Harold Kim and David Nam

Joshua Harris’ announcement that he was no longer a Christian reverberated throughout the Christian world. (Note: Harris was one of the speakers for SOLA Conference 2017.) Harris, who was most famous for his I Kissed Dating Goodbye book that typified purity culture, announced on Instagram in July that he and his wife were…

Jiwon J. Lee

I recently spoke at a high school, and more than 90% of the students said that they used their phones more than four hours a day. A majority of the room used it for more than seven. Every day our youth consume content and seek value from video clips, filtered photos, and text alerts. Their attentions are scattered in a search for…

Aaron Lee

This is an adaptation of 10 Easy Ways To Blow Your Influence As A Leader … Without Even Trying from CareyNieuwhof.com. It is easy for worship leaders to neglect our influence. We focus on fifteen minutes of singing and fail to see our ministry is more than music. We must be aware that our actions leave an impact…

Chris Li

Every time I go up to the pulpit (which is just a music stand), I try to swing for the fences. Sometimes a sermon connects with students but other times, I feel like I strikeout. Why? I believe that teenagers have changed and research proves it. Gen Z is defined by Barna as anyone born from 1999-2015 and they are like no generation…

Daniel Greenhouse Kim

Imagine you are a teenager. It’s Thanksgiving Day at your grandparents’ house (it’s always at your grandparents’ house). Although your family is quite large, there aren’t any kids your age because your parents are a lot older than your aunts and uncles. So you semi-play with your younger cousins, watch TV, or check your phone…

Charlie Y. Kang

Did you enjoy going to your school’s Christian club? I know I didn’t when I was in high school. We sang the same song every week. There was no schedule. We had a volunteer youth pastor who was nice, but I can’t remember anything else about him. The irony of it all is that now I’m that hopefully nice youth pastor that…

Kevin Yi

When is the last time you heard an appeal at your church to serve a particular group of people? Maybe during the spring, you’ve heard appeals to serve at children’s VBS. Or in the winter to serve the homeless. Or in the fall to consider becoming a youth teacher or small group leader. How many of us have heard this type of appeal…

Daniel K. Eng & Tim St. John

A fast food drive thru can be an opportunity to think about how we approach our relationships. Here are some “fast food” thoughts that can (ironically) result in better health for marriages, families, and church communities. To take your order, the restaurant employees are trained to listen well and make sure your order is correct…

Charlie Y. Kang

Bitten nails, chewed pencils, incessant tapping of feet. The outward signs of anxiety used to look docile. Now, when we look at the youth of today, we can see the great harm that anxiety and stress has put upon them. Whether it manifests itself in panic attacks, depression, drug use, or detachment, the present picture of…

Daniel Potter Kim

One of the most common questions I’ve received as a worship pastor is, “How do you avoid the emotional manipulation that comes with worship leading?” The underlying assumption to that question is that any powerful emotion that music evokes is bad. But that’s just not true. I’m not denying that hyper-emotionalized…

Tim St. John

I have joy of pastoring the counseling ministry at Lighthouse Community Church in Torrance, CA. We have a team of more than 20 counselors who aim to reach struggling hearts with the hope of the Gospel. By God’s grace, our ministry is growing. More people in our church are willing to ask for help, and we’ve been…

Adrian Pei

I’ve written many times about some of the challenges of working in ministry. But out of everything, perhaps the hardest of all is how ministry changes friendships and relationships. Maybe we’ve all been there at one point or another – we’re about to speak in public, and nerves overtake us. Our palms are sweaty, our stomach is…

Tony Thomas

In this previous article called “Two Conversations on Ethnicity in the Local Church", I proposed that we need a lot more “nuance” than we currently have in thinking and talking about ethnicity inside the local church. And the article sought to model that one of the best ways to begin understanding one another is through healthy…

Zack Bolen

When I was a young boy, I was really fascinated with songwriting. Music was just a really big part of my life. So I would go to church and I would listen to music. I was always fascinated with an older lady who played the organ, and I was amazed by the way she would move her feet. We had another guy who led the singing…

Eddie Byun

The local church has an important role to play in terms of effective partnership with the global missions work that God desires to see happen. There's a few things we can do in particular. One is to create a strong sending culture within our local church body in terms of teaching on the importance of a global missions and the…

Tim St. John

When life hurts, we want to move away from it. A job that drains you of energy, time, and relationships hurts. The thought of the stress and long hours at work makes us just want to take sick days and stay in bed. A nagging sinful desire that will not go away hurts. We can easily become confused or frustrated with ourselves and…

Ray Causly

The Asian American church should be aware of some potential downfalls that move us away from a Gospel orientation. Culture. A lot of the reasons why Asian churches began in America was to maintain culture or to preserve culture. Coming from an immigrant context, you have a situation where you don't know the…

Alexander Jun

I want to begin by asking what is colorblind ideology or colorblind theology? Because I attend a Korean church or a Korean-American church that worships in English, I've had white brothers and sisters say to me, for example, “Alex, why do you go to a Korean church? We should all be the same.” My natural response is…

Hanley Liu

There are so many things that can be said, but I’ll sum it up in three major categories. The first commitment is a commitment to make the Gospel visible. So each time you're talking about conversions, you're talking about committing to reconciliation, committing to unity in the church, and committing to caring for the people…

Suzette Magaña & Roy Kim

The beauty of where we are now when it comes to mental health is the church and the mental health community professionals have been talking and have been having conversations now for 20 or 30 years. We have Dobson and we have Townsend and Cloud. We have these people who have been writing about…

Michael Agapito

Have you ever opened your front door to see sharply dressed individuals, tracts in their hands, ready to tell you all about “Jehovah?” These people, known as “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” believe that Jesus is the first and greatest created being who is “like God” or “similar to God.” Anything greater than that, they claim, is tantamount…

Jeremy Treat

A lot of people see conviction and being relevant to the community as being in opposition, as if you have to give one to have the other. But I don't think that's the case at all. A lot of the times it comes from a wrong understanding of what contextualizing really is. A lot of people think that you've got to adapt the gospel…

Harold Kim

We do live in a very broken, fallen world. More often than intellectual or theological excuses or objections against the Gospel, more than theological or intellectual objections against the church, I have found so often people who have stories of pain, stories where they were turned off, and they just don't want anything…

Justin Kim

Most people in the church know that serving is important for their own benefit. It’s something that God calls us to do. But I think we burn out so quickly because I don't think we're doing enough to do what I would call “soul care self care”. A friend of mine gave me some great insight about this. He said there are four categories…

Ben Shin

As a seminary professor, I have the privilege of preparing students to be future pastors. I'm often asked the question: What are the priorities that would allow them to be in the game for the long haul? Not only to just stay there, but to flourish in their ministry? The first thing I would say is that they need to have good character…

David Larry Kim

I remember hearing from a couple who were sharing their story of how they got together. He was a great guy, and she was a great girl. But for whatever reason, she was hesitant to pull the trigger on getting married. She had had some challenges. She had had some bad relationships and was struggling with trust issues, not…

P.J. Tibayan

“We’re leaving the church.” The words a pastor hopes he’d never hear. I confess that as soon as I hear those words, a wrestling match begins in my soul: Their good versus my preference. My discouragement versus their encouragement. My frustration versus their joy in God. In those moments, I feel desperate for God to grant…

Brett McCracken

As tense and as kind of fraught the relationship between the church and artists has been in the past, there's a lot of great things the two offer each other. One thing the church offers the artist is limitation, which sounds counterintuitive that that's a good thing, but artists can be prone to be freewheeling — everywhere and…

Tony Thomas

Nuanced. That might not be a popular word or concept in a world that is becoming increasingly polarized. In this world you are either on the left or right. Republican or Democrat. Jordan or LeBron. Yanny or Laurel. Now how about a topic inside the church? “Ethnic-specific” versus “Multi-ethnic.” Is it possible to see both sides…

Bryan Loritts

Of the many things that Jesus said, one of the closing things that he told his disciples in that upper room discourse in John 13 is, “By this will all people know that you are my disciples…,” not by the arguments you have on Facebook. not by the blogs that you write, but by the love that you have for one another. Love is one…