The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

AllanStanglin.com

Category: Evangelism (Page 1 of 20)

Holding the Net Together

July 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Jesus said he would make us fishers of men, fishers of people. He has sent us out, you and me, to be fishers of “every human.” But you’re not fishing with a pole. You’re not sitting by yourself at the end of a pier with a rod and reel. We’re fishing together with a net. You’re not by yourself holding a stick and a string. We are all holding the net. Together.

It’s a huge net. It’s massive. It’s not the size of a volleyball net, it’s a giant net that spans across generational time and space. And it’s not made of rope or cord; it’s made of Christian seed sown to the Holy Spirit wind.

It’s a song written by Charles Wesley here, a plane assembled by Boeing there, a pie baked by a widow in 1843, an invitation to church written in 1391–God’s Holy Spirit weaves together all these weak and meager threads and it becomes the net. Do you see it?

It’s so big. And it sweeps back and forth across the world. It sweeps across every society and through every culture. The net is drawn in and out through all the decades and centuries. It turns and dips to snag one more soul God is faithfully trying to reach. It speeds up and slows down, it expands and withdraws to catch one more dad, one more teenager, one more generation. While you were sleeping last night, the net was catching souls: maybe a prisoner in Russia, maybe a single mom in Vermont, maybe a cab driver in Tokyo, or a teacher in Nigeria were swept up by the love of Christ.

The mission of the Church is a huge net and you’re holding onto it with us. Your faith and hope and love keep that net moving. Your good deeds for others, the ways you proclaim and share the love and grace of God with your words and acts of service–all of that contributes to our Lord’s salvation net.

The net is floating today by the eternal seeds of the Kingdom sown at GCR by Bert Mercer, Doug Parsons, and Ronnie White. When you serve a meal at Family Promise, when you read to kids at Emerson Elementary, when you write a check for Missions Sunday, when you send a card to your co-worker, when you use blue food coloring and whipped cream at VBS to tell the story of Jesus walking on the water, you are helping to maneuver that massive net.

When you warmly greet a visitor at church on Sunday morning, when you buy lunch for the guy behind you in the drive-thru, when you pray for your neighbor, the Holy Spirit breath of God moves another corner of that net to snare one more lost soul.

Here at our church in Midland, I think about Willie Goudeau and Yvonne Brooks and James and Debbie VanStavern who are still holding that net with Gabby and Kendall and M.J. and Preston. Frances Collins and Wanda McGraw are holding that net; so are Dalton and Hannah Mills, Philip and Caitlin Landry, and Justin and Anna Washburn.

So are you. You’re holding the net. We are, all of us, right now today and forever, connected together by the mission of the Church.

Peace,
Allan

Praying on Mission

January 30, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Interesting tidbit to begin this post. Eight teams qualified for the divisional round of the NFL playoffs this year: Rams, Seahawks, Bears, Pats, Broncos, Texans, ‘Niners, and Bills. Seven of the eight quarterbacks who started those games weren’t even born the last time the Cowboys won a divisional playoff game! The lone gray-hair, Matthew Stafford, was seven-years-old in January 1996–a cute little 2nd grader in Highland Park with a Troy Aikman jersey. Sam Darnold, the starting quarterback for Seattle in next Sunday’s Super Bowl, wasn’t born the last time the Cowboys made it to the postseason’s third week–and he’s already played for five NFL teams!

This 30-year drought is moving out of the realm of a generational thing and into oblivion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Ephesians 3, the apostle Paul prays this beautiful prayer for the church. He prays about transformation, that God may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, that Christ may dwell in your hearts, that the church may be rooted and established in love, that we would have power together with all the saints to grasp the love of Christ, to know the love of Christ, to be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen!” ~Ephesians 3:20-21

The prayer is for God to do a whole lot, for God to do incredible and unimaginable things with his power that is at work in the Church. This prayer is not a wide-open request for God to demonstrate his power in random ways. This is a specific request for God to act in spectacular ways through us, through his Church. The transforming power of God belongs to us. So, we’re not asking God to do great things while we sit in the pews and wait on it. And study it. And talk about it. And agree that it’s good. The Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of power!

In Matthew 9, Jesus tells his followers to pray for workers to send to the fields. Pray about it. This is what we want the Father to do: raise up workers. Then in the very next verse–one verse!–he’s giving them the authority and giving them the power and sending them into the fields to do the work! Have you ever noticed that?

Be careful when you pray. The answer to your prayer might be God moving you into his mission.

If you pray for God to use your church, or to work through your church, you’d better be prepared to get off your pew and into the mission. If you pray for the hungry and the sick, if you pray for God’s will to be done in your town just as it is in heaven, you’d better open your eyes, your ears, and your heart to how God wants to work through you to do it.

Peace,
Allan

 

Powerfully Present

October 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

If we’re not careful, we can de-personalize our God. We can’t think about God in terms of an idea or a force or a doctrine. You can’t love an idea or a force, you can’t be in relationship with a doctrine. So, we effectively remove the command to love God and replace it with acknowledge God. Or respect God. Consider God. Defend God. Study God.

Those verbs require very little, if any, personal relationship.

But our God is a personal and relational God. We know this because he revealed himself to us in his very personal and relational Son. Jesus Christ gave up everything to live with us, to live among us, and to live like us.

The Gospels all record our Lord Jesus going out of his way to be relational and personal with the people he met along the way. Just in the Travel Narrative, that ten-chapter section in the middle of Luke that gives us the details of Jesus’ last journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus interacts with people very personally. Intimately. Our Lord is powerfully present.

Luke 10 – Jesus is at Mary and Martha’s house getting ready for a meal. Picture our Lord inside their house, sitting down at their table eating their food, with them. Teaching them. Blessing them.

Luke 11 – Jesus teaches personally teaches his followers how to pray. And then he teaches them about hospitality by telling them a story about a meal. At the end of the chapter, Jesus is inside a Pharisee’s house, reclining at his table, eating his food, with him. And he teaches with a parable about dirty dishes.

Luke 13 – Jesus is in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Jesus is not a monk. He is at church every time the doors are opened, with God’s people, as was his custom. There’s a woman at church who’s been crippled for 18 years. When Jesus saw her, the text says, he called her near. He spoke to her. The Bible says he touched her. And he healed her. In the parable at the end of the chapter, Jesus paints a picture of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God by saying it’s like a huge meal: “People will come from east and west and north and south and will take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God!”

Luke 14 – Jesus is at another Pharisee’s house eating supper. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that our Lord is always eating a meal, just finishing a meal, or on his way to a meal. Jesus teaches and heals and blesses around the table. Around the bread and the fish, the fruit and the wine, the conversation and the hospitality. There are more stories about food in this chapter. The great banquet and all the invited guests. The open invitation. All things are ready! Everybody is invited to eat with the King!

Luke 15 – Jesus is accused of eating meals with sinners, of getting too close and personal with people who are unclean. So he tells these stories about seeking and saving the lost. Friends and neighbors rejoicing together over lost coins and sheep that have been found. The celebratory feast with the fattened calf and the loud music and dancing when the prodigal son comes home. Jesus says, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”

Luke 16 – Jesus tells a story about a poor man who longed to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.

Luke 17 – Another story about sitting down and eating.

Luke 18 – Jesus pulls little children up into his lap. Sticky-fingered, snotty-nosed little kids. “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them!” At the end of the chapter our Lord encounters a blind man at the Jericho city gates. Jesus brings the man near to him, the Gospel says. “What do you want me to do for you?” And he heals him.

Luke 19 – Jesus plucks a wee little man out of a Sycamore tree and says, “I must stay at your house today!”

The point is that Jesus went inside people’s houses. He went to people where they were. Around a table. In the kitchen. In the living room. Eating and sharing meals together.

Jesus never does anything halfway. When it comes to people, when it comes to the lost, our Savior goes all the way. He goes into people’s houses where it’s personal and close. He looks at their family pictures on the walls in the hallway. He reads the cartoons and the baby shower announcements held in place by flower magnets on the refrigerator. He sits down and shares meals. He passes the mashed potatoes. He compliments the cook. He laughs. He listens. And he shares.

Personal. Relational. Powerfully present.

Peace,
Allan

Don’t Fight, Invite

October 7, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We are having so much fun with Breno and Gabi Escobar and Jose Luiz and Isabel Siqueira, two professors and their wives from SerCris Training School in Campo Grande, Brazil. Our GCR Church has partnered with SerCris since its founding in 2002, and the two couples are in Midland for a week to help us kick off our first-ever Missions Month. Whitney and I took Breno to a Texas high school football game Friday, a clash between two state-ranked teams in Greenwood, which also served as the Rangers’ homecoming and a huge Greenwood win. The event provided everything Breno needed to experience at his first ever in-person American football game: the entire community in attendance, sitting shoulder to shoulder on aluminum bleachers, unbelievably large homecoming mums, two undefeated teams making big plays on the field, cheerleaders, two marching bands, and a homecoming queen.

On Saturday, we took Breno and Gabi to Green Acres Miniature Golf, the site of George and Laura Bush’s first date a long, long time ago. Breno kept us in stitches with his unorthodox play–golf balls were flying all over the place–and his soccer-style celebrations. He wound up in the drink once–not in the water hazard that runs across the field of play, but in the waterfall behind the hole! Carrie-Anne destroyed us by hitting three holes-in-one and finishing with a one-under-par 47. She was absolutely on fire! Breno finished by hitting the ball OVER the barn on the last hole, not THROUGH it.

We had both couples over Saturday night to watch college football, shoot pool, eat a massive dinner, and play our favorite card game, 99. Turns out, you can play 99 without knowing any English at all!

 

 

 

 

 

At church Sunday, Breno led our communion time by reading from Jesus’ story of the great feast in Luke 14 and Jose Luiz spoke during the sermon time about all that our God is doing in them and through them in Campo Grande. GCR’s relationship with SerCris goes back to some early church plants in the 1980s and Jose Luiz connected all the dots for us very well. After church, we enjoyed a big lunch together with GCR friends at La Bodega, celebrating a fabulous kickoff to Missions Month.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We’re using the Travel Narrative in the Gospel of Luke as our guiding text during Missions Month. As Jesus is “on the way” to Jerusalem, as he travels from Galilee to the capital city, as he walks from the place where his ministry began to the place where it will all be ultimately accomplished, he remains focused on the mission. Critical to the mission, Jesus purposefully travels through Samaria, unfriendly territory. And as we watch Jesus interact with people, handle circumstances, and explain things in the mission field of Samaria, we can learn how to interact with people, handle circumstances, and explain things in the mission fields of Midland and Brazil, in West Texas and Kenya and Honduras.

One of the first things we learn as Jesus embarks on his mission journey “along the way” is that his mission is an invitation, it’s not a fight. It’s not about judgment or force. We don’t motivate by fear and we don’t fight; we invite.

The very first Samaritan village Jesus and his disciples encounter rejects them outright. “We don’t want you or your message! Hit the road, bub!” And the Zebedee boys are ticked. James and John, the Sons of Thunder, know exactly how they should respond: “Let’s call fire down from heaven! Do it, Jesus! Let’s incinerate all these hicks! Don’t they know who we are?! Boom! Fire! Straight outta heaven!”

And our Lord Jesus rebuked them. Immediately. Non-negotiable.

It is never our task as disciples on a mission with Christ along the way to destroy the opposition. This is not a fight and we are not warriors! Jesus-followers do not bash people who are not on our side. We don’t judge or annihilate or own anybody created by God in the image of God.

Yet, despite our Lord’s unqualified, uncompromising rebuke, so many of us continue to act like Zebedees. We’re following Jesus, full of devotion and zeal, but some of us will not tolerate any opposition. We won’t tolerate rejection. And we get our feelings hurt or we get angry and we rise up in a show of force to judge and destroy.

Boom! Fire! Straight outta my email!
Boom! Fire! Straight outta my prideful mouth!
Boom! Fire! Straight outta my Facebook post or my forwarded video!

With words and attitudes and digital weapons, we destroy anybody who rejects Jesus as the Savior of the World. Or our understandings of Jesus. Our our other beliefs and practices.

As ambassadors of Jesus, with Jesus, our message and our mission is never one of judgment or force. It’s invitation. It’s an invitation to share in the love and the blessings and the promises of God. An invitation to an abundant life in and with Christ Jesus. And invitation to be the Good Samaritan. An invitation to pray, to ask God. An invitation to serve others. An invitation to be healed, to be made whole. An invitation to take one’s place at the feast in the Kingdom of God.

“Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full!” ~Luke 14:13-23

It’s an invitation mission. Not judgment. Not force. We don’t fight, we invite. In Midland and India. In West Texas and Western Brazil.

Peace,

Allan

 

Reality Mission

May 5, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“The Word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart; that is, the Word of faith we are proclaiming. That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved… How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?… Faith comes from hearing the message.” ~Romans 10:8-17

Over the past few decades, we have gotten away from speaking the Good News. Of course, we still believe that God grants us salvation by his grace through faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We haven’t stopped believing. But we’ve stopped talking. We don’t proclaim with our mouths the way we used to, the way we need to.

What do I say? I don’t know what to say!

It might help if we saw our calling to proclaim not so much as engaging a rescue mission, but participating in a reality mission. Ours is a reality mission. The undeniable reality is that someday every knee will bow. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Jesus is Lord! And the day is certainly coming when all of creation will bow before him and recognize it. So we declare to our neighbors and friends, “You need to change jerseys! There is only one Lord and he is Jesus! You need to be on his side!”

It’s like declaring that dinner’s going to be ready at 6:00. You tell your teenaged kids or you tell your husband, “Hey, we’re eating at 6:00!” They may not show up. They may choose to ignore your declaration or reject your announcement. But you’re still throwing it out there: The food will be on the table at 6:00. You are a messenger with a message.

Have you spoken the Good News lately to somebody who really needs to hear it? Can you picture yourself saying to someone, “Christ Jesus has become for you your righteousness, holiness, and redemption.” Can’t you tell somebody, “Salvation comes by no other name than that of Jesus.” Can’t you say those kinds of things to the people God is placing right in front of you every day?

The Word is near you. It is in your mouth. It is in your heart.

Peace,

Allan

Trusting the Good News

April 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Every single time the New Testament says somebody is filled with the Holy Spirit, without exception, their mouths open and they start talking about Jesus. Most of those instances are in Acts and Luke, but they are all remarkably consistent. And intentional. The Bible is telling us that the indwelling Spirit gives us the power, he gives us the boldness and courage, to share the Good News with others. You can do and say things for our Lord Jesus with God living inside you that you could never do by yourself.

This is God’s plan. This is how he works. It’s part of the Good News. The problem is, we don’t trust it. We don’t always trust the way God works to spread the Good News and expand his Kingdom to save people.

We don’t trust the Gospel to connect and transform people. Or we don’t trust God’s way or God’s Spirit to communicate his Good News through us. We forget that there’s not one single person I could talk to about Jesus that God’s Spirit hasn’t already been working on. When God puts somebody in my path and an opportunity right in front of me, the fact is that he has been convincing them and drawing them and preparing them for a while now. God’s already started something with this person a long time ago and he’d be thrilled if I just jumped in and shared the fun.

Pew Research released their state of the church report two weeks ago. According to their surveys and research, in 2007,  63% of all Texans went to church at least once a month. In 2024, just 17 years later, the percentage of Texas residents who go to church at least once a month is down to 38%. The odds are right now today higher than they’ve ever been in your life that your next-door-neighbor doesn’t go to church. The odds are higher right now than they’ve ever been since you were born that your co-worker is not a Christian.

And I’m guessing you don’t know how to talk to them about it. The very thought of talking to your friend or neighbor about Jesus or about the Good News makes your stomach fall into your socks. You say you don’t know how to have a spiritual conversation.

Yes, you do. You just don’t trust it. You don’t trust the Good News. Or you don’t trust God’s plan or God’s Spirit.

Talking to people about Jesus is a Holy Spirit activity. You don’t have to start anything with your neighbor or classmate; God’s already started it! Our Lord tells us that God’s Spirit is at work around the clock convincing men and women, exposing what’s wrong in the world, and drawing all people to himself. The Holy Spirit is convicting people of their sin and compelling men and women to seek righteousness and avoid judgment. God’s Spirit is working hard on people all around you. And this same Spirit lives inside you, empowering you like you can’t believe.

Pray that God will open a door, pray that you proclaim Christ clearly, and make the most of every opportunity (Colossians 4:3-5). The Holy Spirit will put the person directly in front of you, the Holy Spirit will tell you what to say, and the Holy Spirit will do with your conversation what’s going to be best, what he’s already planned and been working on. If you’ll only trust the Good News.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Dallas Stars have played three games against Colorado in this first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, they have led the Avalanche for a total of just 62-seconds, and yet they are leading the series two games to one. Two come-from-behind overtime thrillers. Last night, the Stars had to kill off a four-minute double-minor power play at the end of regulation and at the start of overtime just to get to Tyler Seguin’s sudden death winner. For drama, athleticism, pressure, grit, adrenaline, anticipation, and edge-of-your seat tension, there is nothing better than overtime playoff hockey. It’s like having a heart attack on a roller coaster in an electrical storm. Can’t wait til Saturday.

Go Stars

Allan

« Older posts

© 2026 The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑