Personal

Don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but the Supreme Court decided this week that it would be OK for local governments to take private property against the will of the landowner to develop it as they see fit. In the case in question it is to create a commercial center that will raise tax…

KEEPING CHURCH SIMPLE – PART 1C I finally realized that the problem with the church was a personal problem! But intertwined in our structural and theological rediscovery of church was an even more primary piece to the puzzle. The puzzle had so many pieces in place, but the center piece was still missing. And as…

KEEPING CHURCH SIMPLE – PART 1B I then suspected that the problem with the church was a theological problem. I had only been in Las Vegas for a few months when my fellow Apex leaders and I began sensing some issues brewing beneath the surface of our seemingly “successful” church. These issues would have been…

KEEPING CHURCH SIMPLE – PART 1A I next suspected that the problem with the church was a cultural problem. After college, I spent five years involved in church planting in the New York City Metro Area. Part of that time I spent on a church-planting team in the New Jersey suburbs. The remainder of that…

A friend of ours who currently resides in Las Vegas, NV has been on an interesting journey over the past several years. He has chronicled a bit of that for a class he was teaching at a mid-western Bible college. He shared that paper with us when we were out there in October last year,…

We went to see the trains last night. Among many other family night events. This break from our previous busyness of gigging and serving and doing and being everywhere has been so amazing. So refreshing. So great for our family, I believe. We spend every evening either together as a family, exploring our town or…

“A 44-year-old woman from Monroe County was killed today as an automobile driven by a former Olympic Medalist missed a stop sign and collided with her vehicle. The driver of the other vehicle was not hurt.” “Police say three men were fatally wounded as gunfire broke out in a downtown neighborhood around 1am Monday night….

On the lighter side of things today, this a stream of conciousness at lunch from the mind of our three-year-old son, Alex: (I mentioned something about God… then Alex says:) “I call him JE-sus. [to Dad] Sometimes, you call him Jesus. You can call him Jesus, too. Mom can call him Jesus, and You can…

Perhaps the thing God is teaching me the most at the moment is to respect the choices and decisions and lifestyles of other people. To really allow them to choose what they think is best for their lives. Whether it is meaningless like the insane compulsion to use inferior computers when Apple computers are far…

You know we live through long, cold winters when at the first sunny evening we will stand in long lines outside the door of our favorite local ice cream shop even though the temps haven’t been out of the low sixties for the entire weekend. The weather is definitely one thing I do like about…