I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to make sense of how God has led in my life. I know I’m not alone in that, so I thought I’d share a high-level overview of what I’ve learned and where you can find my thoughts under the heading of Redemptive Leader.
Faith Culture
My quest started with a desire to understand culture. I was leading a church through a significant time of transition, and I kept running into the statement, “That’s not our culture.”
It seemed that culture had come to trump the Bible in some people’s minds, or at least control how it could be applied. That didn’t sit well with me, but I couldn’t find the resources to help me refute it.
So, I set out to complete a Doctor of Ministry degree and wrote my thesis on a biblical understanding of culture. That was the beginning of aligning what I was seeing and experiencing in my work and leadership with what I found in scripture.
I created some blogs and captured some other thoughts on what that looked like, and published them at FaithCulture.org. It seemed to me that Christianity’s battle with evolution had done much to misshape our view of culture, so I focused a lot of attention on understanding that issue.
Prep for Pride
After that season of ministry, God led me into the business world. As I began to learn about the experience of Christians in the workplace, the challenge of Pride month came to the fore.
I came to see that the approach most pastors and churches were taking to the issue of homosexuality was not helpful for Christians in responding to the challenges at their work.
So I created some materials and a campaign called Prep for Pride to present a different way of responding based on the Gospel.
Redemptive Scale
My time in the business world gave me the chance to get to know and work with many Christian business-owners and nonprofit leaders. This posed the challenge of growing a business or organization without straying from its biblical values.
Culture was a big part of those conversations, and so I applied my biblical understanding of culture to the problem. The result was a book, called Redemptive Scale, in which I tell a story of innovation and scale, and draw out biblical principles for what type of scale can fulfill God’s purposes.
Working Church
Covid was a formative time for me, as it was for most of us. I realized that culture is largely meaningless without community. That challenge was that we had never had to build community in such an intentional way before, and lacked the skills to do so.
This was a profoundly spiritual problem because many of God’s promises to Christians are fulfilled through biblical community. And yet, we are struggling to find and maintain that life-giving community.
We have become very adept at scaling solutions for our needs that allow us to exist in isolation. But in the process, we have cut ourselves off from the one thing that we actually need to survive and thrive: genuine community.
So, I took what I had learned about culture, scale, and the Bible’s teaching on community and combined them into Working Church. This is still very much in progress, but I envision a simple process for recognizing and building biblical community wherever you are.
Hope Church
And now God has led me back into full-time pastoral ministry. I see this as the way he is furthering my desire to build biblical community that makes a redemptive difference for Christians in every area of life, including at work.
I am just beginning to understand what that might look like and am excited to build it in the context of our local church.
Questions or comments? Let me know!
