As you know, I think it's incredibly important to discuss controversial topics like addictions, war, and gay marriage with high school students. What's more, the recent increase in the amount of resources (books, curricula, blog posts, and the...
Women.
Their stories litter the pages of Scripture, sometimes as main characters in the story of God and sometimes as more peripheral ones. Yet even in churches that affirm women in ministry, too often we overlook these women. We fail to...
If you look at the teaching schedule for the last month of my high school ministry's program year, you'll see the following topics listed: War, gay marriage, and the question, “Who's a child of God?”
What each of these topics have in common is...
Following a morning devotional time during a mission trip, one of my students found me and announced with a great deal of frustration and fury, “Job sucks”. After asking this student several questions, I learned she'd chosen to read Job during her...
In reflecting on the success of the TV show, Friends, it's producers have said, "Our best episodes became the ones with just the six of them in the room.” To the show's producers, the heart of Friends was not it's flash. It wasn't special...
What do you want to be when you grow up?
As a kid, it seemed like someone was always asking me this question.
For a long time, my answer was teacher... Until it was architect and then later, writer.
Never once was it engineer, which is what my...
Let's do a quick word association.
If I said the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, what would you say?
Perhaps you would say words like mainline, traditional, denomination, bishops, synods, liturgical, baptism, Paul, or grace. These are...
A few weeks ago, in his blog, "Who Determines What Your Ministry Looks Like?", Kurt Johnston posted this quote by Steve Jobs, the recently retired CEO of Apple:
“It isn’t the job of the consumer to determine what they want.”
That quote was still...
I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Brooklyn Lindsey entitled Why Youth Talks Keep Getting Shorter. In her post, Brooklyn talks of how she’s recently become OK with 10 minute talks, saying, “Shorter messages, intentional preaching with...