Darryl Dash's Blog, page 89
June 26, 2018
Preaching?: Simple Teaching on Simply Preaching
I’m not saying that all my early sermons were bad. I should have spent more time under a wise mentor, though: someone to lead me through the early years of ministry, to show me the routines, and to give me feedback so I could do better. I knew the principles; I lacked exposure to the principles applied.
Although no book can replace a mentor, Preaching? by Alec Motyer comes close. Motyer, now deceased, was a preacher, teacher, and scholar. I’ve admired his scholarship, particularly his transla...
June 23, 2018
Saturday Links
Links for your weekend reading:
5 Ways to Thrive in a Transient Church
How can we not grow wearing of doing good in a transient church? Here are five strategies I’ve learned from others in my church.
Specific Ways You Can Pray for Your Pastor
To have an insatiable hunger for God’s Word. To feed regularly & be filled joyfully from communing with God in His Word. To love his wife selflessly, sacrificially, and with a tender, servant’s heart…
June 21, 2018
Two Kinds of Pastors
There are lots of bad ways to pastor, and one counter-intuitive good way.
It’s tempting to pastor without a robust set of convictions. It’s easy to pastor while keeping an eye out for increasing one’s Twitter followers. It’s tempting to want to create a name for ourselves outside of our local church. So many things come easily that shouldn’t: appealing to the lowest common denominator, preaching to the podcast rather than the people in the pews, rushing through the week without adequately fee...
June 19, 2018
The No-Hype Truth About Church Planting
Stephen Kneale seems to have touched a nerve last week. In his excellent blog Building Jerusalem, he wrote:
I am increasingly dubious of our use of the term ‘church planter’. I am, in fact, inclined to go so far as to say there is no such thing as a church planter…
I understand why the term is applied to those who have been sent off as leaders of core teams to establish new churches. But once you have sent a group of people, established regular meetings at which the Word is being faithfully...
June 16, 2018
Saturday Links
Links for your weekend reading:
On Feeling Like a Failure and the Power of Affirming Words
As expressions of God’s relentless pursuit in each other’s lives, we want to convey, “I see you, and I see God working in, around, through, and for you.”
3 Reasons to Stay in a Church That’s Not Cool Enough
I’d like to argue for three reasons to do the very countercultural thing of actually staying in the church that’s simply not cool enough.
Fauxnerability in the Church: What Is It? What Do We Do A...
June 14, 2018
A Vision for Getting Older
Something strange happens as you get older. You get a little smarter, primarily because you learn from all the mistakes you’ve made over the years. Essentially, though, you’re the same. But people start to look at you differently. They think you know more than you do, simply because you’ve lasted. We gain credibility simply by remaining faithful over a prolonged period of time.
It’s a good goal: not to do great things, but to remain faithful. We’re not good judges of what’s a great thing, and...
June 12, 2018
A Better Kind of Love
I thought of D.A. Carson at a U2 concert last week.
U2’s concert began and ended with love. “Love and love is all we have left, The only thing that can be kept” Bono sang before we could even see him. The second last song returned to the same theme: “Love is bigger than anything in its way.”
It’s a powerful theme, especially in contrast to hatred. A video montage in the middle of the concert displayed scenes of racism and hatred. The tension broke as the scenes showed scenes from the Martin L...
