Disciples Who Hear God's Voice

  VBS season is upon us, which mean the church is coming together in a special way to pour our time and energy into building up our little ones. It's ironic that kids ministry tends to become the afterthought of many churches. Ministry to kids can seem shallow, childish, and maybe even meaningless. Certainly, it's possible to do it that way, but that's now how we do it! We understand that Satan invests time and energy into recruiting children. Satan understands that children hold great potential to be trained for Godliness or trained for darkness. Satan tries to get children to view the world through his wicked lenses, and if the church merely babysits kids until they are old enough to sit through sermons, Satan will happily move in to fill the discipleship vacuum.  At Wellspring, we recognize that kids have great potential for belief in God and encounter with Him. We believe that we can train our kids in the things of to know what is good, to reject wickedness, to embrace ...

  On Sunday, June 15, Sam Storms will be our guest preacher at Wellspring. The first time I ever heard of Sam Storms was some time back in 2010, while I was a member of a small church plant in Denton. Back in those days, Nathan Miller and I were not pastors at a church, but we had gotten swept up in leading a prayer meeting on Sunday evenings. The prayer night was not officially connected to any church, but Nathan and I eventually joined a church in Denton, and the majority of the people in the prayer meeting joined the church as well. The only catch was that the church fell somewhere between cautious about and suspicious of spiritual gifts. The prayer group, however, had begun experiencing an outpouring of many of the gifts, namely prophecy, healing, tongues, and deliverance (I know deliverance is not listed as a gift, but it tends to come as a package deal with the others).  When our group joined the church, I ended up becoming somewhat of an associate pastor of the church b...

Picture captured at a Christian event in Dallas where people testified of leaving the LGBT to follow God. During the event, we noticed a halo around the sun. Read the article here . You may have heard that Wellspring has an evangelism team that is slowly coming together. The team is a bit of a grass-roots effort at the moment, but we hope to launch it in the fall. For now, we get together once a week to go share the good news of Jesus with whoever will listen. This month, we plan to go to the Fort Worth Pride Festival on Saturday, June 28 to share the good news with anyone there who will listen. Sharing the Gospel at a Pride Festival is not a walk in the park, but it is not as hostile as you might imagine.  This will be my 4th year to do this, and one thing I've noticed is that when I approach a person and tell them I'm a Christian, I see a look on their faces, not of anger or disgust, but of fear and insecurity. When I say I'm a Christian, people tense up, expecting me to ...

This coming Sunday, June 1, we have a big change coming to the church. We're going to try out this prosperity gospel thing and see how we like it. Just kidding. This Sunday, we will install three new overseers to the church. Travis Maxwell, Scott Stephens, and Glen Campbell have completed an elder apprentice process that lasted well over a year, and they will be installed as overseers of the church. I say this is a big change because as these three guys join the voting elder board, it will necessarily change that group of elders. 1 Timothy 5:17 (depending on the version you read) implies that elders govern the affairs of the church. 1 Peter 5:1-2 says that elders should be shepherds of the flock and exercise oversight. Jesus says that a true shepherd is one who lays his life down for the sheep.  For these reasons, adding three new men to the elder team is a big change. At the same time, it's not that big of a change because these three guys have already been doing the work of o...

I’ve been thinking about this season we find ourselves in where leaders continue to be exposed as having major sin, manipulative practices, cover-ups, etc. It seems to be dividing the church in some ways, maybe in good ways.  I’m not for division, but I am for God purifying his bride, preparing her to be presented to himself without spot or wrinkle. One example of division that is on our doorstep is as simple as whether or not we believe this season of exposure is actually from God or if it is an attack from the “accuser of the brethren,” designed to take down Godly, innocent leaders.  Some churches are calling the many moral failures we’ve been seeing just that, a demonic attack, designed to falsely accuse innocent leaders and cast their ministries into disrepair. I disagree. I think what we’re seeing is real, and I think God is bringing this about now because he is calling the church to righteousness. A test I believe we are receiving is this;  are we willing to call an...

This week, our church has been rallying in prayer around one of our Elders, Douglas Coco. As of the writing of this post, he is in the ICU in the cardiac unit of Baylor Hospital in Dallas. On Thursday, he went to the ER with dizziness that was bad enough that he made the right call and went to the hospital. The first hospital diagnosed him with a serious issue that would need emergency open-heart surgery, so they careflighted him to Dallas. As it was getting late, we were told that he was being prepped for surgery.  I don't know what all happened with everyone else that night, but I know what the night was like for me. I fell asleep praying after the last text update came out. I woke up randomly at 3 am and checked my phone, expecting to see another update after the surgery, but there was no update. I really started feeling the gravity of what was going on, and I started wondering if no update actually meant something very bad.  I ended up getting up and reading scripture and ...