Daniel Darling's Blog, page 25
November 20, 2018
The Way Home: Hunter Leavine on raising kids to be men and women of God
What does it mean to be a man of God? What does it mean to be a woman of God? In today’s culture, many parents are faced with tough conversations about gender identity. Hunter Leavine joins me to talk about this and more.
Hunter is the co-author of Gender: A Conversation Guide for Parents and Pastors[image error] and the College Director for City Church in Tallahassee, Fla.
Show Notes
Twitter: @Hunter_Leavine
Website: citychurchu.com
Book: Gender: A Conversation Guide for Parents and Pastors [image error]
The post The Way Home: Hunter Leavine on raising kids to be men and women of God appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
November 15, 2018
The Way Home: Johnny Baker on addiction and God’s grace
What steps do you taken when you have a friend or loved one suffering through addiction? Johnny Baker joins us to talk about addiction, God’s grace and how the church can meet people who suffer this way.
Johnny is the founder of Celebrate Recovery at Saddleback Church. Over the last twenty six years, over 27,000 individuals have gone through this Christ-centered recovery program at Saddleback Church. The Celebrate Recovery program is now being used in 35,000 churches nationwide. Over five million individuals have completed the program. Learn more at celebraterecovery.com.
Show Notes
Twitter: @johnbakercr
Website: celebraterecovery.com
The post The Way Home: Johnny Baker on addiction and God’s grace appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
November 8, 2018
The Way Home: Dave Furman on trials, suffering, and trusting God
What does it mean to “kiss the wave”? Dave Furman joins me to discuss trials, suffering, and clinging to faith in God.
Dave is the pastor at Redeemer Church of Dubai.
Show Notes
Twitter: @davefurman
Website: redeemerdubai.com
Book: Kiss the Wave: Embracing God in Your Trials [image error]
The post The Way Home: Dave Furman on trials, suffering, and trusting God appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
November 1, 2018
The Way Home: Catherine Parks
Catherine Parks is a writer and Bible teacher. She is the author of Real: The Surprising Secret to Deeper Relationships[image error] and the co-author of A Christ-Centered Wedding: Rejoicing in the Gospel on Your Big Day[image error].
Show Notes
Twitter: @CathParks
Website: cathparks.com
Book: Real: The Surprising Secret to Deeper Relationships [image error]
The post The Way Home: Catherine Parks appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
October 25, 2018
The Way Home: Marty Machowski on family devotions
What’s the best way to teach our kids about the Bible? Marty Machowski joins me to talk about this and to offer some helpful tips for doing family devotions. My family has found his books to be extremely helpful.
Marty serves as the executive pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills, Penn.
The Good Company is offering 30% off of ERLC titles through the month of October. To take advantage of this use code ERLC30.
Show Notes
Twitter: @MartyMachowski
Website: martymachowski.com
Book: Long Story Short: Ten-Minute Devotions to Draw Your Family to God [image error]
The post The Way Home: Marty Machowski on family devotions appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
October 23, 2018
Don’t Swing for the Fences
For a lifelong Cubs fan, there was hardly a more thrilling player than Sammy Sosa. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that he played during the scandal-plagued steroid era. At the time, I was a giddy baseball fan, tuning into WGN to hear every thrilling at bat in 1998, when Sosa and Mark McGuire competed for the home run title. Sammy’s home runs were the stuff of legend and made tuning into a baseball game on a Saturday afternoon a community event. I still hear the dulcet tones of Pat Hughes in my head, “There’s a drive, deep right field … ” and the corresponding “Yes!” from the late Ron Santo.
Sammy’s “at bats” were epic. To watch him swing was to watch a man with one purpose in mind: hit the baseball as far as humanly (and apparently chemically) possible. Sosa either whacked the ball into another zip code or struck out. But even his strikeouts were fun, watching him twist with such indomitable force.
Sammy’s “at bats” were epic. To watch him swing was to watch a man with one purpose in mind: hit the baseball as far as humanly (and apparently chemically) possible. Sosa either whacked the ball into another zip code or struck out. But even his strikeouts were fun, watching him twist with such indomitable force.
Sammy was great those years. But Cubs fans know that winning baseball doesn’t rely on super-star home run hitters alone. In 2003, when we won the division (and then lost the Division Series to the Florida Marlins in agonizing, memorable fashion after being two outs away from the World Series—thank you Steve Bartman), the Cubs were more balanced. Yes, we still had stars like Sosa. Mostly, though, the team was made up of everyday grinders like Mark Belhorn, Doug Glanville, and Paul Bako. Players who showed up every day and did their jobs without much acclaim.
Homeruns and Homilies
Ministry is very much like baseball in this way. There will be the home run hitters—exceptionally gifted preachers. But most who lead God’s people will be the grinders. The Belhorns, Glanvilles, and Bakos who show up every week and feed God’s people truth in faithful, but unspectacular fashion.
This is not an excuse for mediocrity. It’s not a rant against celebrity. Every generation has genuinely gifted servants with ministries beyond their congregations. We should rejoice at their large kingdom impact. “There many not be many noble,” Paul says. But there are some and we thank God for their giftedness.
Still, I wonder if the rest, called to grind it out and preach weekly attempt to be superstars. I wonder if we try too hard, swinging for the fences with every new sermon. When I pastored, I had to fight this weekly.
You might call this the Revival Syndrome or the Camp Meeting Syndrome. Most of us who serve in ministry have experienced one or more of these emotional, life-changing moments, where a single message altered the course of our lives. But if we were to be honest, those sermons might have been catalysts, but it was the patient daily practices of Bible reading, church attendance, prayer, and spiritual mentoring that helped the seed of spirituality blossom.
As a pastor, you want every Sunday to be this meaningful for the people in your congregation. Yet, there is something wrong if we expect every message, every worship service to be like that revival or camp meeting.
I don’t want to diminish the effect of those special moments where the Spirit does a powerful work. I thank God for those intoxicating moments of worship where I was compelled to bow in worship, to confess my sin, to move forward in repentance and renewed faith.
But most of our spiritual growth doesn’t come in the wow moments of ministry. We learn, precept upon precept, line upon line (Isaiah 28:10). Sanctification is slow-cooked and not microwaved.
A pastor must internalize this. The job of a shepherd is to feed the sheep. The delivery of spiritual food implies a steady, ongoing intake of spiritual nutrients. A good pastor does this through weekly presentations from the Word.
Some weeks will be like a banquet: powerful, emotional, ceremonial. But most will be ordinary meals: routine, and not very memorable. We might preach, in a lifetime of ministry, a handful of memorable sermons. But the reality is that that most of what we say will be forgotten by the time our people walk to the parking lot.
And that’s OK.
We should work on the craft, but we shouldn’t try to make every message a home run. The exposure of our people to faithful preaching of the Word over a lifetime of ordinary sermons will have a deeper and more lasting impact than that one emotional Sunday.
Not-so-great Expectations
If we swing for the fences every week, we end up communicating something troubling. We are subconsciously sending the message that the Christian life is lived from spiritual high to spiritual high. We set up ourselves for failure and disappointment, if some Sundays we don’t go home feeling all warm inside.
Furthermore, we exhaust our people emotionally. We set up Sundays to be the one big high that lasts the rest of the week. Church becomes, by default, performance art. If we dazzle them, we’ve won. If we don’t, we go home feeling like we’ve failed.
To preach is to provide spiritual food. We must be concerned with the diet of those we feed, providing the same balance we find in the Scriptures themselves. Imagine feeding your family the way we often approach our people. Every meal is a five-course banquet with fine China. It’s not unrealistic and exhausting.
Meals in our home are a mix of the memorable and the forgotten. Some are quick grabs on the way out the door. Others are leftovers. Some are huge affairs that require much preparation.
But the point is that we are fed well, three times a day.
A doctor would never say, “One good meal will keep you healthy for the rest of your life.” And a good pastor doesn’t say, “This one sermon will be the one that will keep you spiritually healthy for the rest of your life.”
In today’s celebrity culture, pastors must accept the fact that much of their job is unremarkable. Some will achieve fame and wide influence, but mostly pastors will faithfully, patiently guide their people to the good food of the Word.
I think we avoid a “swinging for the fences” mentality first by staying with the cadence of the text itself. Sometimes a passage will call for rich application. But other passages will be more teaching, more meat, not as easily bullet-pointed or alliterated. And as much as possible, we should resist the urge to press into a passage what we hope it says, in order to generate a desired response.
Second, we must yield our preaching to the Spirit of God. Jesus reminds us that the Spirit “blows where it wishes” (John 3:8). In other words, God uses the preaching of his word in ways he desires, and produces unexpected responses. Sermons we think might be home runs end up being solid singles. And sermons we think are destined for ignominy might be used by God to turn a heart toward repentance.
Finally, we remain faithful by remaining true to ourselves, to our gifts, to our specific callings, and to our local contexts. We must resist the pull of celebrity, to be something more than God has called us to be. I’m reminded of Peter’s words to “feed the flock of God among you” (1 Peter 5:2).
Hitting home runs is exciting. But in baseball (and ministry) the game is not won only in the big, electrifying moments, but in the faithful execution of the ordinary.
This article was originally published here.
The post Don’t Swing for the Fences appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
October 18, 2018
The Way Home: John Onwuchekwa on corporate prayer
John Onwuchekwa joins me to to talk about the calling on his life, the importance of corporate prayer, and maybe a little bit on the NBA, too.
John serves as pastor of Cornerstone Church in Atlanta, Ga. He is the author of the excellent book Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church[image error].
Show Notes
Twitter: @JawnO
Website: cornerstoneatl.org
Book: Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church [image error]
The post The Way Home: John Onwuchekwa on corporate prayer appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
October 11, 2018
The Way Home: Nancy Guthrie on the Bible, theology and teaching our kids to pray
How does the Bible fit together? How does the Old Testament fit with the New Testament? Nancy Guthrie joins me to talk about this and more. She also shares the importance of parents teaching their children to pray. Nancy teaches the Bible at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tenn.
Show Notes
Website: nancyguthrie.com
Twitter: @saysNancyGuth3
Book: What Every Child Should Know About Prayer [image error] and Even Better than Eden: Nine Ways the Bible’s Story Changes Everything about Your Story [image error]
The post The Way Home: Nancy Guthrie on the Bible, theology and teaching our kids to pray appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.
October 9, 2018
Embracing My Less than Spectacular Church
For nearly nine years I was on senior staff at one of the largest evangelical churches in the suburbs of Chicago. We were highly organized, and prided ourselves on excellence in all of our ministry outreaches.
My drive to work every day was about 30 minutes, a commute that took me past many small churches, churches I then considered insignificant. As their tiny, sometimes run-down buildings sailed by, I would think, What’s the point of these churches? Is anything even happening there?
Turns out God had a way of shaking me loose of my mega church arrogance. In a poetic justice kind of way, I found myself pastoring one of “those churches,” the seemingly insignificant, small congregations where God, in my view, wasn’t at work.
It’s been five years and I’m still the senior pastor of a small church, a congregation that may never be profiled in leading evangelical publications, one that will probably never be held up as a model ministry for church planters and revitalizers. However, I don’t consider churches such as ours as insignificant anymore. Though God is still chiseling off my big-church pride, I realize just how important all churches are to Kingdom work.
Ministry jealousy
Some have a bias against mega-churches. They see them as a symbol of everything that is wrong with today’s modern evangelical church. I don’t subscribe to this theory. And yet I have also disabused myself of the notion that unless a church is huge, the Spirit of God is absent.
I recently spoke to a longtime pastor in our area. He’s pastored large churches and small churches. Today he leads a midsize congregation. Among the valuable pieces of advice he gave me was this surprising caution. “Dan,” he said, “Watch yourself for ministry jealousy. If you read too many of the leading church growth and leadership books, you’ll slowly begin to feel that the work you are currently called to is somehow insignificant and even unworthy of God.”
This is sage advice, because I do find I have a tendency to grow discouraged after I’ve returned from a popular conference or after I’ve read the latest bestselling ministry tome. I think the discouragement comes from the knowledge that the church I now lead is not what it should be. In some ways this is healthy. Pastors must constantly be setting vision and moving their people beyond their level of comfort in fulfilling the Great Commission. On the other hand, too much exposure to the “successful” church models can breed a deep and paralyzing sense of jealousy. I think it fuels the wanderlust in pastors who, after a few difficult years, start searching for a more success-rich environment.
I’ve even been lectured by my wife, who after seeing my downcast spirit after a visit to a large church or after a conference will say to me, “If these events are going to get you more discouraged, you need to stop going.” In this way I’m tempted by ministry success like my children are tempted by things in the store they cannot have. I’ve learned, as a parent, that the more I parade my children up and down the aisles of stores whose shelves are lined with toys they cannot have, the more I have to fight their discontentment and envy. Small church pastors like me can make an idol of what we think ministry success looks like.
Where God dwells
Ultimately, ministry jealousy stems from a faulty view of God. During my time on staff at a large church, I mistakenly thought that God only worked through the most cutting edge, organized, streamlined ministries. It’s the same misguided view I carried into my experience pastoring a small church.
But Scripture tells us something far different. As Paul reminded the Corinthians, God often works through the “foolish” and “weak” things of this world. Abraham was an impotent pagan whom God raised up to father the nation of Israel. David was the least likely to succeed in his family and yet became King of Israel. Gideon was trembling in fear when the angel of the Lord called him a “mighty warrior.” Moses was well past his prime when he led the Israelites out of Egypt. The list goes on.
This is not to say we shouldn’t pray for big things to happen in our small churches. But the question is this: what do we consider big? For instance, this year we baptized eight people. For some mega churches, that’s the conversion rate of one small group in one weekend. But for these eight people in our congregation, it was a mighty work of God. Heaven’s chorus is no less triumphant over one soul than it is over thousands.
I think of the man who stumbled into our humble church a few months ago. His life had fallen apart. One of our elders led him to faith in Christ and this man’s faith has grown tremendously. Nowhere in his story will you year anything about how streamlined our programs were or how slick our Sunday morning presentations are (because they are not). What he found in our church was a relationship with Jesus Christ. He found community. He is receiving the vital words of life from Scripture that are empowering his transformation.
God is still teaching me many things as a pastor, but perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned these last few years is a simple one. God isn’t only present at the churches that get all the headlines. He’s also present at the little, seeming insignificant, less-than-spectacular churches. And I’m OK with that.
This post was originally published here.
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October 4, 2018
The Way Home: Josh Chatraw on apologetics in the 21st century
How do we speak the gospel into a culture that is increasingly secular? Josh Chatraw joins me to discuss this and more. Josh is the founding director of the Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Liberty University, and Associate Professor of Theology and Apologetics. He regularly teaches, preaches, and writes as Theologian in Residence at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, N.C.
Show Notes
Website: newcityfellows.org
Twitter: @joshchatraw
Book: Apologetics at the Cross: An Introduction for Christian Witness
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