Today in the New York Times, David Brooks published an opinion piece about the Evangelicals who are trying to save evangelicalism from itself. Evangelical is a word that I used to fully embrace for myself because I thought it was a word that described a commitment to the gospel, a commitment to the …
Please, Church, Reject Trump (Transcript)
Today, I posted a video to my YouTube Channel imploring Christians to stand in opposition to Trump even if you choose to vote for him as the "lesser of two evils." Here is the full transcript of my video. Good Morning Church! In today’s video, I’m calling on Christians to give up on …
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Is it Discrimination to Discriminate against Discriminators?
My church office received an email today that called me out for what was printed in the local newspaper reporting on my involvement in the City Council meeting last Monday. A woman named Kathy wrote this: Dear Pastor Mikels, Reading the newspaper Tuesday morning, I felt quite sad to read …
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Is Modern Worship too Simplistic?
Earlier this week, a discussion among the worship band members at my church pointed to this article where Bill Blankschaen describes his frustration with worship songs sung in churches on Sunday mornings and tells us "Why I've stopped singing in your church." As of this writing right now, he has …
Reflections on Sin
Some Context This past week, a number of stories came out in my local newspaper reporting on and analyzing the arrest of a local pastor. He has been accused of placing and monitoring video equipment in the female bathrooms at the church. If you haven't read the articles, don't worry about not …
All this sound with only three guys
With Everything (Elevation Remix) - by Hillsong United from Elevation Worship on Vimeo. The quality of music coming out of Elevation Church is truly remarkable especially when you consider many of the risks they take regarding instrumentation. Check out their Vimeo page to see more. …
Follow the (Crazy) Leader
Leadership takes guts and authenticity. Lead well and you're unstoppable. …
Cooperation Makes for a Good Day
Found at this other blog. Quoting the original article: This unexpected, spontaneous, and scripted dance (aka Flash dance) was performed by over twenty thousand people. How did they do it? Planners recruited 800 people using Facebook and Twitter Choreographers taught a simple dance …
Organizational Insights from Numbers 2
This morning, I was reading the first few chapters of Numbers. I have to be honest with you, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit, I wasn't expecting much. Aside from a few interesting (and confusing) stories, the book of Numbers is filled with, you guessed it, numbers! The first few chapters are all …
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Helping People Resolve Conflict
When two people are in conflict with each other, bringing about resolution can be difficult. However, when two Christians are in conflict, the process of reconciliation should not be as hard as it is. In conflict situations, I like to ask a few questions: Describe all the sin in this conflict. …
I will write a novel in 30 days
Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? I hadn't heard of it until last year during the middle of November and by then it was too late for me to get into it, but the basic idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in the span of 30 days. Now, if you are like I was, you probably are initially thinking that …
New Church Brochures
I just finished putting together two new church brochures for our Grand Opening service on Sunday. By the way, if you haven't heard yet, we are changing our church name to Lafayette Community Church. Read About It Here. I'm uploading both brochures here for your use if you want. LCC Baptism …
Postcard ideas for Choose Well
I'm working on some postcard ideas for my October series... Your comments are welcome! CHOOSE WELL - Series Concept Title: Choose Well Subtitle: { four questions to guarantee good choices } Felt need: Whether it's during the time of an election or not, people feel a sense of anxiety when it comes …
Barack Obama and John McCain Get Real
Rick Warren hosted a "civil forum" where he took roughly 50 minutes with each candidate asking questions from all over the political map. Two very insightful questions were: What is your greatest moral failure, and what is the greatest moral failure of the USA? What current Supreme Court …
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Churches to Watch
Apparently, these are the 250 best(?) churches to track for ideas... sounds like a lot of them to me. How can you "track" 250 churches? http://churchrelevance.com/resources/churches-to-watch/ …
Professional Sunday Morning Video Presentations
In our new church effort in Lafayette, I set as a goal from very early on that we would attempt to do everything we could with excellence, and though we have had some hiccups with our children's programming and with our music, we have been consistently high quality with our printed materials and …
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