Josh Hunt's blog

Jesus taught that is the responsibility of every generation to reinvent the wineskins--the forms that hold the gospel. We are never to tinker with the wine of the gospel itself. We must be constantly creating new wineskins. "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. (22) And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins." Mark 2:21-22 (NIV) This is true in every arena of life. Your teenager will not want to drive his grandfather's Oldsmobile. Successful businesses reinvent themselves or face inevitable failure. The church I grew up in--First Baptist Church, Clovis, NM saw a couple of reinventions. One of them came in the wake of a Lay Witness Mission. This was a meeting where people of all age g...

The number one complaint I hear about Sunday School is this: there is no depth. People often say it this way: those are just Sunday School answers. People want to hear things they have never heard before. Yet, we must be faithful to the old gospel. People want to think things they have never thought before. Yet, again, we are faithful to an old book. People want to be challenged to think, to ponder, to consider, to argue. Think of the opposite: if you don't learn anything new, why bother coming? Apparently, a LOT of people ask that question. And, there is plenty of depth in our old Book. His mercies are new every morning. You can study it your whole life and only skim the surface. Here are some ideas to create depth in your lessons: What is the balancing truth? The truth is nearly always a midpoint between two extremes. People tend to wander in one direction or the other. For example: Is Christian living active or passi...

The number of new churches each year has had a 13X increase in the 16 years Rankin has been president. Yet there has always been a need to track progress. When Rankin took over leadership of the IMB in 1993, the Southern Baptist mission organization saw nearly 4,000 missionaries help start more than 2,000 churches in 142 countries. Last year more than 5,500 IMB missionaries helped plant nearly 27,000 churches and engage 101 new people groups for a total of 1,190 engaged people groups. http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=31262 This is the power of multiplication. This has been done, to a large degree, through joining God in what God is doing through Church Planting Movements. These lay led small groups are turning the world upside down through the power of multiplication. Andy Stanley is the the poster child for multiplying small groups in America. We went from 2000 to 27,000 in the last 16 years. Let's put another zero (270,000) in the next 16 years!

As I was driving tonight, I got to thinking about, "What does a really good lesson consist of?" Solid Biblical content/ depth The number one complaint I hear about lessons is "lack of depth". People want to learn something. They want to hear something they have not heard before. In my lessons, I try to include quotes from some of the greatest Bible scholars around--at least the ones who are available in WordSearch! Great teachers are always investing in great books, scanning the Internet and doing whatever they can to bring some depth to the table. Crummy teachers give Sunday School answers. Humor I love to laugh. In a healthy group, the group will provide the humor. It is not such a bad idea to try to find some funny stories in every lesson. Obviously, we want the story to relate to the text and the point of today's lesson. One of the many reasons I like John Ortberg is he nearly alway...

Need more workers? Get your groups talking! Discussion groups are almost twice as likely to send out six workers or more in the past year. How many workers has your group sent out in the past year? Answers from those using mostly lecture as a method of teaching. Notice the Orange slice: How many workers has your group sent out in the past year? Answers from those using mostly discussion as a method of teaching. Notice the orange slice is nearly twice as big. Discussion groups sent out more workers even though the groups themselves were much smaller: What is the approximate average attendance of you group? Lecture groups: What is the approximate average attendance of you group? Discussion groups: Jesus said the harvest is plentiful, the workers are few. We need to all pray daily that God would raise up workers for the harvest. One other thing we can do is to encourage our groups to discuss rather...

"What you are talking about is not a Sunday School program; it is just Christian living." I was flattered and encouraged by this comment at a recent conference. I have really been leaning into this perspective as I have done seminars ever sense. I don't talk about a Sunday School program; I just talk about how to live the Christian life. Not that I talk about all of the Christian life. I had someone say to me once, "You talked for three hours and you never said anything about prayer." True. And, there are some more things I didn't say too much about. I didn't say too much about how you ought to be saved, though I certainly believe it is true. I believe you ought to be in the habit of starting your day with the Bible on your lap, but I didn't say too much about that. I believe you ought to forgive everyone you have to forgive. There are a whole lot of things we could talk about but are not. But what we do talk about will not be a Sunday ...

Do you serve God to give or to get? The real spirit of the question is, "Should you serve God to give or to get?" If you were all you should be, godly and right thinking and mature and Christ-like, would you serve God for what you could get out of it, or what you could contribute? I think we would quickly agree that we should serve God to give. We should be more about contributing and less about receiving. We should, if we were more godly, serve God to serve God--to give. We might think so, but we would be wrong. Hebrews 11.6 lists two steps to drawing near to God: "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." The two steps are: We must believe that God exists. Turns out, this is a pretty easy step. About ninety-five percent of people on planet earth do believe that God exists. Even the devil believes that God exists. We must believe t...