My friend, Matt Steen has two tickets to the Velocity Church Planting Conference coming up later this month in Atlanta. Here’s a look at this year’s conference… Velocity is the rate of speed.  What speed are we moving at? OUR CULTURE PUTS A LOT OF EMPHASIS ON SPEED. Speed is daring and exciting. Often as the church we fall into the trap of needing to run faster and faster. We believe the faster we accelerate the more impact we will have. Often we have a different kind of impact as we hit the wall head-on. WE CAN ALSO MOVE TOO SLOW. This can happen when our leadership lacks a clear...

Matt Steen writes:  Matthew 23 has always been a challenging chunk of scripture for me.  The passage talks a good bit about hypocrisy, and talks about making our actions and our words line up.  Towards the end of the chapter, Jesus dives into the woes, and there are two that always stand out to me: 25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. 27 “Woe to you, teachers of the...

Matt Steen writes:  Out of Ur recently shared a video of an ABC news piece dealing with the relationship between the evangelical community in Portland, Oregon, and Portland’s openly gay mayor, Sam Adams.  I thought the piece was well done and it deeply resonates with me and how I believe the church needs to be functioning in the years to come. While church planting in Baltimore we commonly worked with a broad range of groups on common ground project, many of which had serious issues with the evangelical faith tradition, and as a result made some wonderful relationships with the community we were...