No, applying John 13 today isn’t about church leaders accepting menial tasks, but about church leaders accepting ridicule and embarrassment, about not being respected in society, and not needing the affirmation of their peers. It’s having their ambitions exposed and extinguished. It’s abandoning their desire for a bigger audience, larger platform,

The theologian Paul Tillich declared that faith is “the state of being ultimately concerned.” He argued that because each person has something of ultimate concern that defines their life and identity, all people are religious—even the atheist. Every person has something in their life that functions as their god. For some, this god-function is occup

Consider our fixation on megachurches over the last 30 years. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with megachurches, but have we been naive about their fragility? Like Goliath, their size and influence project an image of enduring strength, and yet a sad number of megachurches have been brought low in recent years by often small, for

That’s when we might discover it’s the churches we’ve dismissed as weak and insignificant—the small, decentralized, anti-fragile networks of disciples found throughout the rest of the world—that courageously step forward like David to face the challenges of our time.

The Church of Jesus is without question the most anti-fragile system in world history.

Rather than a fearful huddle of believers worried about what Herod, the Romans, or those pesky liberal Sadducees might do, the early Christians appeared to actually believe Jesus when he said the gates of hell, nevermind the IRS, would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).

1. Pause and collect yourself.


2. Process by naming your emotion.


3. Plan by assessing your skills, capabilities, and resources.


4. Proceed , treating your next steps as experiments and adjusting as you go.

The question for those of us in the West, and particularly in America, is this—Why have we chosen to construct such fragile church systems? Why do we build ministries that rely upon a single fallible leader, one dynamic speaker, or that require massive and unsustainable amounts of money? Our devotion to fragile systems means as the pace of cultural

Too often I look for my desires to be met in God’s good gifts rather than in God himself. I don’t want to dismiss the wonderful things I have received from his hand, just as David is not minimizing the value of green pastures and quiet waters. Still, there is an infinite qualitative difference between the gifts and the Giver; between the green gras