The world seems to be increasingly comfortable with most of our embodied lives being reduced to the digital, and for some things that is perhaps neutral—but life together is something that is hard to do outside one’s body. When I lived in Philadelphia, there was a neighborhood bar where I would somewhat regularly get dinner,…
Category: Church Planting
Seeing God in the World through Short-term Mission
In the fall of 2014, my wife, TJ, encouraged me to look into going on a mission trip through Pittsburgh Seminary’s World Mission Initiative. I was apprehensive in the beginning because this was my first year in seminary and I had never been outside the United States or Canada. After looking at the different trips…
What a Church Planter Needs
This morning I had breakfast with a church-planter. Starting a new worshiping community is a different beast from pastoring an established congregation. To quote The Wizard of Oz, “Now that’s a horse of a different color.” “There has been vocational confusion, dark times,” my church-planting friend told me, now four years into this endeavor….