Everybody in leadership needs to foster the right self-identity in relationship to their work. For many of us, identity issues can be major sources of pain and frustration as we seek to make a difference in the position the Lord has placed us. Craig Hamilton mentions this in his new book Wisdom in Leadership: The How […]
Ministry
Are we living in the best or worst of times?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That’s how Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities opens. That sentence seems to describe our world today pretty well. We live in unprecedented times for the worldwide church. People in the global south and previously difficult countries like China are coming to […]
Joe Thorn on Small Churches, Pastoring a Small Church, and True Growth
I serve on a small team of people in my church starting a Spanish congregation, and we’ve had to think through some of the positive and negative dynamics of both being a small church and pastoring a small church. I was encouraged when I stumbled across Joe Thorn’s helpful article series on For The Church […]
Tim Keller on the Penetrating Power of God’s Word in Preaching
…famous verses about God’s Word being “like fire…and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29) are not mere rhetoric. I have seen hundreds of specific cases in which the Bible itself contained a power to penetrate people’s spiritual indifference and defenses in a way that went far beyond my powers of […]
Eaten by Cannibals—Used Mightily by God: The Story of Ludwig Nommensen
In the 1830s, two American Baptist missionaries set out to minister in a part of Indonesia known as Batak, on the island of Sumatra. The Batak people were known for being savage cannibals. The two American missionaries studied the people and language before beginning their preaching ministry to the Batak people. In 1834, shortly after sending […]