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This book has appeared on my radar from time to time, but for various reasons I’ve never blessed Amazon with my order.  But one of the guys at Soma school (Caesar K) so highly recommended it (he said “you need to get it yesterday”) that I took the plunge.  And wow, what a plunge.  I already follow Alan Hirsch – one of the authors - on Twitter, so I’m pretty familiar with him (he’s a South African Jew, now loving Jesus and living in… Read More

Everything below is cut from Matt Troupe's FB wall.  Read at your own risk! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following are some quotes from the talk I heard with Jeff Vandersteldt recently. Some are summaries and paraphrases of major points. Lots of great stuff to wrestle with. • Biblical disciples cannot be made in a classroom, and Biblical disciples cannot… Read More

I've just read, re-read and re-re-read Steve Addison's amazing little book "Movements that Change the World" (visit his web site here).  It's a dangerous book. (As a completely random aside, did you know that there's a fabulous pie shop in B'more called "Dangerously Delicious." Their t-shirt has a pie and cross bones motif that looks like this) OK, back to the book.  It's dangerously delicious.  Addison's thesis is that movements… Read More

Didn't make it to Advance '09?  Not to worry.  Here are the videos of the conference sessions.  Read More

Great post here on what Jesus did with his disciples (he took them to the streets).  Do the pastors we admire do what Jesus did?  Read More

J. D. Grear writes: "We got to baptize a girl yesterday from one of the local coffee shops we are seeing God move in. I went in there the other day, and a guy who DOESN'T go to our church said that they sometimes play our podcast in this Starbucks when they set up in the morning. That's pretty amazing. He brews." Could this happen at MY Starbucks, or at YOURS? Incidentally, last night I hung for a while at Starbucks (Vivano with espresso!).  Wasn't there 10 minutes before the couple beside me began to talk with me.  We… Read More

In Communities of Performance: 

• People talk about grace, but communicate legalism
• Unbelievers can't imagine themselves as Christians
• Broken people are driven away
• The… Read More

by Tim Chester. How can we create communities of grace? Let me suggest seven ideas:

1. Make the connections

We need to teach, speak, sing, and pray grace. But we also need to make connections for people. We can believe in justification by faith for the final day, but doubt justification by faith for the next day. On a Monday morning in the workplace… Read More

Communities of Grace vs Communities of Performance    Tim Chester Communities of performance may talk a lot about grace, but they value performance—Christians who have it all figured out, churches that run smoothly, meetings that are accomplished. And so they communicate that what matters is that you perform well. So is your community a community of performance or… Read More