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Archives for February 2017

Confessions of a Lone Wolf Church Tech


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‘Lone Wolf: A person who prefers to live, act, or work alone or independent of others.’

It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly in smaller churches. When I moved cities as part of a church planting team, I quickly and naturally spearheaded our church tech. It is my passion and gifting to serve in this capacity. However, the demands of the role and lack of team meant that I regressed to the point that I wasn’t enjoying church life and community. I had become:

The Lone Wolf Church Tech.

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Leave Room for the Analog


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A month or so ago, my wife, sister-in-law, daughter, and I bundled up and drove across the Mighty Mississippi River on a quest for a new iPhone for my wife. (Her phone’s screen had been shattered; we’re not in the habit of just buying phones whenever we want.)

After a long and frustrating evening, we decided to get dinner at a pizzeria in downtown St. Louis. Upon parking on a busy, icy street, we made our way to the restaurant. Walking along the street, we noticed that most of the nearby restaurants had their lights off. One of them had a strange looking sign tapped to its door.

I could see from the distance that the design was like anything I’d seen later, and assuming that a fancy (read “hipster) restaurant in St. Louis might be on the cutting edge, I walked over to the door, and this was what I saw:

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Public Speaking in the Church: What You Need to Know About Your Audience [Series]


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[This post is part of our series on Public Speaking in the Church.]

You cannot write a solid speech of any kind without knowing your audience. Let me repeat this, because it seems to be an aspect of public speaking many tend to forget. In order to ‘land’, your talk has to be tailor-made for your audience. That means you need to know about your audience.

I’m a long time youth worker and I speak for various youth events. Let me tell you, there’s a big difference in speaking to middle-schoolers, high-schoolers, or college-age students. That seems obvious, yet many speakers don’t consider this enough when they craft their talk. To dig a little deeper into this example, one incredible big difference between middle-schoolers and high-schoolers is the level of their abstract thinking. In middle-schoolers, this is just starting to develop whereas for most high-schoolers (especially older ones), abstract thinking is fairly normal. As a speaker, this is important because a lot of what we teach (especially on the Bible) is abstract.

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‘ABLE’ by NewSpring Worship [Saturday Morning Review]


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We’re living in the “golden age” of worship music, and I don’t say the to imply that the music that came before was inferior, though it mostly was. What I mean is that, in the past decade, the genre of worship music has been infiltrated and now dominated by artists and musicians who are actual worship teams from actual churches who are actually used to leading believers into the presence of God. That’s not to say that supergroups comprised of musicians who happen to perform worship music are terrible. I’m just rather excited to see the Church, though its many churches, as the launch pad of creativity, artistry, etc.

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