The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Category: Ministry (Page 1 of 34)

Blessing a Minister

September 9, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The boys turned two months old yesterday and they are still awesome. In fact, I think they might be a little awesomer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once a month, our ministry team here at GCR spends a whole morning together at my house. We eat breakfast, spend some important time in Word and Prayer, check in with each other, and then take an hour and a half or so planning whatever needs to be planned and deciding whatever needs to be decided. Yesterday, after some honest reflection together on that enormous canyon in Nowen’s prayer (see yesterday’s post), we went around the circle and blessed one another with these words from 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17.

If you are wondering how to encourage one of your ministers or elders at your church, I would suggest sending him or her a note with these words, inserting her or his name in the blank. Remind him that, no matter what he’s enduring at the moment, he is loved by God. Remind her that, no matter what she feels, she is chosen by God. Tell him he is called by God. Tell her she shares in the glory of Christ. Bless them with the holy words of Scripture.

I thank God for you, ____________, loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through your belief in the truth.

He called you to this, this ministry, this church, through the Gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So then, ____________, stand firm and hold to the teachings.

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved you and by his grace gave you eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your heart and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

Amen.

I can assure you by my own experience, these are powerful words that mean the world coming from someone you really love.

Peace,
Allan

The Enormous Abyss

September 8, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Rangers took two of three from the Astros over the weekend, the first of which Whitney and Carley and I experienced in person at Globe Life Field Friday night. It was a 12-inning triumph in which the kids, particularly Cody Freeman and Dustin Harris, again played pivotal parts. The atmosphere was electric, as it always is when these two Lone Star rivals get together. The World Series trophy was on display–I guess we want to remind all the Astros fans that we won it last–and it was our first time to see the brand new Adrian Beltre statue outside the centerfield gates. So we patted Beltre’s head, took the pic with the trophy, and then sent the selfie to all our Rangers friends after Harris’ 12th inning single drove home the winning run.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shockingly, the Rangers are still in this thing, just a half-game back of a wild card spot. Just as amazingly, if Texas can win just one of the three remaining games against the Astros, they will take the annual Silver Boot Trophy for the first time in nine years. And Myles Hill will have to buy me lunch at Whataburger.

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A prayer from A Cry for Mercy by Henri Nouwen. Especially if you are a minister or a congregational leader. My hope is that this might give voice to your heart in ways you never would have expected. And that you will be given encouragement and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ.

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I am impressed by my own spiritual insights. I probably know more about prayer and contemplation than most Christians do. I have read many books about the Christian life, and have even written a few myself. Still, as impressed as I am, I am more impressed by the enormous abyss between my insights and my life.

It seems as if I am standing on one side of a huge canyon and see how I should grow toward you, live in your presence and serve you, but cannot reach the other side of the canyon where you are. I can speak and write, preach and argue about the beauty and goodness of the life I see on the other side, but how, O Lord, can I get there? Sometimes I even have the painful feeling that the clearer the vision, the more aware I am of the depth of the canyon.

Am I doomed to live on the wrong side of the abyss? Am I destined to excite others to reach the promised land while remaining unable to enter there myself? Sometimes I feel imprisoned by my own insights and “spiritual competence.”

You alone, Lord, can reach out to me and save me. You alone.

I can only keep trying to be faithful, even though I feel faithless most of the time. What else can I do but keep praying to you, even when I feel dark; to keep writing about you, even when I feel numb; to keep speaking in your name, even when I feel alone.

Come, Lord Jesus, come. Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Amen.

Fulfilling the Law

August 18, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Here’s the last thing, I think, I’ll write about salvation and the law for a while. It’s a huge topic with lots of talking points, lots of opportunity to get into the weeds, and plenty of far-reaching ramifications. But I like to follow the lead of our Lord and boil it down to everything hanging on love. All the law and the prophets, everything God ever taught or ever thought, all of God’s plans for his people and his creation–it all hangs on love.

“Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another, for the one who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.” ~Romans 13:8-10

Here’s a bottom line deal for you. If you do not love everybody, then you have to deny all the most basic things all Christians believe. If I harshly criticize anybody, if I refuse to forgive anybody, if I discriminate in any way, if I ignore or neglect anybody, if I make any move to harm anyone for any reason, then I have to reject almost all the basic points of Christian belief.

We believe that all men and women are created by God in the image of God. All men and women. Period.

We believe our God loves all people. All people. Period.

We believe Jesus died on the cross because God wants all people to be forgiven and saved, including you and your neighbor, equally.

We believe in treating others the same way we want to be treated.

We believe our God calls us to show his divine love to all people everywhere–no exceptions.

Serving others in love keeps all the commands. Serving others in love makes all the beliefs real–not just something we know in our heads, but something we live with our lives, that changes us and fulfills the eternal will of our God.

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We were delighted to welcome Josh Ross to GCR Church this past weekend to train our adult Bible class teachers on “The Spirit Poured Out,” a twelve-week curriculum he wrote for us on the person, presence, and power of God’s Holy Spirit. Of course, it’s excellent. And I am beside myself with hope and anticipation for the conversations we’re going to have and God’s will we’re going to wrestle and the formation that’s going to happen in and through our congregation during the next three months.

I believe our church recognized in Josh what Carrie-Anne and I have known for years: his uncompromising commitment to our Lord and the ways of Christ and his unwavering love for God’s people. It’s infectious.

Carrie-Anne and I have known Josh and his family for more than 25 years. Josh’s dad, Rick, was the preacher at the Mesquite CofC when Carrie-Anne and I began worshiping and serving there in October 1999. Rick was the first preacher I really listened to, the first guy in a pulpit who connected the dots for me and, more than that, the first preacher whose life I noticed clearly reflected a commitment to Christlikeness. Josh’s mom, Beverly, became a mentor and friend for Carrie-Anne in ways that still profoundly resonate in Carrie-Anne’s walk with Jesus and in our marriage and family. Josh’s big sister Jenny and her husband David became very good friends of ours–I was driving to Houston with David to see the Astros and Giants on the morning of 9/11. Josh and his younger brother Jonathan were these two dynamic young men who had a fire for the Lord and a passion for discipleship and obvious gifts for speaking and leading in God’s Kingdom.  This was the setting–the time and place and people–God used to call me into congregational ministry.

The first time we went to the Tulsa Workshop, it was with Rick and Beverly and Jenny and David. And it was mind-blowing. Earth-shaking. Paradigm shattering. I started organizing  men’s retreats at Mesquite. I led a 24 Hours of Prayer at Mesquite. I taught that Room 201 Bible class. We sat behind Jason and Tiersa, next to Chris and Liz, in front of Brian and Terri. I led worship at Mesquite. We started that Second Saturday Servants. I rappelled out of a second-story air conditioning vent into the worship center for a VBS bit. The Four Horsemen made those vows to each other and our families and started those Wednesday night dinners and those Tuesday morning Bible studies. I started reading John Mark Hicks and C.S. Lewis. Those three years at that church were the most intensely formative times for Carrie-Anne and me in our discipleship to Jesus. That Mesquite church was a dysfunctional mess, but our gracious God used that church and those people at that time to transform me into a proclaimer of his Good News.

It’s not Josh’s fault, but in my mind and my heart he is forever connected to that time and place and people that still mean so much to me. So, I just absolutely love the guy. We had a blast hanging out together this weekend, and I know our church at GCR is going to be blessed for the next three months and beyond as we dive into his material on the Holy Spirit. As Josh told us several times, we don’t need a perfect understanding of the Holy Spirit, but we do need a working understanding.

I thank God for the gifts he’s given his servant Josh and for Josh’s eagerness to share those gifts with GCR this weekend. I thank God for the whole Ross family and the eternal impact they’ve had on me and my family. And I thank God for that Church of Christ in Mesquite.

Peace,

Allan

The Most Courageous Thing

June 18, 2025 / / 0 Comments

A good friend of mine at our church sent me a powerfully encouraging email this week related to last Sunday’s sermon. The sermon was about identity and belonging from the first part of Galatians 3. Our identity, like our salvation, is to be found in Christ alone. We struggle with this. We build our identities based on where we came from or where we live or how we vote or the size of our houses or the work we do. It’s even possible–easily–for a preacher to construct his identity around being a preacher.

The note from this friend very generously reminded me that I am doing what God created me to do: to inspire and encourage my brothers and sisters to give themselves fully to God in Christ. It was very nice. And timely. I get these kind cards and emails every now and then, and they always feel like they come directly from God. I’m so thankful to God for these Spirit-inspired encouragements. This time, the message came with a long quote from Richard Rohr, the author of several books on spiritual living.

I’m sharing the quote here in its entirety, but I want to emphasize the dynamic center of the whole thing: “The most courageous thing you will ever do is accept that you are just yourself.”

Great people do not need to concoct an identity for themselves; they merely try to discover, uncover, and enjoy the identity they already have. As Francis said to us right before he died in 1226, ‘I have done what was mine to do. Now you must do what is yours to do.’ Yet to just be yourself, who you really are, warts and all, feels like too little, a disappointment, a step backward into ordinariness.

It sounds much more exciting to pretend I am St. Francis than accepting that I am Richard and that that is all God expects me to be–and everything that God expects me to be. My destiny and his desire are already written in my genes, my upbringing, and my natural gifts. It is probably the most courageous thing you will ever do to accept that you are just yourself. It will take perfect faith, the blind ‘yes’ of Mary, because it is the ongoing and same incarnation. Just like the Word of God descending into one little whimpering child, in one small stable, in one moment, in one unimportant country, noticed by nobody. We call it the scandal of particularity. This, here, now, me always feels too small and specific to be a dwelling place for God! How could I be taken this seriously?”

I don’t know how you’re messing up your identity, where exactly you are misplacing the center of who you are, to whom you belong, and your ultimate purpose. But you might try the more courageous thing of leaning into who God created you to be and where he has placed you.

Peace,

Allan

Grace is a Calling

June 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“God chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he adopted us as his children through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves… the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us.” ~Ephesians 1:4-8

God’s amazing grace gives us an immeasurable amount of everything we need most: forgiveness, restoration, reconciliation, peace, joy, hope, salvation–all of that and a million blessings more. But that’s not our primary focus. A lot of the church songs we sing and, frankly, a lot of the church sermons we hear are centered on those blessings. But that can’t be the center of it for us because the grace of God is a calling. It can’t be just my salvation or my peace of mind or my eternal hope or my blessed assurance. Grace is a calling.

Paul says he was called by God’s grace so that he–in order that he–might preach Christ to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:15). We are changed by Gospel power and called by God’s grace for a mission, the mission of our Lord.

And I know it’s not the same for everybody. Not everyone called by God has a blinding Damascus Road experience. Some do. Some people are converted and called–BOOM!–immediately. I’m ready to minister! I’m ready to serve! With some people it takes several years and lots of different experiences. Some people can’t really point to where and when it started. But you are called by God’s grace to minister.

“It is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” ~Ephesians 2:8-10

This helps, too, when those weird, random, bad things happen to you. I posted about this yesterday. When something goes wrong in your life, you don’t face it with a determined self-reliance: “I can overcome this! I can fix this!” And it’s not fatalistic doom and gloom, either: “I’m never going to get through this. My life is over.” 

No, you are called and grabbed by Christ Jesus to be his minister in that mess, to be his witness. And you have his power and grace to do it. Your primary calling is not to be a successful salesperson or a successful surgeon or a successful oil man. You are called first to be a Christian. A Christian witness. So you can relax and rest in that. You are free to love and proclaim, you’re empowered to witness and serve.

You have received the grace of Almighty God. You have received his calling.

Peace,

Allan

Re-Thinking: Part 2

April 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My good friend Blu Malone sent me this picture yesterday. A good friend knows you well enough to understand what really irritates you and how to use it to make you laugh. Well done. I love this. I would like it on a sticker. Like six of them. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Here at GCR, we’re trying to tackle the reluctance we have to speak to our friends and neighbors about Jesus. We haven’t stopped believing in Jesus Christ as our risen and coming Lord and the source off all truth and light and the only way to salvation. But we have mostly stopped talking. We’re not sharing the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the way we used to. It seems to me that as we address the problem, we should acknowledge a few things we need to stop believing. There are some things we accept as real, that just simply aren’t. And those things can keep us from sharing the Gospel with the people God puts right in front of us every day.

I mentioned two of these things in this space yesterday. We need to stop believing that the Church is in decline and that the Church is irrelevant. Here are three more things we need to stop believing so that we’ll feel more able to talk about Jesus with others.

Don’t believe that people in our culture are not seeking God. It’s not true. Yes, we live in a pluralistic, post-modern, post-Christian society now and there’s no going back. Yes, Christianity is no longer viewed as the only way to God and truth is no longer a fixed, eternal reality. Truth is now something each person decides for himself or herself. And, yes, there are more agnostics, skeptics, and atheists in this country than there’s ever been. But that doesn’t mean they’re not searching. They’re all searching! They’re all seeking! And there’s tremendous potential here for God’s Church.

The research is showing that we’re on the front edge of a backlash against all the pluralism and individualism in the U.S. We’re discovering that living in a world without universal truth is a lousy way to live. We’re learning that addiction to our screens and earbuds isn’t healthy, that it’s doing real damage to our relationships and what it means to be human. And people are looking for something else. They’re searching for a meaning outside of themselves. They’re seeking a purpose higher than their own tweets and posts, something more important than their careers and entertainment. People today are starting to recognize all the noise and clutter for what it is and they’re looking for something genuine and authentic. Something they can trust. People are open to it. People are seeking. And that gives the Church an exciting opportunity.

And what about the idea that everybody’s a Christian? No, we’ve got to stop believing that everybody in Midland or everybody in your town already goes to church. Because they don’t. And we also need to stop believing that people who don’t follow Christ have all heard the Good News about Jesus and thought it through and made the choice to reject it. That’s not true. Census data in Midland County and a couple of more recent surveys show that almost 50% of the people in our city don’t have a church home. Almost half! Barna research that was released last week shows that only 38% of the people in Texas go to church at least once a month. The chances are higher right now than they’ve ever been in your lifetime that your next-door-neighbor doesn’t go to church.

And there’s an increasing number of people who just don’t know much at all about Jesus. Over the last couple of decades, kids in this country are being raised differently than the ways you and I were probably raised. And there are lots of men and women in their 20s and 30s who’ve never heard the Good News. They’ve never heard it. We need to stop believing everybody has.

And we must stop believing that the Gospel is too complicated to share. The Good News of salvation from God in Christ is not hard. It’s simple. But for several generations now–for sure in Churches of Christ, I think–we’ve put too much emphasis on knowing all the details of our rules and regulations and being able to explain and proof-text our inconsistencies and loopholes, that we’ve made sharing the Gospel kind of scary. We’ve turned into a people who’d rather not say anything to our friends about Jesus than risk saying something “wrong” or not being able to answer a tricky question. For a variety of reasons, we’ve come to believe it’s a sin to admit to somebody, “I don’t know.”

The Good News is not complicated. It’s the very simple and beautiful truth that God’s eternal salvation through his crucified and risen Son Jesus is a gift. It’s a loving gift. And his limitless grace continually washes us and covers the stuff we don’t know.

If God is for us, who can be against us? Who’s going to oppose us? What’s going to stop us? What are we afraid of? Trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or sword? The culture, the media, the government, or the atheists? No! In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us!

It looked bad when the world carried out the crucifixion of Jesus. But God used it to save all humanity. It felt bad when the world executed Stephen and scattered the Church. But God used it to expand the borders of his eternal Kingdom. Today, we can be certain that our God is using the circumstances and conditions in Midland right now, and in your community, to do more through his Church than we can possibly dare to ask or imagine.

The question is: What do you believe?

Peace,

Allan

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