Blog recommendation from Pastor Chip


  • Our twelve bloggers, and a few special guests, engage the world on a daily basis, looking at life through a Reformed Christian lens.

  • Authenticity used to scare the hell out of me…fine, it still does. So I’ve taken on writing because it forces me to be authentic and vulnerable. I started the blog, not really even knowing how to write, let alone what I would write. If you go back in the archives you’ll find my first posts were about leadership. I know. Novel. A pastor writing on leadership. I don’t know what I thinking there. I am no leadership guru by any means. Over time, writing became about fleshing out my learning. As I follow Jesus, I have found that I need to unlearn how to live in the world in order to learn a new way of living. The way Jesus lived. As I press into that, those thoughts work themselves out into blog posts.


    All of this helps me do what I am really called to do better. While preparing for med-school in college, God made it pretty clear that I was to go into ministry. I did everything I could to avoid being a pastor. I wasn’t about to wear a suit and tie and preach for 20-25 minutes every week. How could I come up with that much to say? Who has that many ties?


    So I preach in jeans and sweater for 45. Go figure.


    Currently I am serving Christ’s Community Church in Fishers Indiana as the Lead Pastor. You can find our website here. You won’t find us on any list of large churches or fastest growing churches or innovative churches. We are just a group of people in the suburban midwest trying to figure out what it means to be faithful disciples of Jesus. And I love it. I don’t want to be anything else.

  • Scot McKnight is a recognized authority on the New Testament, early Christianity, and the historical Jesus. McKnight, author or editor of fifty books, is the Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Lombard, IL. Dr. McKnight has given interviews on radios across the nation, has appeared on television, and is regularly speaks at local churches, conferences, colleges, and seminaries in the USA and abroad. Dr. McKnight obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham (1986).

  • In the fall of 1992, a college junior named Brandon Hatmaker pretended he needed another fork in the Oklahoma Baptist University cafeteria so he would “randomly” arrive at the utensil cart just as my freshman self was getting there in line. Obviously with moves that smooth, we got married. Twenty years after the wedding, we’ve created a whole life, including a bunch of headstrong kids, a temperamental garden, and a church plant in Austin, TX, where we have lived for 15 years.

    •  I love a handful of really important things.  
    •  I love writing. 
    •  I love people. 
    •  I love home. 
    •  I love Jesus. 
    •  I love my readers and our little community.