This is the blog formerly known as benshoun.com. You can read the post below for the lowdown on why it’s happening, but we’re transitioning to the official (as if there was an unofficial one) of Arrowhead Church. Stay tuned for an updated look and focus.
I started this blog for 3 purposes that I can put my finger on.
1. To offer devotional thoughts and leadership lessons to the people of Arrowhead Church.
2. To keep people who aren’t from Morristown in the loop with what’s happening here.
3. So I could become a widely known Christian celebrity.
I feel really stupid writing number 3, but it’s true. And I’m not alone. Blogging is many pastors’ secret sin. How did this happen?
The best I can tell, in the middle of the last decade, ministry blogging took off. Guys like Justin Taylor, Perry Noble, Ben Arment, Todd Rhodes, and then others (Steven Furtick, Craig Groeschel, and too many others to count) joined the game. They were all (and still are) offering great content for church leaders, and the Lord is still using it in great ways. You should read them all.
However, along the way, every church planter in America thought he was going to speak at Catalyst one day because his blog was just one click away from making him a star. Seriously, almost every church planter is buying into this junk. Including me. Okay, not really the Catalyst part, but all of us tend to think that more people will read our ramblings and musings and one day we’ll be a household name in church leadership circles.
It’s ridiculous. And I’m ready for that ambition in me to die.
If you are a church leader, I am not saying there is anything wrong with promotion that would lead you to a bigger platform so that you can impact more lives with the gospel. I’m just saying I’m not strong enough to separate impacting lives in this way from my own ego right now, and I think it’s worth a check from all of us to make sure we can all make the separation.
I’m really grateful for you if you are a regular reader, but honestly there aren’t that many of you! That bothers me, and it shouldn’t. It reveals my pride. I catch myself thinking, “I need to come up with a blog post or people are going to quit coming back.” Which is silly to me.
So, you say, just write what you want to write and when you want to write it. But, unfortunately that’s not how blogging works! If you really want anybody to ever read it, there needs to be some content there when they click.
So, benshoun.com is goin’ away.
There are better ways to offer devotional thoughts and leadership lessons to the people of Arrowhead Church where they’ll actually be prompted to read them, and I’ll be doing that.
If you’re from somewhere else besides Morristown or if you’re from here but don’t go to Arrrowhead and you’d like to be kept in the loop, send me an email at ben@arrowheadchurch.com and I’ll add you to a newsletter list. We’ll also add a news and announcements section and maybe even a church blog to the Arrowhead website.
If you wanted to feed my ego by adding to my blog stats, you missed your chance!
I’m still sticking with Twitter and Facebook and practically everything helpful I have to say can be said in 140 characters so I should be fine!
I think one of the greatest evidences of the activity of God in a church or a community is restored marriages. I love seeing individual lives changed by the gospel, and that is so important. But, in addition to that, it is so awesome to see God bring about healing from the pain that exists in so many families. When husbands and wives start living out biblical covenant marriage and God turns the hearts of children and fathers (Malachi 4:5-6), real transformation is so powerful.
That’s why we take time to do a series on the family like Before and After at Arrowhead. I’m praying that God uses these four weeks to encourage people and to raise the standard our culture lives with when it comes to relationships.
Ran across this at JD Greear’s blog, who ran across it at Justin Taylor’s blog (both are really good sites by the way).
Sometimes guilty as charged. And, this is funny stuff.
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
A day late, here’s an abbreviated recap:
Planting a church is a lot like a mission trip in a typical church. But, the wild thing is that it never ends! A mission trip is usually hard, and it involves lots of work. Most of the time that work is at a level that you’d never reach when you are back home at your church. But, starting a new church means that the workload comes every Sunday! You get up early, empty trailers, set everything up, serve your guts out for 2 services, tear everything down, load the trailers, go home and let the adrenaline buzz wind down into a splitting headache, and then you crash. It’s jetlag at its worst but minus the jet.
I get paid to do this, but I’d like to think I would do it without the money. I think I would. There are people who volunteer at Arrowhead every Sunday for this madness who prove it’s not about the money. That blows me away. I love what God is doing in us.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope you did something fun, like come to church.
“I’m in love, I’m in love, and I don’t care who knows it.” -Buddy the Elf (he has so many romantic quotes)
I’m blessed. I have a wife who is perfect for me. She’s fun. I’m boring. She’s beautiful. I’m short, balding, and expanding. She’s the perfect mom to my son and soon-to-be daughter. I love her with all my heart.
No one will ever know besides she and I all the details of the craziness that has been starting Arrowhead Church. She has sacrificed a lot and complains a lot less than I do. She’d do it again in a heartbeat. We both love what we do.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
(the rest of you can go vomit now if you want…)
This Sunday we’ll kick off a brand new series about relationships called Before & After. We’ll take a look at dating and marriage from a Biblical perspective. What does God have to say before you say “I do,” once you’re saying “I still do,” and even after you or your spouse says “I can’t anymore?”
I hope you can make it. I believe our culture’s view of relationships is in need of an overhaul, and we need practical steps to make it happen.
Rarely does drastic change happen in our lives overnight. If you want to be different, it generally takes some time. If you want to defeat a particular sin or habit, time is where the real battle is won. If you want to know the Bible, you can’t read it all in one sitting - and one reading won’t download it all into your spirit. If you want your marriage to improve, one night of arguing and making up can be great, but it’s not enough.
The power to change is in the consistency. If you want to learn to pray, you’ve got to pray a little every day. If you want to stop a particular sin, you defeat it one temptation at a time.
We often overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. Start somewhere and make progress. Then, look back a month from now and realize where you were and are now.