Jim Essian's Blog: JimEssian.com

3 Ways 2024 Can Be Better

Medical science and secular sociologists all realize that the American pace of life isn’t working; in fact, it’s detrimental. Sleep scientists are telling us there’s a sleep epidemic in the West. Adam Grant and Cal Newport, and other vocational sociologists, tell us our hurried pace at work is less effective, and more hours don’t equal more performance. Physical trainers tell us our body needs to recover in order to strengthen.

It’s as if woven into the rhythm of the universe is this universa...

How To Long-Suffer In Pastoral Ministry

In my home office, over the wine fridge filled with Topo Chico, coconut water, and a few good bottles I’m saving for those “new wine” moments, hang two frames. 

One is a map with our family of six churches scattered across the Greater Fort Worth landscape. The other is a black and white photograph I had professionally taken as a gift to my staff after all their hard work moving us into our new building — a building that literally changed the skyline of downtown and, more importantly, a ga...

Something Better Than Your Inner Child

We find ourselves affixed in the Age of the Autonomous Self — self-discovery, self-help, and pretty dang selfish. 

The famous are our prophets.
The gospel message is self-actualization, self-achievement, self-dependence.
The mystery is finding yourself.
The sin is losing yourself.

This Religion of Self might be cloaked in Baptist language or Hindu karma or an American spirituality that eats, prays, and loves itself to our best life now, but it’s all the same. This solo quest of “finding my t...

Revival & Rain: The Time Is Now

The world is broken. Ravaged by sin, torn apart in conflict, fractured it seems in every which way, and for the first time ever, technology globalizes each fissure and sends it straight to our phones. 

More than any generation before us, we’re inundated with knowledge, and so much of it demoralizes the heart and devastates the soul. We know more than we should know.

Anxiety is at an all-time high, and hope is at an all-time low. Like an economic bear market, the situation seems dire and in...

On Gossip

As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned. — Titus 3:10–11

We lead in a strange time. 

While the world gossips and slanders and cancels and divides, we, the Church of the Living God, are called to be different, set apart, holy even.

We are to shepherd and teach and lead our local bride in this holy matter. 

But it’s strange because we know far mo...

Men Are Called To Die

Husband. Father. Pastor. Headship. Servant leader. Whatever these words mean to you, and, more importantly, however the Bible might define them, one thing is clear…if that is you, you are called to die.

You are called to die. 

We had a conflict. I was certain I was right. Certainly I was wronged. Why couldn’t she see that? 

It was a garden variety marital spat. No big deal.

Later, she sent me this verse:

Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for ...

Men & Women in the Church: Part 1

I have so much to say — about female pastors, women teaching, male/female friendship — but for now, for this post, I just want to say this:

We’re different, but we’re not that different.

There are two things that seem to be a problem: one in the world, one in the church. One overemphasizes our equality and the other overemphasizes our differences.

Church

The church is like a perpetual 6th grade dance sometimes, you know what I mean? I have PTSD from my 6th grade dance because...

Freedom From Pain & Learning the Art of Lament

Some of my most awkward moments have been when I was present in the pain of the people I’m called to pastor, and I didn’t know what to say.

I can remember sitting in the living room of a family from the church whose infant son had stopped breathing in his swing one day, and I didn’t even know what to feel, let alone words to say. I lived across the street from a member who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and when I would visit her I felt like an alien visiting earth. Part of it is ...

Church Planting: The Mother Church

I started reading books on raising tweens and the challenges of that as they grow up into adolescence when my daughter turned 11. One comment in particular stuck out to me in a book aptly titled, How to Hug a Porcupine. The author was talking about the change my daughter is going through, the metamorphosis that’s happening in her as she’s learning how to be a big girl with big girl emotions and big girl independence, and it was talking about how my parenting of her when she was younger was suffi...

Elder Plea

This picture is an illusion. There’s actually six of us…broken men who seek the Lord and plead for our people.

The idea of elders isn’t popular right now — a plurality of male-only elders in an egalitarian, authority-averse culture hell-bent on radical individualism and autonomy.

But this group of men bleeds out for the people of our local church, and I’m honored to bleed with them.

Ray Ortlund once said, “As our whole world falls apart, may we Christian pastors be men of such obviou...