One of the greatest joys and most powerful tools I have discovered as a pastor is taking a list of the church members and praying over each person individually by name. I like to write down my prayer for each person. It's slow, it's personal, it's beautiful, and it changes me.
Preaching rule on our team: connect, don't impress.
You can't make people impressed with you and impressed with God at the same time. Pick.
The day I started living this, my sermon nerves went from anxiety about myself to productive concern for the room.
I've built a sermon rubric tool for preachers. Beta list: https://t.co/90SCwCF9wh.
"Are you seeking great things for yourself? Seek them not." — Jer 45:5
Reconnected with a high-capacity leader at a conference. Owns companies. Volunteers across five ministries at his church.
Followed up the next week. Checked on his prayer requests. Suggested reading a book together.
His response: "Thank you for asking and following up. That doesn't happen for me very often."
I sat with that. The strong people in our churches are quietly under-shepherded. They look like the helpers, not the helped. Nobody notices they're hungry.
Every leader is also a sheep.
"Esteem them very highly in love because of their work." — 1 Thess 5:12–13
Pick the high-capacity person nobody is pouring into. Send the text.
Have you made the same promise to yourself more than once and it hasn't stuck?
You know what the thing is.
You've tried to stop.
Here's where the trap begins, and where the exit is.
📲 Watch now: https://t.co/pG1nyuIBrI
#BreakingTheCycle#RezChurch#ResurrectionChurch
It's time to name what I've been working on.
I've written a book: Help, I'm In Over My Head: Notes from the Storm for Pastors Who Are Drowning.
It's for the pastor in the under-resourced church doing faithful work in places nobody is watching. The one who suspects something is off about what mainstream ministry culture is selling him but can't quite name what. I was that pastor. Most days I still am.
Thesis: God is not waiting for a better version of you. He is waiting for the desperate version. That's the one He does His best work through.
I don't have a launch date yet — I'm working my way through some publishing options. But if anything I've posted these last 45 days has resonated, get on the list at https://t.co/90SCwCF9wh. You'll be the first to know when it's out.
"He drew me up from the pit of destruction… and put a new song in my mouth." — Ps 40:1–3
This is quite interesting. I also hold that the gift of preaching and the office of pastor are separate things, but I didn't expect the difference in SBC support between the two to be so stark.
Let’s do another graph today: Among Southern Baptists, 81% agree that a woman should be allowed to preach to the entire congregation. This level of support for women preaching (81%) is higher than the SBC’s support for women pastors (29%). The difference suggests that many Southern Baptists distinguish between holding the office of pastor and performing the function of preaching. In May 2026, we surveyed 1,786 Christians who believe the entire Bible is true and asked them about women in ministry. The entire Church Answers Research report is now available as a 5,000-word long-form article. https://t.co/8XaysZdJcL
What is so interesting to me is that I would have thought my views on this matter would be more unique in the SBC. To see that what I have come to believe through scripture is relatively mainline SBC is unsettling. Not in a bad way, but perhaps because the contrarian SBC voices have been so loud that I would have thought my views were the minority.
For three years I treated the Monday after a hard Sunday as something to survive. Wake up wrecked. Drag through the day. Be useless. Lose 1 of 7 days a week — 2 months a year — to sermon hangover.
Four years ago I built a Monday-after protocol. None of it original. All of it required:
Get out of the house first thing. Walk, gym, anywhere. Move first; think second.
Don't read Sunday's text messages until Monday afternoon. Protect the morning.
Process the sermon with one person who saw it — not your spouse.
Tell your soul where to put its weight. Mine goes on Galatians 6:9.
I'm collecting the leader tools I wish I'd had.
https://t.co/90SCwCEBGJ — link in bio.
Have you you been turning something over in your head for weeks and still can't see clearly?
The kind of ✨️clarity✨️ you're looking for doesn't come from more thinking. And it's closer than you've been told...
📲 Watch now: https://t.co/imncFdlCcs
#ResurrectionChurch
TBH brother I stopped listening to you or reading most of your posts a while back. Not because you were wrong (I generally agreed with you) but because you seemed to delight too much in being right. That unsettled me because I feel like I struggle with the same issue. If this builds lasting humility, then Glory be to God. I know in my life God is still building humility. I think I do my best work for Him in my suffering.
Memorial Day is for the men and women who gave their lives for this country.
But there is a second, quieter remembrance I want to make today.
The pastor who has preached faithfully in a small town for thirty years and never been on a stage. The youth pastor who has driven the van for two decades. The bivocational pastor who never gets a sabbatical because there is nobody to cover.
You held the line where nobody was looking.
"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." — 2 Tim 4:7
The Father sees you. He always has.
Gotcha. I can see the value to this and the potential for criticism. This is probably the closest to what we functionally hold at our church, though I doubt we've ever articulated it. I can see why it could be criticized. Essentially, if someone isn't an elder and is preaching, we have already separated the office from the gifting of teaching. Which is true. There are saints that have the gift of teaching who will never be Elders including women. But then we've superimposed a new standard on congregational preaching that dodges the office prerequisite, yet still manages to exclude women.
I'm saying this as someone whose church functionally holds to this right now, but I can see the issues with this viewpoint as well.