“So some have doubted.  But then in turn there were some who sought to refute doubt with reasons.  As a matter of fact, the connection was actually this: first of all they tried to demonstrate the truth of Christianity with reasons or by advancing reasons in relations to Christianity.  And the reasons fostered doubt and [...]

Mark Batterson loves Jesus.  I’ve now read two of his books, Wild Goose Chase and Primal, and the portrait I get of him is a high energy (possibly over-caffeinated, he started a coffee shop) Jesus junky.  He comes across as an adventurer in pursuit of new ways to articulate God’s love. And the good news [...]

In the next 10 days or so, we plan to close on our first house and have our first worship service as a church plant.  Both of these decisions have been big steps of faith for us.  Over the past 6 to 8 months, I’ve increasingly been making decisions that are rooted in my faith [...]

Stepping out in faith to attempt something new for God is hard.  Making the initial decision is hard, but following through with it can be even harder.  As we attempt to live into the new and scary journey God calls us to, uncertainty and fear well up in our hearts.  We wonder, can I really [...]

This week at our Community Life Gathering we are talking about money, so I’ve been thinking about it more.  Jesus uses a bunch of different analogies to describe money in Matt. 6.  He says that the way we spend money is like a window into the soul.  How we spend our money reflects the well [...]

There are a lot of poor people in Cincinnati.  I was there for a wedding earlier this year.  I was staying at a hotel in the city, so I wanted to be prepared in case I ran into any beggars.  I went to a drug store where they sold gift cards to fast food restaurants [...]

Don Miller learns to live an exciting story.  That should be the subtitle to this book.  In the process of trying to turn his Blue Like Jazz book into a movie, he comes face-to-face with the reality that he is living a boring life.  He has to sit down with the movie producers and turn [...]

When I read that God said to Abraham, offer up your son as a sacrifice, I wonder if this story should have been left out of the Bible.  What does it have to do with a loving God and his relationship with his people?  Isn’t this just at best a bizarre case of emotional manipulation [...]

It’s amazing how broken our world is.   Since I’ve started planting New City Covenant, I’ve become more aware of both my own brokenness and that of others.  I sit down with anywhere from 2 to 10 people each week and share my story and the vision of our church with them.  I also listen [...]

At breakfast one morning, a wife looks at her husband as he reads the financial page of the newspaper, just as he has done every morning for the past twenty years.  She longs to yank away the paper and tell him she is just as in love with him today as she was the day [...]