Leadership and Faith
What do you call a leader without any followers? Somebody out for a walk
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Two Kinds of Power: Why Love Is Stronger Than Control
We are living in a moment where power matters more than ever. But there are two kinds of power: the power to control and the power to love. Which one shapes your life?mili
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Following Jesus: More Than Willpower, Knowledge, or a Miracle
Following Jesus isn’t about willpower, more knowledge, or waiting for a miracle. Real transformation happens through practice—choosing daily to live His way. Fasting and prayer train us to rely on God rather than our own strength, reshaping our desires and opening us to deeper joy, freedom, and connection with Him.
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Don’t Be a Christian—Be a Disciple
Who is Jesus to you? Jesus never called people to be Christians—he called them to follow him. Following Jesus isn’t about belief alone; it’s about reorienting your entire life around him. True discipleship means being with Jesus, becoming like him, and doing as he did. Will you follow him fully?
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Stepping off the Pedestal
Over the last seventy years, we’ve built a personality-centric church model. We have discovered, unsurprisingly, that a great way to have a growing church is to have a charismatic personality as the leader with a well-defined status ladder that people with the most negligible status can aspire to climb. Over the last decade, this approach to Christian Ministry has repeatedly failed. I am sure that Ravi Zacharias, Bill Hybels, Mark Driscoll, Brian Houston, Mike Pilavachi and Jean Vanier did not plan for their ministries to end as they did; however, each one found themselves atop status ladders that crumbled. The implosion of a status ladder is not a small thing.…
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Do you have a dream like Martin Luther King Jr.?
Martin Luther King Jr. shared a dream that changed the world. Like never before we need leaders who can do likewise. This is how you do it.
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The politicians who failed to take action in America, actually made a choice to allow mass shooting events to happen.
We had only been in Canada a matter of weeks when a deranged gunman massacred innocent children at Sandy Hook elementary school. Our family stayed transfixed and bewildered by what we were seeing. We were sure that now, finally, Americans would take action on gun control. We were wrong. As an Australian, and particularly a Tasmanian, the repeated suggestion that introducing tighter gun control would have no impact on tragedies like this seems wilfully, and perhaps culpably ignorant. We had a sickening tragedy here. Our then Prime Minister bravely stood in the face of opposition and changed the law. I distinctly remember his decision to stand in front of an…
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At a time when politics is incredibly polarised, I witnessed a moment of hope.
On Wednesday I attended a remarkable breakfast. At a time when politics is incredibly polarised, I witnessed a moment of hope. For the last few years, I don’t think anyone would disagree that we have seen the fabric of democracy fraying in a way that seems very serious. The core of the damage seems to be that we have lost trust in the people who are supposed to lead us, and in particular, we have lost trust that those people will tell us the truth. Our politicians are operating in an environment of profound mistrust… and no matter what they do they seem unable to break through the dark veil…
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Social issues really do matter, however they are not the main challenge for the church.
Following Jesus: More Than Willpower, Knowledge, or a Miracle
Reflecting, learning and listening to that part of you ready for the new adventure that God lays before you today is the only way to having a full life.
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Social issues really do matter, however they are not the main challenge for the church.
It is interesting coming home into what feels like a highly charged political environment. Things feel very polarised both globally and nationally. There is a strange sense of foreboding at the moment as it looks like America and North Korea are, day by day, inching closer to a cliff and at the same time, a vitriolic debate about same-sex marriage is dominating talk radio and social media. Polarisation is not new, but it does feel like this is different. It feels like the whole nature and question of democracy is at stake at the moment. One of the big differences between Australia and the U.S. is that the fragmentation here seems to be…
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If we are not continually seeking and learning and changing, we are not actually followers of Jesus, and we are certainly not seeking first the Kingdom of God.
It is Saturday morning and I am preparing for my first “normal” Sunday as the Senior Pastor of Citywide Baptist church. As I was reflecting on what my first sermon should be about, I realised that it needed to come back to what has been the central question of my life since Leeanne and I were married: What does it mean to seek first the Kingdom of God? Regular readers of Faith Reflections will know that Leeanne and I had Matthew 6:33 engraved on our wedding rings after deciding that we wanted that truth of that verse to be our point of orientation for the rest of our lives. Only 11…
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Anderson Cooper is biased, he just hasn’t realized it yet. (So are you…)
It is hard for an Australian to really comprehend the forces that shape the thinking of Americans. While Australia certainly has it’s fair share of irresponsible media coverage, divisive issues and poor leadership, the country as a whole is actually fairly whole. Pauline Hanson is not Donald Trump (no matter what she believes), Centrelink is not Obama Care and Crikey is not Breitbart. To be honest our politics is much less interesting… in a good way. America is divided in a way that Australia simply isn’t, so I have spent the last four and a half years in North America a bit bewildered by what I see on CNN, Fox News and…
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Do you have a dream like Martin Luther King Jr.?
If we are not continually seeking and learning and changing, we are not actually followers of Jesus, and we are certainly not seeking first the Kingdom of God.
Reflecting, learning and listening to that part of you ready for the new adventure that God lays before you today is the only way to having a full life.
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Reflecting, learning and listening to that part of you ready for the new adventure that God lays before you today is the only way to having a full life.
This is my favourite week of the year. We had a really enjoyable Christmas day, except for the moment when it appeared that our little dog might be a casualty of the Christmas dinner. My son Josh put together a documentary of the day, including the last minute dash to the vet, which he would be very pleased for you to check out. (I’m not sure how I feel being on youtube in my dressing gown…) The week between Christmas and New Year is an oasis in a calendar of busyness. Here in Canada many offices close as a matter of course, giving staff a week off without having to…
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We were reminded by a New York Billionaire that it is words and not ideas that change us.
A while ago I spoke at church about the importance of letting the bible shape your identity. It felt like an important message about how we need to find our identity in the biblical story. On Tuesday, from the comfort of the Lake Louise Chateau Hotel, I watched Donald Trump become President-Elect of the United States because he had learned to tell a different kind of story. Leeanne and I were in the mountains for the annual Prayer Retreat for the Western Canadian District of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Donald Trump was elected President, thanks largely to winning the votes of 81% of White Evangelical Christians. In the weeks leading up to the…
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It’s tiring if you play a role to maintain a good image. One day your true character will be discovered.
The major capital city newspaper, writing about the upcoming election, wrote “hate speech has gotten out of control.” While they could have been speaking about some of the more extreme things we have seen coming out of the most bizarre U.S. election any of us have ever seen, they weren’t. They were talking about the upcoming Gubernatorial election in Jakarta where the first ever Christian to hold the office is facing massive and violent opposition from hardline Islamists. I met Governor Basuki back in 2006, and the meeting was inspirational. I imagine it would have been similar to meeting a young William Wilberforce who had a sense of call to politics, not…
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We were reminded by a New York Billionaire that it is words and not ideas that change us.
Do you have a dream like Martin Luther King Jr.?
Reflecting, learning and listening to that part of you ready for the new adventure that God lays before you today is the only way to having a full life.
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If we truly want peace, we need to stop dividing the world into “us” and “them”
Media outlets in North America have become experts at this. A tragedy happens, amateur social media videos are lined up one after the other, professional “experts” give their paid opinions and reporters stand in locations they have never been, acting like they know what they are talking about. Everyone is looking for answers, hoping that this will be as simple as the good guys versus the bad guys. It never is. Like normal, people are trying to reduce complex issues to simplistic stereotypes. Right now there are loud voices proclaiming that the whole problem is either the police, the #BlackLivesMatter movement or Barack Obama. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be…
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I love the heart, vision, challenge and pathway that I am seeing.
There was a two week period where I attended two conferences that were quite different but at the same time similar, and influenced by a very challenging author and what I was preaching about at the time. The first conference was the National Assembly of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. That was followed by the Deepening Community conference hosted by the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. While I was doing all this I had also been continuing to preach through Ephesians chapter four and was processing two books by Danny Silk (Culture of Honor and Keep Your Love on) which have been challenging and inspiring. These diverse experiences and inputs somehow wove…
