Thoughts Across The Bow

Quick Update: We have started taking concrete steps to transition our small group into a launch team (recruiting, gathering, and building community). Juli and I attended our second church planting assessment with the Send Network SBTC. We felt like it went well. We received good feedback and learned a lot from some experienced church planters and their wives. We should hear back from SBTC in the next couple of weeks. It was an encouraging assessment and left us excited about the journey ahead. I also started the “Finishing Residency” program with the Houston Church Planting Network, which will last for about nine months.  Why Plant a Church? After transitioning from a steady career to the unknown journey of planting a church, it has generated conversations and questions. One of the questions that I received is, why plant a church? After all, there are churches on “every corner” and in nearly every town in the Bible Belt.  First, church planting is a biblical pattern that we se...

Friends and Future Partners, My wife, Juli, and I felt a call to plant a church in 2020 through the encouragement and support of our church small group in Cypress, TX. Several other couples within our church sensed a collective call to plant a church in Cypress, and we hope this small group will eventually become our launch team. The elders at our church, Redeemer Church in Tomball, Texas have also affirmed this calling and have agreed to take me on as a Church Planting Resident. I have completed my M.A. in Theological Studies, and I am working on completing a M.Div. With the encouragement of my elders, I completed the Foundational Church Planting Residency with the Houston Church Planting Network and was invited to join their Finishing Residency for continued weekly training. We also went through a formal church planting assessment and received a recommendation to plant a church. Juli and I have been married for 15 years and have three awesome kids: Janae, Piper, and Judson. ...

  A Biblical Argument for Church Membership:      Some argue that church membership is not found in the Bible. This argument further adds that having a process where the church acknowledges who belongs to the church requires a step or process not found in the Bible. The argument presented here is that membership is biblical .   The  pattern for the early church was to join a local congregation .   M embership is consistent with church discipline, consistent with church government depicted in the Bible, and honors the church that Christ built. The argument for church membership is integrally tied to the argument for attending the local church regularly and congregationalism. It is also important to note that a church is a congregation of believers which is distinct and separate from a church building. In modern America, sometimes, the two words are used interchangeably and can cause confusion. In this post, the term "church" refers to a congregation of ...

  Church Membership Biblical References: Mat. 18:17 “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Acts 2:41 “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” Acts 2:42 “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship , to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Acts 2:46 “Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts” Acts 2:47 “Praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Acts 4:32 (CSB) “Now the entire group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common.” Acts 5:11 (CSB) “Then great fear c...

  John’s Prologue: Jesus’s Unity with the Father As argued in the previous post, the Gospel of John begins with a prologue contained in John 1:1-18. John the son of Zebedee uses the prologue as a roadmap to future theological points of interest that he exposits later through historical accounts concerning Jesus’ life and ministry. This series will argue that the theological assertions specified in John’s prologue are connected to affirmations detailed later in his account. The first assertion that was examined was Jesus’s pre-existence . In this post, Jesus’s unity with the Father will be discussed. John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God , and the Word was God." In John’s prologue, he states, “And the word was with God” (John 1:1b). John uses the preposition “with” (πρὸς), which denotes spatial proximity or that Jesus was alongside God. Murray Harris explains that when πρὸς is used to describe relationships, it signifies not just proximity, but ...

  John’s Prologue: Jesus’s Preexistence        The Gospel of John opens with a simple, but theologically deep prologue (John 1:1-18). This prologue is connected to the rest of John’s Gospel account in “intimate and intricate ways.” [1] John the son of Zebedee uses the prologue as a roadmap to future theological points of interest that he exposits later through historical accounts concerning Jesus’ life and ministry. John’s prologue or introduction section, becomes an evangelistic method exhorting the reader to “believe that Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31). [2]   This series of posts will argue that the theological assertions specified in John’s prologue are connected to affirmations detailed later in his account. In particular, John explains in John 1:1-18 that Jesus is preexistent; Jesus has unity with the father; Jesus is a distinct person of the Trinity; Jesus is divine; Jesus is Creator; Jesus is Life; Jesus is Light; Jesus became flesh; John the...