I was a musician in a prior life. A music pastor actually. It was a beautiful season of life, a season where I was able to leverage gifts for the piano, music composition, and arranging that I had been cultivating since I was a little boy. It was also a season where I...
How do we find happiness in our work? This week we spoke with Erik Cooper, the President of The Stone Table, about finding happiness in our work. It's safe to say that we all want to be happy, but should the pursuit of happiness be our focus? You see, happiness is not...
I went looking for happiness, but she’s hard to chase down. I pursued her through hidden corridors and back alleys, occasionally catching the faint gleam of her beautiful hair blowing in the early morning light. But to no avail. She was there and then she was gone....
Hundreds of millions of believers around the world find time to spend time with God every day. Pretty cool to think about right? Devotional time, devos, quiet time, abiding time, Jesus time, alone time, or whatever we else call it in the church is a dedicated time...
Why is Business As Mission so important today? This week we sat down with Ron Maddux, the regional director of Northern Asia for Assemblies of God World Missions, to talk about why business as mission is so important today! "The power of BAM is it gains access to...
Have you noticed who the villains are in the majority of movies and TV shows today? The Lego Movie was terrorized by Lord Business, who longs to destroy lego world by gluing all the pieces together. Wall Street introduced us to Gordon Gecko, who coined the infamous...
We had some tension in the office last week. Negotiations on project hit a snag and neither side was blinking. I didn’t respond well. I was tired of the delays and the details were silly, so I fired off an uncharacteristically frustrated email to one of our attorneys....
As I young aspiring musician within the church, I was confident in what it looked like for me to integrate my faith and my art. Christian music was a clear-cut path for me to create music and live out my faith. Until the day my life decided to pick me up and...
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to pray. At least consistently. Daily. Effectively. We can spout all the super-spiritual mantras about prayer that we want. We know it’s vital to Christian living, the health of our daily relationships, our family, the impact of our work,...
I looked for him everywhere. Our church meets in a high school, and he’s not usually hard to find. I gave up the search and walked into the auditorium to pray before our next service started. I glanced up at the balcony where our production team works the magic that...
I just wanted to take a second and talk to all of my pastor friends out there today. You know, I spent 12 years in full time ministry and really, I think over this this last year and a half, have felt such a pull and a longing to encourage my pastor friends because I think this season of COVID and 2020, and now into 2021, has been one of the most difficult seasons to be a leader of any kind but especially a spiritual leader in our polarized world where everything seems to create conflict even within the context of our local churches.
We were so excited here recently to launch this brand-new book, this resource, from The Stone Table called Missional Marketplace: Finding Your Everyday Work in God’s Eternal Plan and want to let you know that the paperback has been available for a little while now, but now the kindle book, and also the audiobook, of this is available now at Amazon and at other retail distributors. So, if you’re into audiobooks, I can actually read this book to you as you kind of go about your business. So, if you’d like to hear me read this book to you, you can download the audiobook right now as well. So, Missional Marketplace: Finding Your Everyday Work in God’s Eternal Plan, go pick it up right now and we pray it’s an encouragement to you.
Let’s talk a little bit about humility in leadership. You know leaders are leaders oftentimes because they are very skilled. They’re very talented, they are charismatic, they can draw attention, they have good ideas, they can cast vision, and sometimes that can cause leaders, including me, to begin to think they are the driving force. And so, as Christians, we know that we are called to humility; that arrogance doesn’t really partner itself well with the gospel and the gospel redeemed life.