In the past 6 months, as a means for myself and my family to heal from some painful relational experiences (some self-inflicted, some inflicted by others) have been pursuing JESUS-based community or what is referred to as “church” outside of the traditional Sunday Service, non-profit organizational and/or institutional model. This began as my wife and I committed to gather at a local coffee shop together to study and discuss GOD’s word and now we have other brothers & sisters that join us in this gathering and have become apart of our lives throughout the week. We don’t have a ton of things regularly scheduled outside of the gathering on Sunday in the coffee shop, but we do sporadically meet for communion feasts, motorcycle rides, and meals often. In all honesty learning to be a connected community outside the box of organizational bylaws, Sunday performance programs and org charts is much akin to pulling the training wheels off of a bicycle for the first time, our comfort levels ...

    "Ye are what ye be, not what ye do" - Captain Obvious, the pirate philosopher      Western s ociety is abundantly supplied with calls to engage in activity in order to validate identity,  different movements will often utilize peoples hope for how they will be perceived (by themselves and others) to get them to respond and engage in a particular action. Social justice movements will use peoples desire to be seen as progressive and compassionate to get them to back a particular cause, car companies will use people's desire to be seen as successful to get them to purchase a particular vehicle, and tourism companies will use peoples desire to be good parents to get them to book a particular vacation destination and so on and so on. We are constantly being inundated with attacks on our identity and constantly being barraged with attempts to manipulate our response based upon insecurity in who we are.        Unfortunately, ...

"Look, I'm trying to wash away my sins I've got a group of loved ones that ain't my friends & if I ever take an L, then they might grin & They all wanna see me stay in the cage I'm in So when it comes to anybody there's no trust for no one, man, so what?  My whole plans to go nuts  My shoulders ready for more shrugs I'm gon' judge, anybody trying to enter my circle with no love."  This is a portion of Hopsin's verse on the song "Lost" which he performs with NF ( https://youtu.be/fxrkhf17fU0 ) This verse has been a source of great therapy for my soul in the past year, not because I endorse it as truth to be clung to, but rather because it has, at times, perfectly summarized the way I felt. These feelings have arisen from a season of life which has been apart of mine & my family's experience for the last several years, having had the blessing of multiple close relationships, only to have them successively end in conflic...

Originally posted January 12th, 2022 Have I grabbed hold of your attention? Are you sitting on the edge of your seat ready for a strongly worded pontification of my eschatological position? Ready for my pronouncement of which millennial team I will be taking my talents to, whether pre-, a-, or post-? (Note: Lebron is a dispensationalist, he keeps looking for literal lakes in L.A., not realizing they were superseded from Minneapolis. Westbrook is more of an old school covenantal he thinks made shots are an allegory. Yuck yuck, go Jazz) Well then, please accept my apology, for the purpose of this, is not that. Instead of an over-bolstered braggadocio of my own end times opinions complete with pithy zingers of others positions (excluding the Lebron joke) I would like instead to offer a path forward for those, who like me, are left completely humbled by the complexity of the end times debate and have been searching for a way to simplify it for the benefit of there own self-discovery an...

   Originally posted on February 12th, 2022 Proverbs 10:17 The one who follows instruction is on the path to life, but the one who rejects correction goes astray. Soooooo, we need to talk... I hate being this guy, I hate being the one that has to take something that is so celebrated and that inspires so much hope for fellow believers in JESUS and point out a major flaw I have recognized, but I see it, and now that I have seen it, much like the time when I witnessed a boom mic clearly in sight of a scene during a popular Christian movie, I cant un-see it. So my hope in pointing out what I am about to is that I may rebuild whatever it is I might tear down by the end of this post (so no one feels Left Behind but instead are made Courageous...please forgive me) and hopefully inspire fixing it. So lets rip the Band-Aid off, here is what I'm seeing, church plants can be merely just an exercise in vanity , this vanity can be a temptation for several different groups, those being Mis...