Hello, all. Been a few weeks since I’ve had a chance to really give an update, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to do that today, as well as to dole out a little pastoral “wisdom.”

I’ve been a senior pastor for 2 1/2 months now. There isn’t really a handbook for how to handle every situation you come across and I think it’s okay to be honest about something: there isn’t a great solution for every problem you’ll face. So sometimes you just prayerfully do the best you can.

Get comfortable with the fact that you won’t always know the perfect course of action to pursue in any given situation. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s difficult to know all the repercussions of any single decision that you’ll be forced to make.

I say all this (vaguely, I realize) to encourage other pastors and church leaders. You will face some difficult decisions over time and you will face opposition from people both in your church and outside of it. The best advice I can give you is simply this: follow after Jesus Christ with all of your heart in everything you do and every decision you make. Filter everything through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you do that, if you honestly try to follow hard after Him in everything, then you can irreproachably sit back and let the chips fall where they may.

As a church leader, your integrity is everything. Don’t compromise it.

Even when it’s hard; even when it may cost you your job.

For the last 2 1/2 months I have faced challenges that are completely unique to my church. Without going into details, I’ll just say that there was a lot to do when I started here and a lot of very difficult decisions to make. I feel that we’re through the worst of it, however, and we’re now in a place where we can simply move forward and minister to our community and our world without the distractions of the past. This is more than a “positive” step forward; this is the beginning of a new era and a fresh start for our church.

In the last month we’ve gained a new name, a new facility, and a new website. We’ve left the problems of the past exactly where they belong: in the past. We’ve started fresh and I’m so excited to see what God has for us moving forward. It’s truly an exciting time.

Last week I spent countless hours (countless because I was half asleep for many of them) working on our new website, and I’m happy to announce that it’s now up and running. We’ll be adding new content to it over the coming weeks and months, but it’s now officially open to the public. Check out the new website if you’d like, and let me know what you think about it. You can view it at this link.

I’ll try and post a little more later this week about the series we’ve been doing and how it’s affecting our thought process going forward. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a happy Labor Day.

Be blessed and be a blessing.

When I first became pastor of a church in Springfield, Missouri, I knew there were a lot of challenges ahead of us: a new location, a new time to meet, a complete reimagining of how we do ministry, etc. One of the tasks that I was actually looking forward to, however, was changing our church's name. I figured that it would be somewhat simple and relatively exciting.

I was wrong.

It's a nightmare. : )

For the last several weeks we've been asking for suggestions, ideas, and prayer. We've had a pretty good response and quite a few solid suggestions. But we're also facing some formidable challenges.

One thing I've noticed is that most of the churches around Springfield sound more like country clubs than communities on a mission: Timbercreek (our old name), James River, Scenic Drive Church (no, I'm not making that up), Ridgecrest Baptist, Glendale, Parkview, etc., etc. It's not that these are inherently bad names; they just seem more like places you'd go to play 18 holes than commune with Christ and live life with fellow believers.

And this has been part of our challenge: to come up with a name that actually symbolizes what we feel called to do. It's harder than you'd think.

We've thought of LOTS of great names. The problem is that it's very difficult to find an internet domain name for a church that's not already taken. Or to think of a church name that isn't already prominently known.1

Journey Church? Taken. The Way? Gone. The Gathering Place? Don't even think about it; that domain's been taken for years: .com, .net, .org...you name it, it's not there. The sad thing is that most of these sites don't even belong to churches; they've been bought up by squatters who are holding them ransom and trying to get churches like us to pay an exorbitant amount of money to buy them back.

And we could always add a hyphen or the word "Springfield" to the URL, but that seems confusing and overly long (ex: www.JourneySpringfield.com).

So we're still thinking, but we need to get this nailed down pretty soon. If you feel like you have any great ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Being a pastor is hard. I'll admit it. There's always more you can do, prepare for, discuss, study, etc. So I sympathize with many pastors who find themselves facing criticism while trying to also serve their churches.

That being said, there are days when other pastors kindly make me want to tell people I'm a plumber when asked my vocation. Apparently Roger Byrd of Jonesville, South Carolina thought this sign would be a nice, non-racial, non-political way of reminding people "what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ."

When a local news organization asked Byrd if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd replied, "I don't know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim ? I don't know. He says he's not. I hope he's not. But I don't know. And it's just something to try to stir people's minds."

Good think that Byrd says the message, "wasn't meant to be racial or political."

You know, except that's all it was.

Recently I was asked to lead worship for a large church in the Dallas metroplex. Four other Christian musicians generously agreed to join me despite the fact that we weren’t getting paid. I know these guys well, however, and they just want to help the Kingdom of God in any way that they can.

The way that we were treated by the church, however, made me wish I had given them the weekend off...