? [...]

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Piper: To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions

Dietrich Bonhoeffer breathed the air of crisis most of his adult life. This would eventually make the issue of decisiveness a matter of life and death. And even before that moment it was an issue of love. Everywhere Bonhoeffer looked in the Europe of 1934 he saw Christian indecisiveness. The “deutsche Christen,” the global ecumenical movement—everyone [...]

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Bill Donahue: the dark side of community

The dark side of falling in love with community is our inclination to form a holy huddle, intentionally or unintentionally. We love the fellowship of the body so much that we become addicted to it, closing our doors to those outside. Yet when we are on the outside looking in, we long to be invited [...]

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Chan: more than a program

So what does disciple making look like? We have to be careful about how we answer this question. For some of us, our church experience has been so focused on programs that we immediately think about Jesus’s command to make disciples in programmatic terms. We expect our church leaders to create some sort of disciple-maker [...]

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Searcy: big days build momentum

I run into a lot of churches who say, “We feel like our momentum is beginning to wane.” If you can relate, that’s all the more reason to do a big day. Big days build momentum on many levels. First of all, they involve your people in working toward a big push, as I mentioned. [...]

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Andy Stanley: should unbelievers lead small groups?

We almost always involve unbelievers in our small groups. And we give them opportunities to lead the discussion. One of my most memorable small group experiences was the night John led. The first night we were together as a group, John announced that the only reason he was attending was to make his wife happy. [...]

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Just teach

How much time do you think Jesus spent in what we call sermon preparation? Do you think Jesus studied as an average pastor studied? Do you think he read, did research, prepared outlines and so forth? How much time do you imagine Jesus spent preparing to teach? In a way, I think that is all [...]

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Bill Donahue: bad things happen when you don’t train

“I’ll never forget my first leadership experience at Willow Creek Community Church,” says Jon Bodin, former director of our couples’ ministries and current director of small groups for Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I became a Christian here in 1981, so right away I got plugged into a small group. It wasn’t long [...]

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