Help build churches & orphanages for persecuted / poor Christians

One of our favorite organizations is International Cooperating Ministries, a:
non-profit, trans-denominational Christian organization that works toward the mission of nurturing believers and assisting church growth worldwide. With our partners, we leverage simple church growth principles to see our vision of growth in the faith of individual believers, the number of people within each church, and [...]

Fallacies ‘R Us — Michael Moore preaches about Jesus and economics

 

Michael Moore’s new movie is Capitalism: A Love Story and he wrote For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning …a note from Michael Moore on his blog.  He makes the same mistakes that many Christians and non-Christians do, namely taking verses out of context to match his view of the word and [...]

Africa follow up

Right after the post on Africa and business went up I received an email with this update from a contact at the hospital in Kenya.  They are experiencing a severe drought and many adults and children are starving to death.  Please pray for rain and for the people.  If you want to you can click [...]

Business — the best way to help Africa?

I’ve had a heart for Africa for some time.  One of our World Vision sponsor children is from Kenya.  We’ve been writing Dennis for 10 years and I’ve been able to visit with him three times on mission trips there.  My wife and I are planning to go to Kenya on another mission trip in [...]

Ministry Spotlight – Faith Comes By Hearing

Faith Comes By Hearing is a ministry that produces audio recordings of the Bible in 371 languages and all are available for free download. Some countries are 80-90% illiterate, so getting the spoken Word to them is a powerful evangelistic tool. But as you can imagine, getting tape players (and power) to remote regions of [...]

The Mercy Project

A terrific website called Girls Gone Wise had a post on CareNet Pregnancy Center’s Mercy Project ministry.
The Mercy Project is the educational outreach component of the CareNet Pregnancy Center of Northwest Houston. In Mercy Project classes, volunteers from the community seek to teach women with crisis pregnancies specific skills needed to become better parents, to [...]

The 2nd or 3rd conversion: Your wallet

Martin Luther once said that when someone comes to Christ there is a “conversion of the mind, a conversion of the heart, and a conversion of the
wallet.” (I’ve also heard it as the wallet being the 2nd conversion, but you get the point.)
A few statistics that our pastor shared with us from The Hole in [...]

Focusing on getting rich = bad idea

Consider this powerful passage about the dangers of worshiping money and focusing on getting rich.  Especially notice the terms in bold.
1 Timothy 6:6-10 But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be [...]

“I’m gonna love you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

The title was a phrase uttered by a participant at a Kairos Prison Ministry Walk last weekend.  He mentioned it during a forgiveness exercise the prisoners were going through, and it turned into the catch phrase of the weekend. 
On Saturday night each prisoner is given a dozen cookies of his own, plus another dozen to [...]

Thoughts on tithing: Something to offend everyone!

I have mixed views on the Biblical concept of tithing.  On the one hand, I think 10% is a nice, round number and a great amount for people to give. 
But I don’t see New Testament support to make it a requirement for Christians, and I see many preachers take Old Testament verses that were just [...]

International Cooperating Ministries

One of our favorite organizations is International Cooperating Ministries, a “non-profit, trans-denominational Christian organization that works toward the mission of nurturing believers and assisting church growth worldwide. With our partners, we leverage simple church growth principles to see our vision of growth in the faith of individual believers, the number of people within each church, [...]

The worst church growth program ever?

A comment on the Yoko Ono post referred to this portion of Acts, and I wanted to clarify a few things.  It relates to how believers treated their possessions in the early church.  It could be called “the worst church growth program ever.” (I’m kidding, of course.  The church grew dramatically even with this not-so-seeker-sensitive approach.)
Acts 4:32-5:11
The Believers [...]

Prison ministry weekend – updated

Original
Hey – if you are the praying type – and I know many of you are – please say a quick prayer for the prison ministry weekend I’ll be at the next couple of days.  Mainly, pray for the 42 prisoners who will be participating, plus all the inside and outside team members.  I’ll be [...]

Prison ministry closing ceremony

I’m working another prison ministry weekend in March.  If anyone in the Houston area wants to come to the closing ceremony, it will be at 5:00 on Sunday, March 9.  Just click in the “Email Neil” box to the upper right and ask for the application instructions (you’ll need send an email with your driver license # [...]

Kenya mission trip

Also see Kenya – travel & fun and Kenya – safari
A team of 16 from Lakewood United Methodist Church went on a mission trip to Kenya from September 20 – October 6 to share the love and truth of Christ.  We had the opportunity to do many things, such as helping build three homes for AIDS orphans, [...]

Kenya – prayer quilts

This post is dedicated to those who made all the prayer quilts we gave out in Kenya, either to those who we built homes for or others we connected with during the trip.
Click here for a post about this group’s article in the Houston Chronicle.