The Outward Turn · Part One If your church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside your congregation know it was gone? Sit with that question for a moment before you answer it. Not the people on your roster. Not the families who would miss Sunday morning. Not the pastor whose livelihood depends on the…
Why the thing you’re drinking from isn’t satisfying the thirst you actually have We have a spring on the back of our property. It’s not dramatic. Just a wet spot on a hill that never dries out. Even in July when everything else is cracked and brown. Even in the winters when the temperature drops…
Why your passion is a doorway and not a distraction I have a friend whose entire world was sports. Not casually interested in sports. Completely fluent in sports. He could give you the batting average of any Reds player from 2014. He could tell you the rushing yards from every Buckeyes game he’d ever watched….
A hard reckoning about numbers, urban deserts, and what it means when a denomination forgets the difference between preserving a structure and advancing a kingdom. Last week I wrote about the sale of Concordia Ann Arbor and I asked a hard question about what it reveals when a denomination puts a price tag on a…
The grief is real. But the question underneath the grief is more important. I’ve been watching the reaction to the sale of Concordia University Ann Arbor this week. The alumni posts, the lament threads, the old yearbook photos dusted off and shared one more time. For some the grief is real. Alma maters matter. The…
Why the hunger you can’t name might be the most important thing about you There is a hunger that doesn’t have a name. You know the one. It’s not the hunger you feel at noon when you skipped breakfast. It’s deeper than that. It’s that low-grade ache, that sense that something is missing. It’s the…
Grief doesn’t end at the funeral. That’s the part nobody prepares you for. There’s a day when everything breaks open – the phone call, the hospital room, the empty chair, the lowered casket. The moment it all gets real. The moment time fractures and nothing quite holds the same weight anymore. But that isn’t the…
If you would have told me ten years ago that I’d live on 13 acres with about twenty chickens and a substantial garden, I would likely have laughed in your face. But here we are. And I’m loving it. But I will tell you that life on a farm, even a mini farm, isn’t for…
There’s a strange tension that nobody really prepares you for when the thing you’re leading grows past what you can personally hold. For a pastor, it’s the congregation. For a manager, it’s the team. For a parent, it might just be the family table getting louder and more complicated. But the tension is the same:…
Why the thing you’re chasing to fill the void probably isn’t the thing Somewhere out there right now, someone is ordering an embarrassingly expensive pizza delivery. We’ve all been there. Hungry, slightly irrational, willing to spend money or time or energy we don’t really have just to scratch the itch. The hunger takes over and…
