I participated in mission trips as a kid and then worked for a mission trip organization in college. Both ends of the spectrum had a profound impact on my faith. Neither equipped me to plan a trip from start to finish.
My first year in ministry, I...
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...
The idea of Rachel Held Evans' book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, is simple. For a year, Rachel took the Bible literally, focusing on one specific command (targeted at women) each month. It's not an entirely new idea. A.J. Jacobs did it in The...
In her address to the Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama said, “We are playing a long-game here." Though the First Lady was, of course, talking about the long-term political agenda of the Democratic party, I believe she...
In our culture, everyone wants to be great.
Students do. Their parents do. And if we're honest, we do too.
For this reason alone, Steven Furtick's new book, Greater, will gain an audience. After all, how awesome would it be if our faith in Jesus...
A year ago, I visited Kiziba Refugee Camp in western Rwanda.
This camp is home to more than 20,000 refugees from the Congo, where an on-going civil war has resulted in the death of more than 3 million people. It is a conflict rarely talked about...
About a month or two after returning from a summer mission trip, I typically hear mission trip participants say these things:
"I don't feel God here like I did there."
"I'm forgetting things."
"It's starting to fade."
A member of my church council recently asked me, “What do you feel is the key to our church keeping you as our youth worker?”
To me, this is an interesting question, one I believe is often overlooked in favor of it's close relative, “When and why...
While on vacation, I saw this sign, an advertisement attempting to lure passerby's into a shop because of it's “cool stuff”. Each time I passed this shop, I was struck by how much this shop's advertisement mirrors the way we so often do youth...