Category: Uncategorized

  • advent 2024

    advent 2024

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    Today is the first Sunday of Advent. In our home, we read the first story of the New Testament in The Book of Belonging. It begins, “We are called Beloved, but we feel forgotten.” I love that the first story in the New Testament enters into the Advent season without being shy about the turmoil…

  • cultural translation of the gospel

    cultural translation of the gospel

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    In seminary, I was part of a program that was a partnership between The Newbigin House of Studies and Western Theological Seminary that focused on urban church planting. During the course of my studies, there was a work that was central to our program: The Ephesian Moment. It’s an essay/chapter in The Cross-Cultural Process in…

  • two dangers to avoid in cultural translation

    two dangers to avoid in cultural translation

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    For the past several weeks, I’ve been slowly writing a long post about the cultural translation of the gospel for today with reference to Andrew Walls’s Ephesian Moment. It’s gotten long. And as I’m editing, there’s a large portion that pains me to cut because I spent so much time writing it so now it’s…

  • Summer of Renewal

    Summer of Renewal

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    I recently saw a friend who had been present throughout the chaos of the past year. He wasn’t present for every step of the unfolding, but because he only saw and sees me intermittently, he was able to say that I looked genuinely happier than I’ve had in the past year. That’s a good sign…

  • The AI Powered ImPastor

    The AI Powered ImPastor

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    I was recently in a room with other pastors taking a look at some new AI tools designed to help day-to-day work. We were trying out a few AI tools with a similar feature set: essentially the tools would take a sermon manuscript (or produce a transcript from an audio recording), and from that source…

  • Imagining a different church

    Imagining a different church

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    I’ve recently been diving into the practices of the early church: learning about its structures, how they organized, their worship practices, and their relation to the world. I’ve been reading up on their writings and tracing their history. How did they form new disciples? What practices were taught? What was central to their identity? and…