God Is My Strength: Reflections on God’s Faithfulness During a Dark Time
“The Lord God is my strength, And He has made my feet like deer’s feet, And has me walk on my high places.” (Hab. 3:19, NASB) How was your high school experience? I did not enjoy mine at all. I was bullied over my skin color and disparaged by my teachers for not being as smart as...
Rahel bint Younas
Philosophy Questions: What Is the Definition of Knowledge?
What is the definition of knowledge? The historic definition is that knowledge is “justified true belief.” This means that we know something if 1) it’s true, 2) we believe it, and 3) we have good reason to believe it (i.e., we are “justified” in believing it). Since everybody believes that what they believe is true,...
Daniel McCoy
Social Justice from the Left and the Right
Within the Church (broadly speaking), there are two groups of people. Not everyone in the Church fits into one of these groups. In fact, many people in the Church are a little weirded out by these two groups. This is largely because the people in these two groups tend to be agitators. They stir things...
Chad Ragsdale
Who Am I? An Exploration of Our Identity as Human Beings
Who am I? Our identity is that we are image bearers of the God who created us. This means that to be human means to be relational, to uniquely reflect God’s attributes, and to rule over creation as representatives of God. The 20s/30s ministry at my church is going through Mark Moore’s Core52 for the...
Gavin Andrews
Prayer of Repentance: Learning U-Turns from Nehemiah
What’s a prayer of repentance? In the Bible, “repentance” means a change in mind and behavior so that we go from doing whatever we feel like to living for God and doing what he says. So, a prayer of repentance is a prayer admitting that we have made wrong decisions and done wrong actions and...
Daniel McCoy
Structuring Churches for a Better Kind of Growth
A while back a friend of mine, a pastor of a growing church, asked me for some advice about what next hires he should make in order to help his church keep growing. His church had about 450 people attending regularly, and he wanted to know a good hiring strategy for growth. I was a...
Christopher Barras
Singleness in the Bible: A Q&A with Pieter Valk Exploring the Gift of Singleness
Is the theme of singleness in the Bible? While we find romance and marriage celebrated in the Bible (e.g., Song of Solomon), we also find lifelong singleness described as a gift and calling from God for some Christians. What are we to make of the fact that both Jesus and Paul, themselves single, celebrated the...
Daniel McCoy
Prayer & Fasting Sermon Tools
Would you like to help your church develop serious rhythms of prayer and fasting? To help churches engage with the principles and practices in David Roadcup and Michael Eagle’s Prayer and Fasting: Moving with the Spirit to Renew Our Minds, Bodies,…
Renew.org
A Principled Approach: What DMMs Know and Are Teaching Us
In recent years many of us in church leadership have begun paying attention to what is happening in Disciple Making Movements (DMM). If you are unfamiliar with DMM, let me give you the definition that Discipleship.org has developed. A Disciple Making Movement may take a few years to be established, but once it is, the...
Paul Huyghebaert
Renew Church Planting: You Can Join the Movement! (Part 1 – Interview with Brett Andrews)
We are excited to announce Renew Movement—a church planting movement that is being birthed in partnership with Renew Network. Brett Andrews and Todd Wilson are two key catalysts for this new movement. Brett himself is a church planter, planting New Life Church thirty years ago in Northern Virginia. His church has gone on to help...
Brett Andrews
Racial Tension and the Church – Louisville Regional Gathering
At the Louisville Regional RENEW.org Gathering in 2022, five church leaders sat down together to discuss current cultural topics churches face. They were RENEW.org’s point leader Bobby Harrington; Anthony Walker of Hwy 231 Church of Christ; Nate Ross of Northside…
Frankenstein & Monsters of Our Own Making
As a child, I enjoyed terrorizing myself by staying up late on Friday nights and watching scary movies. Most of the movies were old Hollywood classics and one such film was the 1931 version of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, based on the 1818 classic novel by Mary Shelley. The movie’s mute and murderous monster scared this...
Christine Davis
Sermon on the Mount: Don’t Worry
Storing up treasures in heaven makes sense. Serving God and not Mammon is obviously the right choice. But if you follow this train of thought all the way, it brings up a problem. You still need to eat. In fact, you have all kinds of practical, material needs. What about those? “So,” you could ask...
Jeremy Bacon
Infant Baptism: Does the New Testament Teach Paedobaptism?
Does the Bible teach infant baptism (also called paedobaptism)? Many denominations of Christianity practice infant baptism, but an exploration of the Scriptures describing baptism and its purpose challenges the practice. Baptism in Scripture involves internal factors such as belief and repentance which do not fit infant baptism. There was a young couple talking about marriage....
Who Was Caleb in the Bible? Spy, Soldier, and Settler
Who was Caleb in the Bible? Caleb is best known as one of the 12 spies sent by Moses on a reconnaissance tour of the land of Canaan. The reason we know Caleb’s name (and not the others such as Igal, Palti, or Sethur) is that Caleb, along with Joshua, dissented from the other ten...
Daniel McCoy
Summary of Philippians: Understanding the Basics of Philippians in the Bible
Here is a short summary of Philippians: Philippians was written by the apostle Paul to thank the Philippians for the special offering they had sent him while he is under arrest in Rome and awaiting trial. In addition to thanking them for the gift, he updates them on his circumstances modeling how to evaluate one’s...
John Whittaker