Category: Church
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From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in churches over the years. You walk through the door, spend a few weeks in the services, and fairly quickly you start to sense what the community values most. For some churches it’s the teaching — careful, expository, scholarly.…
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From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts Sarah sat nervously at the edge of the prayer circle. Three months into this church, she still felt like an outsider looking in — quiet by nature, uncertain of her place, more likely to slip out unnoticed than to step into anything. When the…
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A reflection on charismatic culture, pastoral responsibility, and the cost of elevating gifting above character There is a particular kind of silence that has caused immeasurable damage to the charismatic and Pentecostal church. It is not the silence of ignorance. It is the silence of people who suspected something was wrong, who perhaps even knew…
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From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts There is a theological assumption so deeply embedded in the way we think about Jesus that most of us have never stopped to question it. It goes something like this: Jesus healed people because he was God. Jesus taught with authority because he was…
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From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts There’s a particular kind of frustration that settles into a church over time. It’s not the frustration of conflict or crisis. It’s quieter than that. It’s the frustration of watching the same small group of people carry everything — Sunday after Sunday, meeting after…
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Sent, Not Self-Sent Paul was sent, he didn’t commission himself. That’s worth sitting with for a moment, because it challenges an image many of us carry without realising it — Paul the maverick, the lone genius, answering to no one but God. The reality is far more interesting. Paul was the most sent person in…
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The Women on Paul’s Team Open Romans 16 and start counting. Of the twenty-six-plus individuals Paul greets by name, at least nine are women. Not wives mentioned in passing. Not silent supporters. Women Paul names with the same language of ministry, labour, and partnership that he uses for his male co-workers. Women he calls deacons,…
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When Teams Break If apostolic teams were only ever a story of triumph, we’d have reason to be suspicious. The New Testament is too honest for that. The previous posts in this series have painted a picture of something remarkable — Paul’s divinely commissioned, gift-diverse, Spirit-formed teams achieving extraordinary things across the Roman Empire. All…
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How Apostolic Teams Form Nobody applied for a job on Paul’s team. There was no recruitment drive, no interview process, no job description circulated around the churches of Asia Minor. And yet Paul assembled one of the most effective missionary teams in history. How? The answer matters because it challenges almost every assumption we bring…
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Paul the Team Leader “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother.” Two names. One apostle. That line opens 2 Corinthians, and versions of it appear across Paul’s letters. Timothy gets named. So do Silas, Sosthenes, and others. But the pattern never varies: Paul names himself first, Paul…
