Category: Missional Church

Total Church Conference

I landed in San Diego yesterday with fellow planter Jacob Vanhorn. Last night we stayed with a sweet family that is on staff at Kaleo church, the Petersons.

The Total Church conference with Tim Chester starts in a couple of hours. For those that dont know, Total Church is a book that was written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis of the Crowded House in the UK. The book is a rethinking of church around gospel-centered missional community. It’s so balanced that it probably won’t become immensely popular, which is unfortunate.

Other speakers include: Drew Goodmanson, David Fairchild, Mike Gunn, Caesar Kalinowski, and Mark Moore. All these guys really get missional ecclesiology really well. I look forward to learning from them and working on some longer range plans for Austin City Life while I am here.

Austin #1 Hardest Drinking City

In a recent article released by Forbes, Austin ranked #1 among the hardest drinking cities in the U.S. Here are some interesting stats from the article:

  • The CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey last year found that 61.5 percent of residents said they had had at least one drink in the past 30 days
  • Nearly 9 percent of people surveyed said they drank daily. For men, two drinks a day was considered daily alcohol consumption in the survey. For women, it was one.
  • In the CDC survey, about 20 percent of adults in Austin admitted to binge drinking, or having at least five drinks in one sitting.

Great Baxter Quote on Preaching

(People) will give you leave to preach against their sins, and to talk as much as you will for godliness in the pulpit, if you will but let them alone afterwards, and be friendly and merry with them when you have done, and talk as they do, and live as they, and be indifferent with them in your conversation. For they take the pulpit to be but a stage; a place where preachers must show themselves, and play their parts; where you have liberty for an hour to say what you (desire); and what you say they regard not, if you show them not, by saying it personally to their faces, that you were in good earnest, and did indeed mean them…

HT: MF