It may have come to your notice that gospel conversations with your unbelieving friend or neighbor have become more challenging in the last couple of decades. It’s not your imagination.

If Satan is doing anything of importance on my street, it would most likely be making me care too much about those yard signs, turning my heart off toward my lost neighbors, whooshing out “this little light of mine,”…

…postmodernism ushered in an age of idolatry unlike anything the world has ever witnessed; an idolatry not composed of wood and stone images, but mirrors. “To thine own self be true,” sprouted not a flourishing garden, but a weedpatch of rudderless self worship; a world in which we ourselves are gods, yet with no wisdom, holiness, or providence.

To honor those who have both made and kept America free with their very lives is a good thing. But it shouldn’t end there. The question ever before us amidst such remembrances is: To what end?

As Summer 2023 rolls in, many churches, youth groups, and teams will traverse the globe to participate in short-term mission trips. Let me state at the outset that these trips are vital to the life of Great Commission obedient churches and believers, as well as the partners they serve internationally.

We know that we ought to be obedient to the Great Commission, but it can feel like a one-way, guilt-laden pipeline, straining the limits of our church’s giving. While we may identify it as the right thing to do, it can be hard to reconcile with being the most prudent thing to do, especially when giving doesn’t meet budget projections…

While nearly every church would now define themselves as “On Mission,” what exactly that mission is, either lacks clarity or leaves much to be desired.

These perspectives most often arise indirectly, and are the slight objections that linger just beyond the spoken heart. The things many faithful churches and church members secretly believe, but wouldn’t speak aloud either so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings, or risk sounding unspiritual. They’re the elephants in the sanctuary. Friendly elephants perhaps, but elephants nonetheless.

In the wake of the “Attractional Church Model” peddled to us for the better part of two decades spanning the late 20th and early 21st century by well-intentioned church growth enthusiasts, many churches now find themselves caught between two worlds.

We are living in a time of great potential for developing missionaries with minimal interruptions to their ministries if we can approach the obstacles to training with some humility and creativity.

The contrasts of flesh and spirit are perhaps no more laid bare, than at Christmas, when the thrill of hope crashes headlong into the desperation of daily trials. Transcendent and entangled, helpless and hopeful, fragile yet fortified.

The perceived delay in the unfurling of God’s plan allows for seasons of much distraction. We find ourselves frayed and fragile, hanging on to our deferred hopes by some tenacity of will.

What does it say about us, that the most memorable of stories is one centered on Joseph and Mary fraught with anxiety?

We are crooked, and we grow in crooked ways. A training in godliness will help straighten the curves, but the curves are evident even with all of the energy exerted in the process.