Kevin and Owen, welcome to the 9Marks block party!  Glad to have you both on the team!

A couple things I thought might interest readers:

Hereyou can see the video and find a time-stamped outline (those SovGrace guys do everything with class, don't they?) of Jeff Purswell's address called, The Pastor's Teaching.  Along with Kevin's piece on learning to be yourself when preaching, this is good food for thought for all those looking for a sermon break today, or trying to recover from their sermon on Monday!

Also, our brother Lig' is teaching us to pray scripturally.  If we preach the word, we'd better start by praying the word.

Whether preaching or praying, Tony Carter reminds us do so like a Calvinist all the time.

When Phillips Brooks famously defined preaching as “the communication of truth through personality” I do believe he was talking about your own personality and not someone else's.  It has taken me awhile, but I finally feel like I have learned to be myself in the pulpit.  Now whether this means my sermons are better or worse I can’t say.  But being myself means my preaching is more genuine, more comfortable, and more sustainable.  I know I have a lot to learn as a preacher, and I hope that ten years from now I’ll still get those awkward but true compliments–“your preaching has really improved over the years.” But at 32 I feel like I’m finally preaching the truth through my own personality.

Like most young preachers, and not a few old ones, I’ve struggled to find my “voice” as a preacher.  When I was in college I started devouring the Reformers and Puritans.  Everything I read seemed to be either hundreds of years old or was translated hundreds of years ago.  As a result, my writing (I wasn’t doing much preaching at the time) sounded like I was aiming for the “just translated from Latin” award.  My sentences were often elephantine.  The grammar was antiquated and there were simply too many words.  A very fine professor who affirmed me in many ways challenged me to write for my own century, not for the century of my heroes.  It was painful advice at the time.  I wasn’t quite sure I trusted him.  After all, wasn’t it a mark of piety to use words like “behoove” “calumny” and “obfuscate”?  Well, it wasn’t.  I need to be myself and not put on puritan-sounding airs.  (Incidentally, my cousin, and classmate during college, had a wonderful t-shirt at the time that read “Eschew Obfuscation.”  And he was the one with a girlfriend during all four years!  Go figure.)

In seminary I began to notice that many of my classmates sounded a lot like their homiletics professors.  I still find this to be truth.  It doesn’t matter where you go, preaching profs seem to crank out clones.  Some of the blame may rest with instructors who place too much emphasis on their way of preaching–usually a way that works great for the teacher but doesn’t fit all the students.  But some of the blame rests on the students too.  We are desperate to latch on to some model so we end up copying wholesale what we see in those we respect, especially in those teaching us preaching.  At Gordon-Conwell I saw lots of mini-Haddon Robinsons.  This doesn’t mean all those students will turn out to be bad preachers, but they must realize there is only one Haddon Robinson.   And they’re not it!

As much as I was blessed by Robinson’s sermons, I was more tempted to imitate other preachers.  I’m sure that for the first years of my ministry I sounded at times like a (very) poor man’s version of John Piper.  I was listening to so much Piper that I’m sure my prayers, my themes, and even the way I said “Joy!” was Piperesque.  Don’t get me wrong, I make no bones about learning from Piper and being influence by him.  I’d trade my sermons for his any day.  But he’d probably be the first to say, “Preach the same gospel I preach.  But you don’t have preach just like me.”  It’s taken me several years, but I think I’m finally ok with not being John Piper.  I just don’t think I have the same personality, let alone the same gifts.

Along the way there have been other famous preachers I’ve wanted to emulate.  I wish I could walk through a text and use humor like Alistair Begg (with the accent too, of course). I wish I were as creative in my thinking and as culturally attuned as Tim Keller. I’d love to be as funny and humble as C.J. Mahaney.  I’ve wondered at times what it would be like to do in-your-face as well as Driscoll, or be as smart as Carson (I tried saying "Eye-Ziah," but no one was fooled). Hey, I’ve even thought how cool it would be to communicate as cooly as Rob Bell.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with several different methods of delivery. I’ve preached without notes, with a half page of notes, and with a full manuscript because some preacher I love preaches each of those ways.  But what works best for me and my style, at least at this point in my ministry, is to preach from a full set of notes that alternates between manuscripting and chicken scratch.  Homiletics professors might hate me for saying this, but sometimes you just have to figure out what works for you.  I’m sure there are certain principles that define all good preaching, but there’s also a whole lot “I’m not sure why, but this works for me.”

Since 2002, the year I was ordained, I estimate that I’ve preached almost 500 times (we have an evening service).  And I think it took about 450 sermons to find my voice.  This isn’t to say all those sermons were bad or untrue to myself.  It’s not like I faked a Scottish accent or told stories about growing up in Greenville, South Carolina.  But it’s taken me this long to realize the wisdom of Paul’s confession, “By the grace of God, I am what I am.”

One of the hardest things for any preacher to learn, especially young preachers, is to simply be yourself.  Don’t put on someone else’s passion or humor or learning.  And don’t take off your own personality because one of your heroes doesn’t share it exactly.  Go ahead and learn from the best.  But your congregation needs to hear you on Sunday, not an impression of the preacher you wish you were.  Let your person constantly be refined by the Spirit of God, and let the truth of God’s word shine through your own personality. Preach as a dying man to dying men. And don’t forget to be your own man.

I think multi-site and internet campuses are soon going to be passe.  If you haven't seen it yet, check out this video!

Welcome Owen and Kevin! I look forward to reading your insights here.

We're grateful to present two new 9Marks bloggers to all of you: Owen Strachan and Kevin DeYoung.

Owen is a member of CrossWay Community Church in Bristol, Wisconsin, which is just close enough to the Illinois border for him to drive there on Sundays from Highland Park, IL, where he "resides." Owen is a PhD student in Historical Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is the managing director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at TEDS. He is married to a woman of noble character, Bethany. He also has a daughter, I believe, but he needs to update his blog and say so....did you get that Owen!!!!  Owen used to be consumed, but now he's just owenstrachan, lower cased, of course. Owen has a series of books on Jonathan Edwards coming out early next year co-authored with Doug Sweeney, including Jonathan Edwards on True Christianity (Moody).

Kevin is the senior pastor of the University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan. He is married to Trish and has four young children as well as, apparently, a bunny, though he's a little self-conscious about that fact. He is the author of several books, including Why We Love the Church (Moody). We asked him to blog for us, quite simply, because he's published a book with that title. That means, yes, we will make you a blogger too if you write a book expressing your love for the church in the title. Kevin already blogs here and here, and so we're hoping he throws us a few scraps from time to time. 

Both men have written for 9Marks in the past. They are godly men and are committed to the local church. We happily commend them to you.

We should all be growing in our understanding of the gospel.  Over the past five years in pastoral ministry, the Lord has been teaching me about the liberating power of the gospel: it frees us to admit that truth about us.  

Let me say first of all what a privilege it was to have been invited to participate in the panel discussion at Southern Seminary a couple of weeks ago.  I count all the men on that stage as friends—some of them long and deep friendships, others new and deepening.  Whatever else we talked about there, the most important fact is that we are all men who are deeply in love with Christ’s church and have given our lives, in one way or another, to serve her.  We may disagree on the multi-site issue, but there’s a mountain of agreement and respect under that.

I know I’m a little late in posting this—life calls, ya know?—but I think it would be useful to lay out in more detail the case I was able to make only very briefly, and really only as a bald assertion, during the SBTS panel.  That is, there is no example in Scripture, either in Acts or anywhere else, of a multi-site church as we think about that today.  Whatever the size, whatever the circumstances, they seem to have met together, and you have to do quite a bit of speculation to get to any other conclusion.

I realize that for some people, it won’t change much in their thinking even if it becomes really clear to them that the NT church met together.  There’s a real debate going on, apparently—even among Baptists, of all people—about whether the example of the NT is prescriptive for us.  I think it is prescriptive, and I think that’s an incredibly important point, but I’m not going to argue it here. 

This post is for those many Baptists who agree with me that we should take the NT example as prescriptive, but who are perhaps set on their heels a bit by the argument that it would have been impossible for “the church” in Jerusalem to meet in one place because they were just too large.  I’ve heard that argument many times, but as I read the book of Acts and the rest of the NT, I just don’t buy it.  The natural way of reading the story in Acts is that each church met together in one place, and there’s not a single instance (as least as far as I can see) where that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Take a look:

1) In Acts 2:41, “about three thousand souls” became Christians and therefore a part of the church.  It’s often asserted that there was no place in Jerusalem large enough to hold that many people on a regular basis.  Acts 2:46 disagrees:  “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.”  Whatever else we might say about the number of people or the meeting space in Jerusalem, or other meetings in houses, the Bible says they—the whole lot of them—“met together.”

2) Acts 4:4 says that “the number of men grew to about five thousand.”  It’s often said that we really ought to understand this as more like twenty-thousand, since the five-thousand is only explicitly “men.”  Maybe; you have to do quite a bit of two-thousand-year-old crowd estimation there, which would seem to be a tricky task.  But regardless of what number you finally come up with—5000, 10000, 20000—5:12 is about as explicit as it could be:  “And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade.”  All of them.  Met together.

3) In 6:2, the apostles somehow manage to “gather all the disciples together” in order to take care of the food distribution problem.  Gathered.  All of them.  Together.

4) In 8:1, the church in Jerusalem is scattered by the persecution.  That apparently makes for much smaller assemblies, but regardless, even in Antioch where the church was made up of “great numbers of people,” (11:21, 26) Paul and Barnabas were able to “gather the church together” somewhere, somehow (14:27; also 15:30).

5) 9:31 is admittedly strange—the only place in Scripture where “church” seems to be used for something other than a local assembly or the universal church.  I think there are a couple of options here.  A) It could be referring to the one church of Jerusalem, now scattered throughout Judea and Samaria by the persecution.  If so, it’s a one-off, and it never happens again.  Or B) It could be a use of the word “church” similar to our usage, “the church in China.”  We do not mean that there’s a single institution in China; we just mean “the churches, considered as a whole, in China.”  I go for Option B, personally.  But here’s the important thing:  What we do not see in 9:31, no matter how you slice it, is a “church” of Judea and Samaria made up of multiple little non-churches.  Even if the word is, just this once, blanketing multiple little assemblies with the word “church” (as we do with China, for instance), every one of those little assemblies is itself a “church,” not a campus, a site, or any other such thing.

6) This is just an observation, and I haven’t looked at it exhaustively, but the apostle Paul seems to have been pretty careful about all this in how he addresses his letters. Take Romans, for instance.  We know from Romans 16 that there are multiple churches in Rome which are meeting in various houses, and Paul, who often addresses his letters “to the church” in a certain city, does not do so here:  “To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints,” he says (1:7).  Same thing with Colossae, which also probably had multiple congregations (think about the letter to Philemon):  “To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.”  But in his letters to Corinth, which obviously had only one church (see Romans 16:23), he doesn’t hesitate:  “To the church of God in Corinth.”

The point of all this is simply to say that the unbroken example of the NT seems to be that each church met together in one place.  That was true after the scattering, when churches were smaller, and it was true before the scattering, too, when the church in Jerusalem was enormous. 

To get to a multi-site church, then, I think you'd have to do one of two things:  Either show that the NT pattern isn't what I'm seeing here, or say that the NT's example isn't prescriptive. Over to you....

On two occasion those who have their trust in the unshakable Lord of all are depicted as laughing at circumstances that might terrify others.

An interested reader recently sent me the following email which I thought was insightful. Before beginning seminary recently, the writer was a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. I've bold-faced what I think are the particularly helpful bits:

I thought about the work of 9 Marks as I read Kevin DeYoung's post reviewing policy toward Africa. Why?  Because he is exactly right about the well-intentioned yet horrifically flawed approach nations have taken toward Africa.  Bono can cover the globe arguing to eliminate their debt and chastize nations that are "rich" when they don't acquiesce.  But, at the end of the day, good intentions don't make for good policy.  There are rules in economics.  Africa needs to be able to trade, and the failure of the Doha round of trade talks that would have given Africa a serious seat in the agriculture trading game would have placed them on a far better path to long-term stability.

I immediately thought about how the church misses this logic in the recent multi-site debate. The well-intentioned desire to "reach more people" by structuring church any which way does not necessarily equate to acheiving that goal. The Scriptures provide rules (regulation you might say) about how to go about it.  We did not come up with the gospel, so we certainly don't know how to protect and project the gospel.  We are completely dependent in every way on the Scriptures to tell us how to do all of this.  Just as in economics, so in theology there are rules to the game.  And we better be working hard to understand the rules the Scriptures give us.  We should assume that God understands the game better than we do! 

Thus, for those who "love the gospel" and want to see it advance, they better do the hard work of understanding, studying, and researching what the Scriptures say about protecting it through the church. 

The federal government is full of miserable failures that started as great intentions by people with "good, generous hearts."  Why would anyone think the church and the spiritual realm are any different?  I love that people want to reach more people.  But, no one who believes in the sinfulness of the human heart should begin by thinking that simply because they have a good intention that they are not flawed in their understanding in how to achieve it.  If the goal is to reach more people, then the first place to begin is by doing the hard work of asking what the Scriptures say about the structure and nature of the church which has been given the task of reaching them.

Could it be that even in this "boring" and "secondary" area of ecclesiology that the wisdom of Scripture just might seem, at first, to be foolishness to those of us who once thought we were wise?

You've probably already seen both of these posts on effective elder meetings over at Justin Taylor's blog, but I think they are worth reposting here in case you didn't.

First, Justin pointed to seven good ideas from Jim Eliff. On his blog, Jim explains each of the seven ideas:

1. Plan for meeting together more often and for a longer period of time.
2. Challenge each other spiritually.
3. Discuss the state of the flock.
4. Have an agenda.
5. Actually pray for individuals and issues being faced.
6. Study together toward a unified position on difficult issues.
7. Make these meetings non-optional.

Second, Justin points to 16 Keys to Effective Elders’ Meetings, by Alexander Strauch summarizing his book, Meetings That Work: A Guide to Effective Elders’ Meetings.

Thanks, Justin.

Iowa pastor and friend Eric Schumacher put together a study guide for Mark Dever's Twelve Challenges Churches Face for using with some of the men in his church. Here is his original post.  

And here are the individual studies:

• Preface
• Chapter 1 - Forgetfulness
• Chapter 2 - Division
• Chapter 3 - Imposters
• Chapter 4 - Sin
• Chapter 5 - Asceticism
• Chapter 6 - Disobedience
• Chapter 7 - Legalism
• Chapter 8 - Autonomy
• Chapter 9 - Thoughtlessness
• Chapter 10 - Selfishness
• Chapter 11 - Death
• Chapter 12 - Decline

Thanks, Eric!

This is a powerful recap of Piper's 2008 Together for the Gospel talk. You can listen to the whole thing here. What I find most moving is that the words he shares (living radically, looking forward to the reward, the joy of finishing the course and completing the work of testifying to the gospel of the grace of God) are backed up by a life that has lived these virtues for decades. Praise God for models like Dr. Piper!

John Piper - Recap from T4G 2008 from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.

Did you know that you can get The Jesus Storybook Bible in seven other (that is, non-English) languages? Check it out.  

Here in the UK (no, that's not the University of Kentucky, as people used to ask me when I lived in Washington DC, it's where we enjoy living in a kingdom rather than living in a state) a whole stack of evangelical churches are preparing for a focused evangelistic partnership in the lead-up to Easter 2010. 

The 11/2/09 edition of The New York Times had a piece on churches that hold services on the internet.  It's fairly brief, and you can read it here.

This is a great article by Ed Stetzer, which raises an important point:  The recent drive by many churches to become "missional" has actually, in many cases, led to a de-emphasis on the most important mission Jesus gave to his people--the Great Commission.  Stetzer gives five reasons why this might be the case:

1) In rediscovering God's mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions [as opposed to its global ones].

2) In responding to God's mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything "mission."  [The result is that the special need for sending missionaries to foreign lands is made fuzzy and ultimately lost.]

3) In relating God's mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.  [The emphasis is on relief of temporal suffering, rather than eternal suffering.]

4) In refocusing on God's mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news. [As Stetzer says, "As many missional Christians have sought to "embody" the gospel, they have chosen to forsake one member of Christ's body--the mouth."]

5) In reiterating God's mission, many lose the context of the church's global mission and needed global presence. ["Hyper focus on our community" leads to a loss of focus on the wider world and God's mission in it.]

Stetzer's points here are, I think, spot on, and he continues with four points about how to regain a focus on the Great Commission.  All of those points are very good, and worth the time to read them.  His point on evangelicals' engagement with social issues puts things in proper perspective--social engagement serves the preaching of the gospel.  It is not a second, mountain-peak mandate given to us in Scripture.  Caring for the poor is one way (and there are others) that we love people so that we may speak to them about Jesus the King.

You know, it's interesting, though.  One of the major (and usually impatient) defenses of this new focus on social justice by "missional" and emergal churches is "We're not going to lose the gospel.  We're not going to go the way of Rauschenbusch.  We're going to do both!  Two wings of a bird and all that." 

But look how Stetzer sums it up:  "It appears to me that many missional churches are missing the Great Commission in the name of being missional. . . . It is a huge (but historically common) mistake."  Stetzer's right.  We've seen this before, several times, and it's never ended well. 

Now is that a reason to despise the poor?  No.

Is it a reason to make sure serving the poor is clearly in service to the preaching (by which I mean speaking) of the gospel?  Yes.

Is it a reason to be careful in how we think theologically?  Yes.

Have people emphasizing social engagement messed all that up before and lost the gospel?  Yes.

Will a new generation of social engagers be able to avoid the problems previous generations fell into?  Eh, don't know yet.

Are there signs one way or the other?  Stetzer certainly seems to think so.

Those who ignore history, as they say....

I'm re-reading J. Gresham Machen's Christianity & Liberalism with my friend and co-worker, Jacob Hall. Machen wrote this book in 1923 as a response to the doctrineless preaching of Harry Fosdick. It rings true today--and I'm not just talking about what others are preaching. I'm talking about the temptation I face to avoid saying hard things. I'm surprised how often I have an inner conversation as I prepare a sermon. It goes something like this: "Aaron, that's true. It's in the Bible. It needs to be said even though it may offend some." In spite of myself, I am resolved to call myself and others to repent. Here is Machen, challenging preachers to stop their feeble attempts to reform the self-righteous. Instead, we ought to show the "righteous" their sin.

The fundamental fault of the modern Church is that she is busily engaged in an absolutely impossible task—she is busily engaged in calling the righteous to repentance. Modern preachers are trying to bring men into the Church without requiring them to relinquish their pride; they are trying to help men avoid the conviction of sin. The preacher gets into the pulpit, opens the Bible, and addresses the congregation somewhat as follows: ‘You people are very good,’ he says; ‘you respond to every appeal that looks toward the welfare of the community. Now we have in the Bible—especially in the life of Jesus—something so good that we believe it is good enough even or you good people.’ Such is modern preaching. It is heard every Sunday in thousands of pulpits. But it is entirely futile. Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance, and probably we shall be no more successful than He.

Thabiti,

I'd like to follow up on a point you made and make it a little stronger. You write, "Some seem to presume that if you're growing and you're not interested in multi-site then you just may be limiting the growth potential of the kingdom.  And conversely, if you are a practitioner of multi-site you're increasing the growth potential of the kingdom."

You suggest this is "spurious." I would also say it's short-sighted. If God does in fact mean for local churches to consist of one congregation, then we can trust that such a congregation will, over time and all other factors being equal, make for a better witness to the non-Christian community around it. We can also trust that planting other single congregation churches will make for better witnesses to the world, and, over time, yield an even greater harvest, can't we? As such, the pragmatic question must necessarily remain a distant second to the Scriptural question, because determining the right answer to the Scriptural question will always give us the best answer to the pragmatic question.

Furthermore, doesn't the "multi-site = increased growth potential" formula wrongly equate kingdom growth with the growth of my local church? Is kingdom growth really that dependent on the growth of any one of our local churches?

Greg,

Thanks for alerting us to your participation in Southern's panel discussion on multi-site churches.  I not only appreciate the link, but appreciated how you represented the "opposed" position and how all the men engaged one another charitably.  It was a good Christian "scuffle."  Which is to say, nobody got hurt and there was love for all.  Thanks for modeling that, brothers.

I have to say, though, the multi-site church issue feels like it's in that category with emergent churches for me--something receiving a lot of attention and ink disproportionate to it's importance and impact.  That's not to say it's altogether unimportant and having absolutely no impact; I just don't think it's huge on either score.  At best, I think it's too early to tell.  But what do I know?  I'm not a real student of the movement.

The one issue I am troubled by in these discussions, though, is the differing approaches to the Scripture.  Are we to take a regulative or normative approach?  Are we to read silence as tacit approval for an innovation or a "freedom"?  Or, are we to follow what is commanded, modeled, and their necessary consequences to govern our thought and practice?  It seems that if we argue from silence to "freedom," we're going to be in a whole heap of trouble when it comes to pragmatic innovations.  And we'll find ourselves at risk of inadvertantly untangling some knots that God in His wisdom tied.

I suppose that's an argument from and for conservatism in our approach to Scritpure and the life of the church.  But it's not an argument against growth or against actively and aggressively seeking the salvation of sinners.  The argument for multi-site, insofar as it hinges on calls to reach more people, makes a presumption at this point.  Some seem to presume that if you're growing and you're not interested in multi-site then you just may be limiting the growth potential of the kingdom.  And conversely, if you are a practitioner of multi-site you're increasing the growth potential of the kingdom.  Hmm....  Maybe....  For me, jury's out on that.  Sounds spurious.  And it flirts with a "size equals success" error.

Al asked a wonderful question when he asked Pastor Ezzell, "What are you losing with multi-site?"  I thought the pastor gave an honest and for him painful answer.  He's losing contact with his people.  On some level we all do at some point of appreciable size.  But should we intentionally choose a strategy that increases the likelihood of that loss?  Seems unwise. 

Perhaps the limits of single-site, single-serivce congregational life are limits divinely appointed to ensure careful pastoral oversight.  To ensure none of us actually have more sheep than we can handle by God's grace.  Perhaps.

We should all want our churches to grow... to grow with new converts to the faith as rapidly as we can manage it ... and to grow increasingly deeper in spiritual maturity until we all reach the fullness of Christ.  But at any cost or by any means necessary? 

John Meade, a dear Brother from Clifton Baptist Church here in Louisville, KY, gives a thoughtful, biblical, succinct, and helpful answer here.

Here's some of John's highlights and conclusion from the post:
"My basic assumption going into this issue is simple: the view that remains faithful to the clear Scriptural directives and can obey those directives practically should be adopted.  Thus any view of the church which would necessarily lead to the disobedience of clear Scriptural directives because of the church’s structure itself should be abandoned....

What are these clearly revealed commands?

1. Overseers, Shepherd the Flock of God (1 Peter 5:1ff; Hebrews 13:17). 
2. One another Commands.
3. Church discipline/congregationalism (Matt. 18:16ff; 1 Cor. 5:1ff).
4. The Lord’s Supper, “when you come together…

I’m sure I have made caricatures of the multi-site position.  I invite others to correct me where necessary and to dialogue with me and show me how multi-site churches carry out these commands of the Lord.  If multi-site churches are able to abide by these commands, then I would be more in support of them.  But as it is now, I do not think the multi-site church is in a position to obey these commands and thus one should reject the model."

The rest of the time at the FIEL conference was a great privilege.

1) I got to hang out with some great brothers and sisters: an older brother in ministry, Stuart Olyott; a fellow elder, John Folmar (who so graciously put up with my snoring - one night on the plane and 3 nights in a hotel room); the leadership of FIEL, including the director, Rick Denham: hugely gifted in terms of vision and business acumen, and Tiago Santos: a brother with great theological insight and pastoral vision (you could tell he's got a great pastoral heart even by how he translated - he wasn't just translating it, he was preaching it!)

2) What a privilege to have the opportunity to encourage, and Lord willing, influence a group of pastors in a part of the world that is starving for the gospel. I was constantly encouraged by conversations with people who had made great sacrifices, and had a joyful trust in the Lord, even though the fruit seemed to be slow to become visible.

3) I was fed in my own soul through listening to the teaching of John Folmar, Sturat Olyott, and Augustus Nicodemus (as much as I could understand his Portuguese.)
One highlight was the two-part message given by Stuart Olyott on how not to preach boring sermons. I posted the link to the first half earlier.

Here's the second half:

Here are his 13 points!

1. Reflect on when you last switched off
2. Learn communication skills
3. Be expository
4. Use stories
5. Ask questions
6. Keep eye contact
7. Use the spoken language (not the written language)
8. Take care of your voice
9. Remember that less means more
10. Be the slave of structure and logic
11. Be in the message
12. Assault the conscience
13. Conquer God before you start (in prayer)

I just finished speaking on a panel at Southern Seminary's chapel this morning, on the topic of multi-site churches.  The panelists were myself, Daniel Montgomery (pastor of Louisville's Sojourn Church), Kevin Ezell (pastor of Louisville's Highview Baptist Church), Gregg Allison (professor of theology at SBTS), and Albert Mohler (president of SBTS), who moderated.

Click here to listen.

I'll post some thoughts on the conversation later.

Truly, that is a wonderful new tune to "The Sands of Time are Sinking."  One thought about that YouTube video---watching that, you are actually witnessing the first time that song was ever sung by a congregation.  The song is being born.  It shows, too, in a really beautiful way, I think.  It starts with one voice, then adds a voice with each stanza until the congregation joins in, haltingly at first, missing some notes, etc.  And then by the end, the entire congregation has (almost) nailed it.

I love that.  A new song of praise to God, rising to His ears for the very first time in history---not perfectly, not flawlessly, but beautifully.

For the celebration of Mark's 15th anniversary at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, his wife Connie wrote a new tune to The Sands of Time Are Sinking.  It's one of Mark's favorite hymns and he's often remarked that he wants it sung at his funeral.  There aren't a lot of very good tunes for the words, but Connie has written a beautiful one.  You can find the music at the Praise Factory website. Just scroll down and you'll see a link.