I write this on an Amtrak train returning from a 4th of July weekend with my young adult son in New York City.  We are headed to DC for fireworks tonight before he flies home tomorrow.  He and I had great fun in New York.  I had never seen Times Square at 2 am, but when you travel with a 21-year old, you shift into a slightly different time zone.  Yesterday, after we watched the Yankees toast the Toronto Blue Jays (in about 97 degrees), we noticed that our subway train back to Manhattan was headed ultimately to Coney Island.  Neither he nor I had ever been to Coney Island, but we had read all kinds of stories and seen movies about it - so we said, “Let’s just stay on the train all the way to the beach,” About ninety minutes later (we were riding the local) we arrived in this large railway terminal on the lower coast of Brooklyn, with thousands of people pouring out of trains onto the beach and into the amusement parks of Coney Island. 

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“Beware ministry on the cutting edge; because on the cutting edge you bleed.”  I’m told this piece of advice was circulating more than a decade ago, in the church growth movement, among mega church staff people.  The idea was this — better to play it a bit safe when trying to grow a mega church.  Let someone else experiment.  Use the tried- and-true methods that are working to grow your church — and don’t take too many chances.  This advice may have worked in the 1990’s of fast growing suburban church planting; but in my world, the words take a different twist.

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Another Path 1 staff member and I recently spent a week traveling through parts of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference which includes Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Among the hundreds of well established churches there I learned of a couple new and innovative church starts that really captured my attention.

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At the center of the blitz of new United Methodist church development that is swirling around Chicagoland, there is a village.  Actually, there are two. (more…)

On the first day of autumn it seems appropriate to talk about new beginnings. Today marks a new beginning for me as I enter the world of blogging. Journaling, I’ve done – regularly – for about twenty years. Blogging? Now, that’s another story. Sharing my private thoughts on the web for anyone to see? Are you kidding?!?! That’s why I have a journal - it’s just between me and God. But here goes… GULP.

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The reasons are obvious to me and everyone who knows me! It certainly doesn’t take much explaining. I know the reasons I am not God—gross deficiency in things like omniscience, transcendence, omnipotence and such. Like every other human being who has touched terra firma I want to be God, I really do—to control my life, the circumstances around me, other people (especially in traffic) and even the One who is the Alpha and Omega. This is the very root of sin isn’t it? The desire and the intention to be God or at least control God.

There are moments where I am made more keenly aware that I am not God—not even close. Sunday morning was one of those epiphanies for me. I was dragged to visit a little church that was thought (by the denominational powers that be) to be dead. My wife, who works for our district, was asked to pay a surprise visit to this tiny outpost and report back any signs of life. I was an unwilling accomplice; but because I love my wife I was obedient.

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Sometimes people ask us what new church starts is really all about. We have many answers, but all of them lead to the fact that healthy new churches make more disciples, more young disciples and more diverse disciples who transform the world. Recently we heard that one of our newer church starts got the attention of their community by challenging all local churches to a food drive smack down (our words, not theirs).

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