I often read or hear a servant of Christ insist that worship is “more than singing.” We are frequently told that making a meal for your family or cleaning your car or helping your neighbor are all acts of worship. When these acts are the outgrowth of our love for God and are done to demonstrate that love, I would agree that they are “worshipful,” but technically they are not worship. I’m not seeking to parse meaning with undue rigor, but we need to be precise in our definitions if we want to accurately embrace the very purpose for our existence. Worship is the actual act of ascribing worth directly to God. Worshipful actions may do this indirectly, but when the Bible commands and commends worship as our highest expression, it is not talking about anything other than direct, intentional, Vertical outpouring of adoration. While that does not have to be put to music, it does have to be direct and not indirect to rise above the “worshipful” and actually ascribe worth to God. First Chronicles 16, Psalm 29, and Psalm 96 define worship with surgical precision: “Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name” (Psalm 29:1–2). Worship is mind, emotions, and will engaged in whole-person ascription of worth.

Nothing brings glory down in church as quickly and as powerfully as when God’s people unashamedly adore God’s great Son, Jesus Christ. Not just a few enthusiasts in the front row when the service starts but a room packed to the walls with fired-up Christians. Not testimony to personal benefit resulting from gospel belief, but ascription of worth to the God of the gospel. When that happens, an unbeliever coming in will “worship God and declare that God is really among you” (1 Corinthians 14:25). A whole body of believers worshipping with their whole beings can expect to get the only thing we have to offer this world: “Is it not in [God’s] going with us … that we are distinct … from every other people on the face of the earth?” (Exodus 33:16). All church activities that dilute, diminish, or detract from worship destroy Verticality, deny the priority of doxology, and forfeit what Vertical Church is all about—glory. … (more…)

You can’t fake glory. You can’t manufacture it, or manipulate it, or manifest it at will. Only God Himself can bring glory into a church, and when He does, communities get shaken and lives get changed, and the fame of Jesus Christ curls continuously upon the shore of human hearts like a Hawaii 5-0 wave. Church is supposed to be a tsunami of glory every Sunday, and that is what we gather for. Push out of your mind your concepts of church as community, church as mission, church as evangelistic tool, or church as instruction in Scripture. Church can be all of those things with great power if God is in the house. Vertical Church points to a new day where God is the seeker and we are the ones found. In Vertical Church God shows up, and that changes everything.

This is a significant week in the life our church and our fellowship of churches, with the release of the book, Vertical Church. It’s the story of our twenty-five-year try-fail-try again pursuit of the single goal of experiencing God’s glory—and one that I fervently pray will be used in churches around the world to ignite a renewed hunger and passion for His manifest presence.

In addition, the first worship CD from our Vertical Church Band releases today…and I cannot adequately express how fired up I am about these songs of ascription to our Savior. (more…)

When Kathy and I were in seminary in the late eighties, we began to pray, “God, we will go anywhere you want us to go, but if You would allow it, we would like to pastor one church for our ministry.” I had already been a youth pastor at a church of two hundred and a singles pastor at a church of two thousand. And I had studied enough churches with significant fruitfulness to know that long-tenured senior pastorates were a key ingredient in abundant fruitfulness. I never dreamed of a church with ten thousand people; there was no such thing at the time, and my heart was much less for a big place and much more for a God place, a glory place. We prayed and prayed for God to lead us somewhere away from Chicago and hopefully back to our home country of Canada. When seminary and our two-year commitment to the church we were in came to an end, we were fervently praying for God open a door somewhere, never dreaming we were already there.

Nobody expressed an interest in our ministry from the channels we pursued, so we decided to remain in our current assignment and put some money down on a house in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. No sooner had we emptied our little nest egg into escrow than we heard from sixteen different churches around North America and even candidated at one in Winnipeg. Still, it seemed God would not lead us to abandon our house deposit. Just then, the phone rang in our little apartment behind the bookstore at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School less than a month after graduation. It was a group of eighteen people from five different churches who wanted us to lead them in planting a new church in the northwest suburbs. As I hung up the phone, I laughed out loud, and it was one of the few times the Lord spoke clearly into my spirit, “Don’t laugh.” A heaviness came over me and Kathy, and we wept tears of submission as we knelt by the couch and told the Lord we would stay if this was the place He wanted us to remain. I really didn’t want to plant a church, as any church planter I had ever known spent the bulk of his time storing speakers in his garage (more…)

It was Jack Nicholson who famously bellowed to Tom Cruise while playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in the courtroom scene of A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.” I wonder if the screenwriter knew how succinctly he had summarized our culture. Individual capacity to bear the weight of truth has been mortally wounded in a world that idolizes tolerance and despises anyone who threatens our addiction to autonomy. If this were only true in society at large that would be one thing, but as Christian philosopher extraordinaire Francis Schaeffer rightly observed, “The spirit of the age becomes the spirit of the church.” For that reason I confess to wondering about the capacity of most, including many church leaders, even pastors to rightly evaluate and benefit from the content of this chapter. “Can’t you just focus on the positives of Vertical Church without exposing its absence?” Though I might prefer to avoid the refutation of error, the New Testament commands it. Yet why does it seem that most who are willing to do that work tend to call all doctrinal variance false teaching and anyone with a different view a heretic? Why isn’t failure to love and work for unity as Christ modeled considered the greatest kind of false teaching? Where rebuke comes from elders in the body of Christ it should be directed against confirmed, substantive error, not disagreement over method or minor variation in doctrine, and it should come from those qualified to give it. Even ESPN realizes that veteran NFL players are in the best position to critique those currently on the field. Spiritual gifts are dangerous when expressed in isolation and not governed by the complimentary gifts found in a healthy local church. Churches were never intended to have a single focus like Jiffy Lube or Dairy Queen but to be fully biblical in all priorities. To be Vertical and powerful in God’s strength, we must labor to be all that God commands and not crouch in any corner of mutual congratulation about an isolated biblical emphasis.

I fear that challenging the church in North America about its true condition spiritually is gonna be like getting Charlie Sheen to show up for an intervention; however, I have (more…)

“A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.” (Proverbs 29:11)

A complex issue for ministry leaders is how to process the incredible amount of feedback that comes from so many sources, both in and outside the church. It falls into some basic levels, regardless of the source:

• General input (random and one time)
• Persistent input (continuous on many topics, not always negative)
• Irreconcilable disagreement without sin (Paul and Barnabas)
• Constructive criticism (always negative, but goal is helping)
• Destructive criticism (always negative, with goal to wound)
• Harsh unjust criticism (intended to tear down)
• Personal attack and character assassination (intended to destroy)

The further what you’re facing is down that list, the more this article is intended to guide you. Part of the puzzle in processing feedback requires evaluation of the person who brings it (let’s save that for another post). A.W. Tozer and many other men of God have had, throughout their ministries, a policy of ‘no attack, no defense’ when the opposition involved unjust or untrue statements from those outside of their own churches. Instead they chose silence, and I believe we should do the same.

1: When Answering Would Cause You To Sin
Every question does not need an answer. For those outside the information flow, the interrogative can be more appealing than the prerogative of love, as the former expands the ego while the latter deconstructs it. Knowing the whole story is a burden that leaders must bear in plurality, so the company or the congregation or the country does not have to carry the weight of full disclosure. In a culture where journalists dictate the information flow, we start to think getting the full scoop is the ultimate good. But seeing firsthand the failings of others without becoming disillusioned is what leaders are called to carry (more…)

Transcendence is the best single word I have found to describe the attributes of God that are only found in Him and what is missing too often from our churches. We are facilitators of transcendence. Our main job is to usher in the Almighty—God forgive us when we have settled for less. When transcendence is welcomed and unveiled, no one even notices the program, the preacher, or other people. Anything resembling performance seems out of place. Because all that is visible is eclipsed by what is not: God Himself moving through the church in power and meeting with His people in manifest ways.

When did we decide that relevant need-meeting was superior to awesome God-meeting? We have settled for the horizontal and become comfortable leading and attending churches that God does not. Sailing is only delightful when the wind blows, and church without the transcendent leaves us dead in the water. Does your heart hunger for the miraculous in church where God’s power is manifested in measureable ways?

May I ask some honest questions? Whether you attend a megachurch, a large church, a medium or small or microchurch—when was the last time God took you to the mat and pinned you with a fresh awareness of His size compared to yours? How have we come to be content with so little of God’s obvious presence? I believe there are reasons why good, dedicated people serving the Lord settle for so much less than what church (more…)

A real encounter with the living God changes everything. First it magnifies the Lord, and then it puts me and my ego and my sin and my burdens, that moments ago seemed so big, all in their rightful place.

That is what church is supposed to do and be. Not an encounter with the glory of God in creation, but an encounter with God in a different, even more awesome way, that only church can provide. In fact church, as a weekly experience with the manifest glory of God is the greatest lack in our day. The lost are not found because God’s glory is not revealed in church. Children wander because church is pathetically predictable or shamefully entertaining but hardly ever authentically God. Marriages flounder because arrogance grows unchecked in our hearts and is not weekly cut down by the pride-withering presence of almighty God. Church was never intended to be a place we serve God to the exclusion of meeting with Him. What I felt that morning at the edge of the Hawaiian volcano is what we need to experience in church every week. We cannot survive spiritually without that corporate connection in heart, soul, mind and strength with the One who made us. That’s what I mean by Vertical.

People Are Desperate
Twice in the past 3 weeks I have stood in a home with heart sick families shrieking in despair at the discovery of a loved one who had ended their life. A young man crumpled in his basement, gun strewn nearby as his body fell lifeless in his final second on earth. An old man blue and bloated hanging in the garage of the home he shared with no one, freed in that act of finality from the fears and loneliness that cornered and conquered his rational thought. I was in these situations and many others because a while back I decided to become a chaplain with a local police department. My ministry had become too isolated from the people we are trying to reach and disciple. (more…)

Church was never meant to be safe.
Or comfortable. Or predictable.
God isn’t any of those things.
Church is supposed to arrest our pride.
Church is meant to crush our selfishness.
Church was created to carry our heartache and comfort our affliction.
Church is where we find community, express compassion and engage in mission.
But church without God does none of that.
Make the change that changes everything and learn how to go Vertical at church.
Discover the things God has designed and given us to welcome His glory and provoke His manifest presence.
When church stops being about us, it can be about God again.
And when God comes back to church…it’s time to order more chairs.

From August to October, I’m bringing the message of Vertical Church to 40 cities across North America. Check out the trailer below, then get the details here.

The New Testament knows nothing of an unbaptized convert. Jesus asked us to do two specific things—to remember His sacrifice with the bread and the cup, and to be baptized.

I’ve been preaching verse-by-verse through the book of John in a study called Authentic Jesus. A few weeks ago the entire message was dedicated to John 3:16—the greatest verse in the Bible. Expositing that verse word-for-word led to an incredible movement of the Spirit in our church, with more than 70 first-time confessions of faith in Christ.

The next weekend we finished chapter 3, and the call to obedience through baptism leaped straight out of the text through the clear proclamation of the Word: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36).

Here is the Vertical response that followed…

Let’s grow in our capacity to discern. Make a note of these four myths attacking the church today. Some you might be aware of, others maybe not at all. They are messages crafted for itching ears that damn the souls of men.

1: The Word of God is not sufficient. The Word of God does not have all of the answers that people need for the complex problems of the twenty-first century man. Instead of the message of the Word of God, we need psychology—literally, the study of the soul.

Almighty God has already written a book on the soul. Any contributions from psychology have not seriously upgraded what God calls “all things pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). If you have a problem, a burden, or a struggle, the answer is not found by running away from God’s Word and going to a counselor, month after month, who never opens the Word of God, who never prays with you, or who is not ministering in the power of God’s Spirit. If the answer to your problem doesn’t leave you closer to God, it wasn’t God’s answer for you. I don’t judge those who don’t know the Lord for doing the best they can and finding relief along the broad road, but the people of God should not be clamoring for the world to solve what God, in His Word and in the power of His Holy Spirit, wants to give. God help us to love the truth and pursue the truth for the answers to the burdens we carry and the issues we face.

2: The Word of God is not sophisticated. If you really want to reach people—boomers, GenX’ers, post-moderns—you need a more sophisticated hook than the Word of God.

Listen to what some church sites are posting in their attempts to reach people. “Our church is growing large and strong with an emphasis on the importance of every individual.” (more…)