August 29, 2011 12:00 AM
Everyone in pastoral ministry has a bias. Some of us prefer deep doctrinal teaching. Others value ministry that is practical and immediately applicable. Others are all about reaching those far from God. And while there is nothing wrong with those...
July 28, 2011 12:00 AM
Back in college my professor of American religion gave us an interesting assignment. We had to visit a number of local churches, sit in their sanctuaries, and write down our observations of the spaces. Based on these observations, we...
June 9, 2011 12:00 AM
If you are an Urbanite then you know that last October church leaders gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, for the Third Lausanne Congress on Global Evangelization. It was the largest, most diverse gathering of Christian leaders in history. Our...
June 1, 2011 12:00 AM
Read Part One of Skye Jethani's article, "The Post-American Church." OBSERVATION TWO: The American Church still has a vital role to play as the global church rises. In 2008, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria wrote the best-selling book The Post-American World from...
May 25, 2011 12:00 AM
I’m seated at the front of a university lecture hall with representatives of five other religious traditions. Listening intently to the brief descriptions of our faiths are seventy undergraduate and graduate students, many hailing from other countries. Two weeks later...
May 24, 2011 12:00 AM
A week ago I returned from a trip to Spain where I was speaking with a team of missionaries working in different regions of the country. Yes, I was suffering for the Lord on a Mediterranean beach. Apart from the...
April 27, 2011 12:00 AM
“Welcome to Portland. Have you gotten high yet?” That was how Donald Miller welcomed the 600 participants of Q to his hometown. As a very “progressive” and “post-Christian” city, Portland is a colorful backdrop for this year’s Q Gathering. Much...
April 5, 2011 12:00 AM
In line with our recent discussion about the overlap in Christian and Muslim theology about God, let's talk about t he chaos that has erupted in response to the burning of a Quran by a pastor in Florida. There is...
April 1, 2011 12:00 AM
The latest issues of Christianity Today includes an interview with Yale professor Miroslav Volf about his new book Allah: A Christan Response. Volf grew up in Yugoslavia where Christian and Muslim communities have cooperated and clashed. The dedication page of...
March 23, 2011 12:00 AM
I described in a previous post how our church community shifted from a complementarian view of women in ministry to…well…something different. Of course we had to deal with 1 Timothy 2:11–12, which seems to bar women from leadership in the...
March 9, 2011 12:00 AM
I was raised and educated in church communities and traditions that held a complementarian view of women in ministry. So when I helped plant Evergreen, our community here in Portland, I did so with complementarian values. My original vision for...
February 24, 2011 12:00 AM
N.T. Wright is one of the more popular theologians today. When his views about the atonement are not stirring debate, then perhaps his understanding of the role of women in ministry will. In this video, Wright outlines the prominent role...
February 23, 2011 12:00 AM
The church is a family, and God has designated men to be the head of the family. That is the argument put forth by Bill Kynes in this Gospel Coalition video defending a complementarian understanding of the sexes. Does it...
February 21, 2011 12:00 AM
10 percent of Protestant senior pastors are women. That number has doubled in the last decade. But the issue is still debated and divisive. What role should women have in church leadership? Are certain responsibilities given to only men in...
November 12, 2010 12:00 AM
It is widely known that by 2048, if not sooner, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. Less clear is what these demographic shifts will mean for us who are living through these days...
November 4, 2010 12:00 AM
I spent Tuesday in a room in San Diego with 400 pastors, academics and ministry practitioners. There’s no shortage of Christian conferences these days, but there seems to be something exceptional represented by these folks. You might get a sense...
October 8, 2010 1:35 PM
Day Two of Catalyst began with the statement: “It’s impossible to love people and avoid tension at the same time.” Then, after an amazing spectacle, an audience participation exercise in percussion (think Blue Man Group with 13,000 people beating out...
August 30, 2010 12:00 AM
Tom Steers, founder and co-director of Asian American Ministries for The Navigators, recently wrote a guest opinion column for Christianity Today (July 7, 2010). The column is entitled, "Needed: More Monocultural Ministries". Mark DeYmaz, founding pastor of Mosaic Church of...
August 25, 2010 12:00 AM
Tom Steers, founder and co-director of Asian American Ministries for The Navigators, recently wrote a guest opinion column for Christianity Today (July 7, 2010). The column is entitled, "Needed: More Monocultural Ministries". In the opinion piece ("not necessarily representing the...
August 2, 2010 12:00 AM
Ninety-five percent African American, five percent other. These are the demographics of the Chicago neighborhood where our three-month-old church has been planted. I am “other.” White. One hundred percent white. As the pastor of this young church plant, I have...
July 28, 2010 12:00 AM
The summer issue of Leadership features an interview with Mark Dever and Jim Wallis about the role justice ought to have in our gospel ministry. Over the coming weeks we'll be posting video segments of the interview hosted by Leadership's...
June 22, 2010 12:00 AM
Read part 1 of the interview. How would describe some of the rewards of leading a multi-ethnic church to pastors who have spent their vocational lives within a homogeneous church? For eighteen years prior to planting Mosaic I served homogeneous...
June 18, 2010 12:00 AM
Mark DeYmaz is the founding pastor of Mosiac Church of Central Arkansas, author of Building a Healthy Multi-ethnic Church and co-founder of the Mosaix Network. Mark’s recently published second book, Ethnic Blends, addresses some of the unique challenges faced by...
October 30, 2009 12:00 AM
I came across an interesting interview in the recent issue of Leadership Journal. The subjects of the interview were from River City Community Church—a multi-ethnic ministry located in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. Leadership talked with Daniel Hill, who...
September 11, 2009 12:00 AM
A year or so ago, when gas prices were over $4 per gallon here in Chicagoland, something remarkable happened: people started driving the speed limit. Despite the threat of traffic tickets, commuters regularly speed by 20 miles per hour or...
June 15, 2009 8:48 AM
Clint Eastwood taught me something the other day. The veteran actor and director's latest film sheds light on the tendency by many of us to seek the cultural values of homogeneity, stability, and comfort rather than finding God in the...
April 20, 2009 8:00 AM
Stephen Colbert doesn't know his own race. The host of The Colbert Report, a satirical television news program on Comedy Central, claims to be colorblind, unable to discern his skin color. "People tell me I'm white," he said during...
April 9, 2009 12:00 AM
Sarah Pulliam at Christianity Today has just posted her interview with Rick Warren. He talks about the controversy surrounding his invocation at President Obama's inauguration, the uproar over his support of Proposition 8 in California banning same-sex marriage, and the...
March 3, 2009 8:43 AM
I've been to a lot of potlucks. Growing up in church and being a pastor has meant many, many casseroles and Jell-O salads. After a recent preaching gig at a suburban church, I was treated to an entirely different...
January 23, 2009 12:00 AM
by Dave Gibbons It's just the beginning. With the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president we are seeing what many consider a dream fulfilled. Of course there are still conflicts, and there still is racism, prejudice, and stereotyping...
June 12, 2008 12:00 AM
How multi-ethnic should your church staff be? Should churches have hiring quotas to ensure diversity? In the spring issue of Leadership, Mark DeYmaz, pastor of Mosaic Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, discusses the importance of being intentional about diversity....
April 4, 2008 12:00 AM
I recently returned to my native Arkansas - a world much less ablaze with all the conversations about emergent, missional, monastic, anti-institutional, and ancient-future Christianity. As much as I appreciate those dialogues, a heavy dose of them can obscure the...
January 28, 2008 12:00 AM
"In the modern world, we tend to reduce the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to simple systems, even when our systems flatten the diversity and integrity of the biblical witness. We reduce our sermons to consumer messages that reduce...
August 16, 2007 12:00 AM
Once an article is published in Leadership one never knows the ripple effect it will have. Greg Asimakoupoulos, pastor of Mercer Island Covenant Church, wrote for Leadership about the community-forming power of Starbucks in his neighborhood. He confesses, "We like...
February 23, 2007 12:00 AM
David Fitch's church, Life on the Vine, is a missional community that has abandoned the leadership model that most churches employ. Life on the Vine has no senior pastor, and they don't want one. In the first part of his...
January 12, 2007 12:00 AM
The upcoming winter issue of Leadership will wrestle with the meaning of a very popular word - missional. Tim Conder, pastor of Emmaus Way in Durham, North Carolina, says, "So many fellowships that once boldly self-identified as cell churches, meta-churches,...
May 25, 2006 12:00 AM
In part 2 of his post, Tony Jones addresses emerging church critic extraordinaire Chuck Colson. Colson sees the Emergent conversation as a threat to traditional Christian understandings of the "truth." Jones responds by discussing the interdependence of truth and community...
May 23, 2006 12:00 AM
In December, Brian McLaren was arrested along with 115 other activists while peacefully protesting the federal budget that he believes unfairly treats the poor. As one of the most visible participants in Emergent Village, McLaren's increasingly outspoken political views has...
