What Can We Do About All the Problems? We Can Keep Showing Up
So, what do we do about all this stuff? Years of preaching and listening to sermons about how to be positive, happy, and successful definitely did NOT prepare us to endure a lengthy global pandemic, which triggered a recession, which occurred during an election year,...
2021: The Year of GOOD News?
For the last couple of months, I’ve listened as the Holy Spirit has put a phrase on my heart for the upcoming year of ministry… 2021: The Year of Good News That’s right. Good news. 2021 is definitely going to be a year of good news. It’s preposterous, isn’t it? 2020...
King Jesus Came With a Clear and Unapologetic Agenda
I’m writing this on the day after Electors met in all 50 of the United States to cast their ballots on behalf of their respective states’ votes for the presidency of the United States. It now seems like a decade ago that we were still in the Democratic...
My Confession of Faith – A Modern Creed for Worship
I’ve now been in ministry for about twenty-five years. That isn’t long compared to a lot of my heroes who are still living and serving, but it’s long enough that I’ve seen plenty of change happen within the American Christian and evangelical...
This is No Time to Preach in Neutral
In Dare to Lead, her wonderful book about vulnerability as the key to influential leadership, Brené Brown proclaims a simple and powerful truth, “Clarity is kind.” And on the other side of the same coin, “A lack of clarity is unkind.” In other...
God Put You Here for This Generation
When I was starting in ministry, I was very nostalgic and felt attached to the decades in which evangelicalism was thriving most easily in America, as if that were a better era in which to do ministry. Not only have I come to understand how that season was not a...
The Three Voices of Effective Pastoral Leadership
I grew up in a church where visiting evangelists would scream, then gasp for breath, then scream a little more. They walked around on the stage and sometimes down the aisles, red-faced and often carrying a handkerchief to wipe away the sweat they’d collected on their...
The Two Ways Jesus Gets Me Through My Hardest Days
Earlier today, I received a text from a friend who asked how I and my family were faring right now. I responded simply with, “Surviving well.” Thankfully, my friend and his family are surviving well also. How about you? Are you surviving well? As I write this, it’s...
Thoughts from One Depressed Pastor to Many, Many Others
It’s just hard! Those are three of the nicest words I’ve ever heard. When you’re hurting and sad and you don’t even know exactly why you’re so sad, but someone, instead of offering solutions or guilt trips or “snap out of it” advice just comes along and validates what...Hi. I’m Brandon.
I’m the Lead Pastor of Grace Hills Church in Bentonville, Arkansas, which my wife, Angie, and I planted in 2012. I’ve been blogging here since 2004. I formerly served as a Pastor at Saddleback Church and was the Editor and Online Community Facilitator for Pastors.com and Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox. I wrote a book called Rewired, about how churches can use social media to spread the gospel.