Blueprint

A Little Understanding – The Footings

People often ask, “Why does life suck?” For those who find the language offensive, please forgive me, but it wouldn’t be a quote if I tried to soften it. Pastors may use more carefully chosen words, replacing the offensive ones and reworking the question this way: “Why is everything a struggle at my church?” I would never go as far as to say the solution to life sucking or a struggling church is Proverbs 3:5-6, but I can say the solution to navigating through these times is not in your hands, your strength, or how you understand things. The solution lies in letting God take over, and He will plot the course. He will carry the weight. “He will make your paths straight.”

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A Little Knowledge – What We See Becomes What We Know

Many personal growth, church growth, and outreach how-to books and motivational sermons are “mirrors,” or to bring it back around to the building metaphor, pictures of the décor. They address the appearance. This isn’t a bad thing. Appearance will go a long way when it comes to enticing people to visit your church or ask about your faith. What people see demonstrates the commitment, enthusiasm, and passion of Christ followers.

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Blueprint – A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” Matthew 7:21- 23 (NIV)

How fast it all changes.

When the pandemic hit, there were things we had been doing in the name of Christianity under the umbrella of church that were really our way of “staging the house” to make it look good.

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I Never Really Looked At It This Way Before

I was signing a copy of my book Blueprint (shameless plug by me). The person I was signing the book for has been a window into a world I will never be able to fully comprehend. He is an African American and I am a white Canadian. As hard as I try I will never be able to fully grasp what he and other people of visible minority groups, especially black American males, have gone through and continue to go through. At best I can be understanding while never, no matter how hard I might try, fully understanding. When I started to personalize the inscription…

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They Told Me I need To Write A Blog, I’m Glad I Did!

It was August of this year that I penned a blog of lament called They Told Me I Need To Write A Blog. I felt like giving up. I had no job and, because I am a Transitional Pastor, the odds were not in favor of me getting a job; pastors aren’t leaving churches during the uncertainty of COVID. I was ready to give up. I had started blogging because I needed to get noticed if I was going to find a publisher for my book. That’s what I was told so that’s what I did. Blogging ended up being more than just a way to get noticed. I fell in love with writing my blog but even more, I loved the friendships I formed in the blogging community. The book was why I started blogging and, as tough as it was to accept, maybe blogging, not the publishing of the book was why God inspired me to write it in the first place…

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They Told Me I Need To Write A Blog

So I did! It seemed like a good idea at the time, a way to achieve my goal of being noticed. Trust me when I say I am not normally looking to be noticed but this was different. I had a book to sell. I had an agent to find. I had a publisher to impress. Somewhere out there was success and all I had to do was take the appropriate steps and my “baby” would be in the hands of Christians, in the libraries of pastors and on the required reading lists of church boards everywhere.

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