My Critics
Some people find me and/or my views offensive, dangerous, or unwise. I will post their critiques on this page to give my friends a look at the “other” side of my life, and in hopes of remaining accountable to the larger Christian and non-Christian communities. Also, the “Comments” section of this page will give anyone who takes issue with me a public space in which to note their objections. After all, people usually listen to my talks without a comfortable way to offer negative feedback (which I may deserve), so it only seems fair to make a public venue available for critique. In general, those who find me subversive tend to suspect that my friendship with the Emerging Church means that…
ContinueLeadership, Followership, and Mission
Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big personality” so often identified with leadership. He described himself as “leading from the middle,” that is, bringing people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that produced results but not heroes. Talking about this issue brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus. We began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different approaches to…
ContinueThe Demise of Illusions
A famous historian once said the most dangerous form of ignorance is the illusion of knowledge. This maxim has become very real to us as we prepare for our campus church project in Berkeley. On our journey, Janet and I have stumbled over three kinds of “knowledge” (so far) that have all proven to be illusion in their own way. 1. The Google Illusion: During the very anxious season when we were considering becoming planters, we comforted ourselves by doing research about the campus and community at Berkeley. Along with millions of others, we turned to Google to discern the answers to life’s questions. What we found was a huge quantity of information about our potential plant site. We learned, for…
ContinueFree Fall
Leaving the conference room at the end of our last church plant screening interview, I felt like a parachutist taking that first big stride out the airplane door. Up until that moment, my resignation from our Seminary and the sale of our house had still seemed sort of hypothetical. But this committee’s affirmative vote completed a long approval process that finally made our transition into church planting concrete. In our system, we raise personal and project budgets for as long as it takes before the plant actually begins. In other words, we are self employed with a capital “S,” a radical departure from the institutional cocoon of higher education… It feels like free fall. One step and you’re hurtling downward through…
ContinueTPE Interview: The Road Less Traveled
This online interview with Ken Horn, Managing Editor of Today’s Pentecostal Evangel (The AoG national magazine) deals with my book, Off-Road Disciplines, and includes a link to a supplementary audio interview.
The New Bohemians
Not long ago, Janet and I had a long talk with a twentysomething man I’ll call Zeke, who manages a local coffee house during the days. At night he assumes another identity as a musician in an AltCountry band (a genre that he says fuses country music with an alternative rock vibe to create a new sound). I’ve heard his band in a show (and liked their music) so we started asking Zeke questions about culture, music, and spirituality. The motivation to ask the first question is the difference between mind-blowing learning experiences and just another jolt of caffeine. What we heard described “Bohemia,” a distributed nation with representatives in most major US cities, but with concentrations in places like the Bay area,…
ContinueTodays Pentecostal Evangel Podcast
In September of 2007 my friend Ken Horn, Managing Editor of Today’s Pentecostal Evangel (The AoG national magazine) interviewed me for a podcast about our church planting project in Berkeley.
We Receive US Missions Approval!
On July 10th Janet and I officially received our national appointment as church planters with US Missions, the Assemblies of God national homeland missions agency. We have also received approval for the Berkeley Church Planting Project from the Northern California-Nevada District, which will be our new home once we move west. (We are counting the days.) However, because our travel schedule is so crazy, we have been unable to attend any of the official commissioning events. So Steve Pike, the USM Church Planting Director, surprised us during a coaching session at Big Momma’s coffee house on Commercial Street in Springfield. He presented us there with a Certificate of Commissioning and with a small sculpture of Jesus washing Peter’s feet. The inscription reads,…
Continue13 Things I Like About the Southern Baptist Convention
Today I spoke at some workshops for the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. Located at North Phoenix Baptist Church, the ACE conference is attended by about 1500 leaders from local churches who come together for a day of training. But in this case, even though I did some teaching, I also did a lot of learning. The conference was my first exposure to the inside of SBC culture. So I asked a lot of questions, made some observations, and generally tried to find out everything I could about these new friends. In light of all the critical things that appear in blogs these days, I want to concentrate this one on the things I like about the Southern Baptists. This is not to…
ContinueLearning Communication from the Transformers
A few nights ago I attended a preview showing of the Transformers movie at the invitation of a group of students from our seminary. Having grown up watching Superman in black and white I was almost totally ignorant of the robot-as-Swiss-Army-knife genre. But the mostly twenty and thirty-something crowd that packed the darkness around me did have this memory. So I started interviewing Ryan and Joel, the two students seated on either side of those clever, drink-holding armrests that locked me into a reclining seat. My initial question was how eight of us had ended up attending a screening that was not advertised. In response, Ryan described how he discovered the preview on Yahoo Movies (which I have never used)…
ContinueOff-Road Disciplines
In Off-Road Disciplines, Earl Creps reveals that the on-road practices of prayer and Bible reading should be bolstered by the other kinds of encounters with God that occur unexpectedly—complete with the bumps and bruises that happen when you go “off-road.”
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Earl Creps—a popular speaker and leader—is director of the Doctor of Ministry program and associate professor at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary (AGTS) in Springfield, Missouri. He has been a pastor, ministries consultant, and university professor. Along the way, Creps earned a Ph.D. in communication at Northwestern University and a doctor of ministry degree in leadership at AGTS.
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