Essays from an earlier season — mostly written while I was a bi-vocational pastor outside Philadelphia, on ministry, leadership, and suburban life. It isn't where my thinking lives now, but people still find these and still write to me about them, so they stay up. For current work, see Letters from the Front Porch.
I just bought a Sodastream and it has already made me a better person. I am now one step closer to sainthood because of it. This is not a hyperbolic statement. This morning, in a brilliant epiphany,…
January 12, 2021 · 1 min readIn our noisy, busy, over informed world, you can still create social media, email and marketing campaigns that will actually be opened and read by your donor base and community (and raise more money in the process)
February 27, 2020 · 2 min readIf you are like me, your resolutions (whether they are for the New Year or not) constantly fail. Let's look at three successful elements of what makes lasting change possible.
December 28, 2016 · 8 min readA friend messaged me this afternoon... I call this PPSD. Post Pastoral Stress Disorder. Here's a challenge: Don't only meet with your pastor when you have something to complain about. In my…
November 5, 2015 · 1 min readFor the last 14 years that we have been married my wife and I have been living in the Philadelphia area. If you count the 4 years at college, we’ve been here for 18 years. For 13 years we have been…
June 23, 2014 · 2 min readI think the following is a fair statement: One of the most individual things done in churches these days is preaching. To be kind, this seems unfortunate. While I do not generally think that sermons…
February 7, 2013 · 3 min readI started working at The Well 1 year out of college. That was 2001. Since then, it has been quite the journey. It's fascinating (to me at least) to look at how I have grown as a Christian and as a…
April 29, 2012 · 9 min readI prepared this for a leadership call I did with some close friends in the Ecclesia Network. Many of us have found Edwin Friedman's book, The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix…
February 27, 2012 · 2 min readI've been working on the following thoughts for the last year or so and I am honestly apprehensive to even publish this because it has morphed and changed so much over the last year. It's far from…
October 21, 2011 · 27 min readI was told in seminary that I should spend 1 hour of sermon prep for every minute I will be preaching. For many of us that means we should spend 20-30 hours preparing sermons? This approach poses…
August 9, 2011 · 5 min readTonight, I stood in front of 300 people, about 290 of whom I had never met before, and did my best to deal with the reality that their 26-year-old brother, son, nephew, and friend had taken his own…
November 29, 2007 · 6 min readBelow is a paper I wrote in an effort to give an introduction to Mission in a Suburban Context. I presented this paper at the Eastern Region Evangelical Theological Society meeting on March 23, 2007.…
March 23, 2007 · 24 min read