I am a pastoral coach. I have the joy of pastoring young pastors every day, all day, pastors of all kinds: lead pastors, church planters, staff pastors, missionary pastors, and even pastors-of-pastors. I love what I am called to do with my life because I love pastors and I love and greatly respect every one […]
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the local church in Wittenberg, Germany, 95 reforms he believed necessary to revitalize the universal church and restore Jesus to His rightful place as Savior and Lord in church doctrine and life. In effect, Luther grabbed the church by the throat & […]
Culture is imploding, collapsing in upon itself. Denying all absolutes and objective truth, culture is now without safeguards, consuming itself in a death spiral of spiritual and moral chaos. In his outstanding essay, “The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World,” David Wells writes: “The evangelical church has a sense that moral absolutes are evaporating […]
QUESTION 7: JOURNEY’S PASTORS OFFER THEIR THOUGHTS With the national conversation shifting to the question of ending the quarantine, pastors find their burden not lifted, but shifted as well. And deepened. As they shepherd their people in quarantine, they are asking how they will Psalm 23-shepherd through the transition back to normal. They are asking […]
QUESTION 5: Will pastoral ministry be primarily prophetic or merely visionary? Will the eternal or the temporal define pastoral ministry? Students of Scripture and world history are not surprised by challenges like COVID. We may not have foreseen this particular test, but neither are we surprised by it. The Bible tells us that we live […]
QUESTION 4: Will Ephesians 4.12-16 pastoral ministry make a comeback? Many pastors are very good at doing ministry alone, and so, they think doing ministry alone is best. They create, plan, strategize and implement their ideas well, so each one asks himself, “Why do Ephesians 4.12-16 when I can do it better?” We’ve all heard […]
As a pastoral coach, I spend countless hours in conversation with our ministry’s target group, young ministers. It’s who we are; it’s what we do. And it’s a joy. These conversations are focused on helping our members in their ministry lives. Through regularly scheduled and special phone calls, I join their journeys and help them […]
I remember the anxiety that filled our nation. People were dying. We knew the name of the infection that was killing them. But we didn’t really know how the disease was spreading. And killing. And because we didn’t know with certitude, the rumor mill raced in to fill the void. The black hole of curiosity and […]
When we were children, we carefully wrote our Christmas wish lists. Some of us even kept lists throughout the year. As Christmas approached, we would share them with our parents, telling them, “If I could just have these gifts I’d be happy for the rest of my life!” At eight years of age, I remember saying, “If […]
I received the following two horror story phone calls in one week. Call #1: A Young Staff Pastor in Shock. Without warning, he had been fired by his senior pastor the day before. No notice or signs. None. No indications that anything was wrong. From the day he was hired, no one, not his pastor […]
© [2015] — Journey Pastoral Coaching