When I grow up, I want to be just like Joe Clinard, my 90-year-old friend whose memorial service we attended today. Here is his official obit, which doesn’t (as most obits don’t) do him justice at all He was a perennial youth, always seeking adventure and wonder. He loved flying ultralight airplanes, and he regularly [...]

My mom is an amazing short-term mission trip planner. I’ve never seen someone more passionate about taking groups of people to third-world countries. When I became a youth minister, I started co-leading trips with her—and we based our mission work around a “mission exposure” model, recognizing that we would have little lasting effect as short-termers, [...]

I’ve been focused on time and money for the past couple of years due to our life circumstances—sometimes so much that I get a bit obsessed. And I’ve been thinking a lot about my health recently—particularly my physical health. Especially since my wife almost died following the birth of our newest daughter, Bethany Dawn Penner. [...]

So I just received a link to a YouTube video of Nick Vujicic. How I haven’t heard about him before, I have no idea. But he is one impressive guy. I hope to meet him in person some day. His site is lifewithoutlimbs.org.

My friend Mark DeVries said something at an opening session of a Youth Ministry Architects consultant gathering a couple of months ago that’s been haunting me. As he was talking about the need for leaders in the church to first attend to their own souls, he mentioned that though much of people’s spiritual lives are [...]

This is part 4 of my sermon on Exodus 16:2-15 from Sunday. Part 2 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here. I love those incredible emotional highs when a really great speaker moves me to want to recommit my life to Christ. I get stoked when a song moves me in [...]

This is part 3 of 4 of my sermon on Exodus 16:2-15 from Sunday. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here. Whether or not I choose to believe in God has absolutely nothing to do with God’s existence. However, my level of faith does impact my ability to notice God. You and I [...]

This is part 2 of my sermon on Exodus 16:2-15 from Sunday. Part 1 of 4 is here. The first thing to keep in mind about faith is to make sure we’re putting that faith in the right thing or person. After Jesus’ death, the disciple Thomas is pretty sure he had been putting his [...]

Our pastor is still healing from a broken arm so I was the sermon pinch-hitter again Sunday. The Old Testament Lectionary reading for the day was from Exodus 16:2-15, so I decided to talk about faith…and the lack thereof. Because the whole thing is a bit long for a single blog post, I’ll post in [...]

This is part 4 of 4 of my sermon from this week on The Parable of the Lost Sheep as told in Luke 15:1-7. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here. When I was a youth pastor in a suburb not too far away, one huge church had 120 [...]