Wanting vs. Needing

14 October 2025

What people need and what people want are frequently two different things. In ministry, the observation “That’s not what the sheep want” gets used to justify all kinds of defections. “I’d love to teach more Bible, but it’s not what the sheep want!” “I’d love to have more prayer in our church, but that’s not what the sheep want.” “I’d love to care more for the poor, but that’s not what the sheep want.”

The sad fact is, these things might be true. But it’s the shepherd’s job to lead the sheep where they need to go, not where they want to go. They have their own will and they get to make choices, but that doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities. If they’re headed the wrong way, we chase them down and turn them toward what they actually need. If their desires are disordered, it’s our job to help them want the right things. Let’s get to work!

I have to admit, leading the sheep toward what they need is a lot harder than giving them what they want. Bright-eyed guys coming fresh out of seminary and hoping to just be good shepherds and make a living wage at it may well be disappointed, and it’s discouraging to see ear-ticklers prosper while good shepherds struggle. But remember Who we’re following: foxes have holes, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with making a paycheck in pastoral care, that’s a relative rarity across the sweep of history and cultures.

Even in our prosperous times, shepherding work is mostly not what churches pay for, at least in my experience. My pastor father was a great shepherd, in a place where they certainly had the means to pay him. He got paid for teaching Christian school and media distribution; the shepherding he did–which was a lot–he did on the side, for free. I once served a church for two years with the title “Pastor of Discipleship and Ministry Logistics” and got zero support for the discipleship side of things. Nobody above me on the org chart ever asked how discipleship was going — not my boss, not any of the elders, nobody. My spending request for curriculum (a whopping $60) was turned down; I ended up buying what I needed out of my own pocket. I got plenty of support and accountability around making sure the bulletin got done and we didn’t run out of copy paper, though. Part of the answer here is to adjust your expectations; churches, like sheep, don’t always want what they need. Helping them want what they need is the job.

That particular church is where I learned this lesson the hard way. They’d hired me because they knew they didn’t know how to disciple or shepherd. They wanted me to bring those skills to the church, and I did. I expected them to support me intelligently in the task. I look back at that now and think, “Well isn’t that cute!” Of course intelligent support is a reasonable thing to want, but it’s very naive to expect people that don’t understand your job to support you well. Of course they didn’t know how to support me, for the same reason that they needed to hire me in the first place — they didn’t understand discipling or shepherding! The wise course of action would have been to actively train the leadership in how to support my work. Instead, I was struggling to do my job in spite of them, and was therefore constantly frustrated at the lack of support. As I say, that was the place where I learned this lesson. Feel free to profit from my error: go thou, and do un-likewise.

But mostly, that’s not a problem shepherds have. Most of the shepherds in Christ’s flock, most of the time, support themselves. Even Paul did, sometimes — if he’s not too good to make tents, who are we to balk at it? I can tell you, self-supporting ministry comes with a certain kind of freedom. If you’re self-supporting and you have a small network of godly men who will provide wisdom and accountability for your work, you don’t need anybody else’s approval. Just go forth and shepherd, and be glad you have the time to do so! During a big chunk of that two-year stint I mentioned above, I was tracking my time in 15-minute increments. Since I found the practice helpful, I continued it for a while after I left that position. Fun fact: in the weeks after I left, I spent *more* time shepherding than I had when I was on a church payroll, ostensibly being paid to shepherd and make disciples. Fewer distractions, you see. No marathon staff meetings. No copy paper to order. No bulletins to make. Just people who needed pastoral care. So I cared for them.

Effectiveness comes from focus. Focus is mainly about what we don’t do.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Church?

23 September 2025

An acquaintance recently posted this meme:

This is a seriously dumb stance to take. It’s not an either/or thing.

But — whoever wrote the meme — let’s give him his due. I understand why church attendance feels irrelevant to a lot of people. For too many of us, church is Christian karaoke, a TED talk, and lying about how great your week was over bad coffee and stale donuts in the foyer. We don’t see those people in between Sundays, and in bigger churches, we won’t see the same people week to week even on Sunday. It’s not hard to see why that seems irrelevant.

That is irrelevant. But that’s not what church actually is.

So get a better church. Start obeying what the Bible says to do when we’re together: use your gifts to edify one another (1 Cor. 12-14), sing the Psalms to one another (Eph. 5:18-21//Col. 3:16), do good to one another and share (Gal. 6:10, Heb. 13:15-16). Can’t find a church like that? Don’t worry about it — find yourself a couple other believers who also want to obey these commands together. Get together and support one another. See where it goes.

A gathering like that isn’t irrelevant to your impact on the world; it’s where you get patched up from last week and armored up to go out into spiritual battle this week. It’s where you find answers and moral support for the hard things you face. It’s the people who pray for you when you’re headed into something tough; the people who show up at your door with a big pot of chicken soup when you’re sick; the people who will give you a ride home from the hospital after an outpatient surgery.

You need these people. If you don’t have them, you’re missing one of the great blessings of the Christian life. And not to put too fine a point on it, you’re disobeying one of the basic commands in the Christian life (Heb. 10:24-25).

Now if you’re one of four guys posted to a radar station in the Aleutians, and you’re the only Christian, then it’s not your fault you don’t have fellowship. You’ve been providentially prevented, and that’s on God. He’ll see you through it; take your time in the Cave of Adullam and turn a profit on it as best you can. But let’s be honest, that’s not most people.

Most Christians don’t have fellowship because they aren’t seeking it. They aren’t even trying to obey the instructions God clearly gave. If that’s you, there’s no better time to start obeying. Find yourself a few people and get to it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Glories of a Good Corn Dog

13 September 2025

My latest Theopolis post, “The Glories of a Good Corn Dog,” went up this week. Enjoy!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

How Important is Theology?

8 July 2025

I was corresponding with a fella about practical ministry and seeking Christian fellowship. In passing, he asserted that soteriology is really the heart of it all. I had an intense, visceral reaction to that line, and it made me stop and interrogate it. Soteriology really is important, after all. Different Christians focus on different aspects of theology, and that’s as it should be; if soteriology is his focus, why is that bothering me so much?

Upon reflection, here’s where I’m coming from: Soteriology is not the heart of it all. Jesus Himself is the heart of it all, which I hope is what he meant, but the language matters here, so bear with me in a little folly! The distinction is not trivial: soteriology is an ever-more-detailed set of ideas and convictions; Jesus is a Person. People who prioritize Jesus will work at getting along with other people who prioritize Jesus; they find ways to handle their differences charitably for the sake of serving their mutual Friend and realizing His righteousness in the world. People who prioritize soteriology will turn on their fellow believers over a series of ever-smaller distinctions, all the while congratulating themselves loudly on their keen discernment. I could name names here — I certainly have some in mind — but what for? You can probably think of your own examples, and if you’d recognize the names I would mention, then you can see what I’m talking about anyway. The temptations may be subtle in the moment, but the results are visible from orbit.

I’m easy friends with people who put Jesus at the heart of it all. Whatever their foibles, I got mine too, and we get along all right. Folks who put soteriology at the heart of it all, on the other hand…no. Not even if we agree on the soteriology. They need to repent, hard. I pray that they do. If they won’t, then they can’t backstab their way into irrelevance fast enough to suit me, and I certainly don’t wanna be standing within reach while they do it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Anatomy of Apostasy

1 July 2025

When someone has–as far as we can tell–come into the faith, but then walked away again, it can be hard to tell exactly what happened. Three things are possible:

1) This person was hanging out with us, being a social chameleon to ‘try on’ Christianity, and never believed any of it. That’s certainly possible–it’s been a time-honored way to access a Christian dating pool, for example. (It’s also a little dangerous; people who start out like this have a way of meeting Jesus if they hang out for long enough.)

2) This person did not understand the gospel and was trying to work their way into being a Christian. Your group may present the gospel clearly, but as every preacher knows, people hear very selectively, and it can be hard to overcome their prior programming. The ‘folk Christian’ idea that good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to hell is very, very strong, and some people will hear absolutely everything you say through that filter. These folks leave because nobody can actually live the life they’re trying to live. They’re exhausted — of course they are! — and they don’t want to keep up the pretense anymore. Who could blame them?

3) This person understood and believed the gospel, and then left the faith for whatever reason. Often this is because Scripture told them a hard truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s a costly moral demand, and they’d rather retreat from the faith than grow into obedience. For more status-conscious people, it’s often a realization of just how much their faith — if they take it seriously — will separate them from the cool kids. For prophetically gifted people, it’s often a preference for demonic lies over the hard truths of the Spirit. But then, sometimes it’s none of those things. Sometimes it’s exhaustion from faithfulness, as the readers of Hebrews were experiencing.

Happily, we don’t actually have to know which of these things happened to know what to do. Where this person belongs is back in the fold, walking with Jesus. No matter whether that will be a prodigal son returning or a fake believer becoming a real one, we preach the gospel to them and the goodness of God that calls them to repentance. Paul preached the gospel to the Romans (Rom.1:1-17) even when they were faithful. We can certainly preach it to the faithless, confident that it’s what they need to hear.

If it turns out this person actually grasped the gospel all along, great! This is an opportunity to help them see how the same truths they’ve already grasped work out in daily life. For MANY Christians, their honest answer to Paul’s question in Gal. 3:3 (“Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”) would be “Yes, of course! How else would you do it?”

Anytime someone says “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” I always ask them what it was they were doing that they could no longer stand to do. Because, mark it down, they didn’t get sick of all the Spirit-produced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control that was overflowing in their life, and wish instead for hatred, misery, conflict, short-temper, cruelty, evil, coarseness, betrayal, and impulsiveness.

But something happened. Listen. Find out what, if you can. But even if you never figure out what happened, bring them to Jesus. That’s always the answer.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Wish List

24 June 2025

I’d like to commend to your attention Peter Leithart’s Wish List for a reformational catholicism. I think it’s worth contemplating in some depth. Ask yourself, as you read each item on the list: if God gave us this, would we be better off than we are now? Are there reasons why we don’t want this? What are they? Would those costs outweigh the benefits?

(Full disclosure: I’d make a few edits to the list, myself. But only a few.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

So You Don’t Quit

10 June 2025

Really grasping the doctrine of heavenly rewards is an important tidbit in the Christian life. I’ve noticed that some people really like to believe in some version of a democratic socialist heaven, where everybody is rewarded the same regardless. The notion of different rewards for different investments of devotion and service really offends them. But the Bible speaks of this regularly, so it would behoove us all to get our heads around it. (See the Personal Eschatology section of my Free Grace Theology page for a little more on this.)

Once you’ve grasped the idea, though, there are still some pitfalls to avoid. One of them is developing a calculator mentality, where you’re constantly keeping score in your head, thinking about all the heavenly rewards you’re racking up. Jesus does encourage us to lay up treasures in heaven “where moth and rust do not corrupt, and where thieves do not break in and steal,” but He discourages keeping score. When Peter asked Him “What do we get for all we’ve left behind to follow you?” Jesus told the parable of the workers in the vineyard, a tale wherein nobody gets cheated, but a lot of folks get surprised.

Another pitfall is to keep score in the opposite direction: constantly mindful of your sins, failures, missed opportunities, and keeping track of all the reward you’re losing as a result. Obviously, that’s a miserable way to live.

So what are we to do with this doctrine, once we grasp it?

Use it to fuel the mission, that’s what. God didn’t put you on earth so you could daydream about heavenly rewards, or so you could be paralyzed by the thought of losing them. God put you on earth for a purpose. Focus on the purpose. If you’re driving to a friend’s birthday party and you want to actually get there, you don’t daydream about how good the party’s going to be, nor do you spend all your time staring at the ditch you don’t want to accidentally drive into. You keep your eyes on the road, right? Now obviously, you’re motivated by the party; that’s why you’re driving there to start with. But on the trip, you focus on the task at hand.

Be about the mission. God in Christ is reconciling the world (that means you, too!) to Himself, and has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. Quit thinking about the hoard of goodies that awaits you in heaven, and focus on helping the people around you become fully reconciled to God, whether that means leading unbelievers to Christ or helping believers grow in maturity or helping unbelievers inch their way closer to the cross, even if they’re not going to convert this year. Or just being the hands and feet of Jesus to the people who are around you, loving the hurt and lost and broken because God loves them, whether they love Him or not. You don’t need some higher purpose to feed a hungry man or dress a homeless woman’s foot wound; it’s enough that this person is the image of God and He loves them. Love them. (Wear gloves when you dress the wound; I’m not saying you should be stupid!)

When you join in the dirty, dangerous, soul-harrowing work of being present to the people God loves (that would be all of them), the doctrine of rewards will help you — not because you’re keeping some kind of running tally in your head, but because the work is hard, and the results are not always visible. It gets discouraging. I tell my disciples “If you don’t wanna quit every couple months, you’re probably not playing hard enough.” Sometimes it’s really helpful to remind yourself that every good thing you do, every ziploc bag of Clif bars and tampons you give away, every wound you dress, every ounce of love and attention you share — none of it is for nothing. God is telling a magnificent story; you get to be part of it. Every little detail matters; He isn’t wasting any of it. Everything you do is seen in the halls of heaven, and you have never given so much as a cup of water unnoticed — you’ll see a reward for that some day.

You don’t reflect on that so you can rub your hands together like Scrooge McDuck; you reflect on that so you don’t quit.

  • When an angry girl throws her entire plate of food across the room because you won’t give her a second cinnamon roll, you don’t quit.
  • When you have to turn a haggard man with holes in his shoes out into 10-degree snowy weather because your shelter is out of space, you don’t quit.
  • When a guy you loved and counseled gets his life turned around, then relapses and dies of an overdose, you don’t quit.
  • When the lady you just fed turns around and chucks a hammer through your window for some meth-induced reason, you don’t quit.
  • When a dear friend drinks herself to death rather than face the hard work of healing, you don’t quit.

You remind yourself that God never wastes anything, that everything good, even if it “failed” as far as we can see, is rewarded. You shrug off your crippling self-pity, get your head back in the game, and love the next person God puts in front of you. God in Christ is reconciling the world to Himself, and He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. (And by the way, none of the examples above are invented, and I still feed the lady with the hammer. Had a good little conversation with her just last Saturday, in fact. God brings some rewards here, too, if we have eyes to see.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Places I’ve Been

13 May 2025

If you read the gospels carefully, you will discover that Jesus goes to the places and the people who are totally respectable, and to the people who are…at the other end of the spectrum, shall we say. (Note Luke 7:36-39, which nicely encapsulates both ends of the respectability spectrum, or compare John 3 to John 4, or Luke 11:37 to Matthew 9:9-11//Mark 2:14-16//Luke 5:27-30, Luke 19:2-7, Matthew 11:19). There was a point in my Christian life where I noticed that fact in a more-than-theoretical way, and it’s had a profound impact on me. For your amusement and edification, Gentle Reader, here are a few of the places I’ve been….

Bacon, Beer, and Body Paint

Once upon a time, I had a minor role in launching/promoting an event to benefit an oil field worker named Dan who’d been handicapped in a vehicle rollover. Insurance covered his medical expenses and bought his motorized wheelchair, but didn’t cover the necessary modifications to his house so he could get around in there. Doors needed to be widened, etc. And of course, he also needed a new job, and training for it. Dan’s brother had a few thousand bucks, but that wasn’t nearly enough to fund everything that needed to get done.

But Dan’s brother was also a good salesman and knew a little about event planning. So he piled the money into a fundraiser: a beer-and-bacon festival. He got a local business with a big parking lot to let us use their property for the weekend, and a handful of other businesses to sponsor the event with give-aways, door prizes, etc. They had a couple of breweries, Denver Bacon Company, I think some insurance and real estate brokers, a local pot shop, that sort of thing. They got musicians, face painting for the kids, all kinds of stuff. A good friend of mine worked for one of the businesses, and asked me to help promote the event. I took posters to businesses in high-traffic areas, personally invited everybody I knew, everything I could do to promote it.

Come the day, I showed up and hung out most of the day. I still have a set of 4 tin cups from Sailor Jerry’s rum that I won in the door prize drawing. It was all going swimmingly until the spokesmodel from the pot shop visited the face painters. I recall passing through that area and noticing one of the painters doing a piece on her back, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Half an hour later, I see a huge crowd over by one corner of the building. I wander over to see what’s going on and discover this same model doing an impromptu photo shoot wearing nothing but her Daisy Dukes and expertly applied body paint. So then I get to decide, do I just leave? Do I just avoid her? Something else?

Right on Target

I was down at Centerpoint chatting with one of my regular guests. He was a bit drunk, as is usual for him, and he asked me to pray for him about something. I did so. When I finished, he thanked me, and then he grabbed my shoulder and said “Now I’m gonna pray for you.” I didn’t want to tell him not to, so I let him. In minutes, there were tears in my eyes — without knowing it, this Jesus-loving drunkard was praying for the deepest concerns I had that week. Was he in active sin? Yes. Was he being led by the Spirit despite that? Undoubtedly.

“Tim won’t go!”

Went to a friend’s thirtieth birthday party. She’s one of my favorite felons, and has a friend group to match. We closed the restaurant where we started out, and then tried to go to a pop-up haunted house down by the highway (this was in mid-October). By the time we’d re-convened in the haunted house parking lot, they were closing. So we’re standing in the parking lot as the last carload of our people arrives. Someone catches them up on the situation and explains that we’re trying to decide where to go next. One of the guys says, “Titty bar!” My friend vetoed it immediately: “No, because Tim won’t go.” She wasn’t just assuming (although she was right); she’d been there when I declined an invitation from her boyfriend a few weeks earlier. 

If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him.

Suicide by Tim

I’m sitting at a kitchen table with a man who’s threatening to kill me. It’s not an idle threat; he’s a combat veteran, a Marine turned cop. I know he’s drunk; I assume he’s armed. If you were watching through the window, the scene would look pretty calm. Samuel (not his real name) is talking; I’m sipping a glass of water. Below the table, I’ve quietly drawn and opened my carry knife. Plan A is talk him down; Plan B is “I go home to my wife, no matter what happens to him.” At the moment, the most likely approach is to send the water glass flying at his face while three inches of very sharp steel comes in low for whatever I can reach, before he can draw whatever he’s carrying.

This was not in my plans for the day. I’d gone down to the Springs to spend an afternoon with my friend Jack on his day off. We’d eaten and talked, and I hung out for a while at his church’s coffee shop while he worked a volunteer shift. (That shop itself is a cool story for another time.) Afterwards, we went back to his house, and a bunch of his friends and coworkers came over to hang out. The beer and whiskey flowed freely, and in due time Samuel took offense at something I said. The initial threat was just a generic “We can take it outside” type of thing — I forget the exact words — but things turned ugly when Jack tried to intervene.

“You don’t want to do that, Samuel. Tim would do you. Just let it go.”

That was like pouring gas on a fire. “I’ll kill him!” Samuel said. “I don’t care!”

He didn’t, in fact. Samuel’s squad had been on patrol when their humvee got hit by an IED, killing his three buddies. He had a massive case of survivor’s guilt that he medicated with whiskey when he was off-duty. Samuel really didn’t want to be alive; the only reason he hadn’t killed himself was because he was afraid to face God after committing suicide. Jack’s attempt to deter Samuel had the opposite effect: Samuel wanted to die, and Jack had just told him I could get it done for him. He escalated and threatened my life in a roomful of witnesses in order to create a situation where I’d kill him. But that didn’t mean he’d go down easy.

Until He Stood Up

Back when I first started Centerpoint, I would have one of the guests assist me in serving the Lord’s Table. One night a fellow I’ll call John asked me if he could assist me. He had been interacting reasonably well during the service, so I didn’t see any reason why not, so I said yes. He stood up next to me, and it quickly became apparent that he was drunk enough that he wasn’t going to be able to continue standing without help.

By this time, we were serving, and I couldn’t see how to swap him out for someone else without conveying a rejection I didn’t want to convey. So I got my arm under his elbow to give him a little extra stability and soldiered through. Right decision? Probably not, but I couldn’t see my way around it in the moment, so I went with it.

And So On…

Am I telling you that you should be willing to go anywhere, with anybody, anytime? No. Please note, they knew I wouldn’t go to the strip joint. If a particular place or group of people presents you with a temptation you can’t handle, then don’t do it. “Flee youthful lusts,” remember? If you can’t go to the place and be with the people and give God thanks, then turn down the invitation. “Whatever is not of faith is sin.”

But if your misgivings about going to the place or being with the people are founded in some ridiculous notion that Christians are supposed to be country-club respectable, if you’re worried about what other people will think of you, if you think “it’s just a bad testimony,” for vague and unspecifiable reasons…repent. You need to re-read the Gospels and have a hard look at how Jesus ministered, who He was willing to talk to, what He was willing to be accused of. They called Jesus a glutton and a drunk that pals around with traitors and whores. When’s the last time anybody accused you of that? Never? So that would be a way you’re not like Jesus. A servant is not greater than his Master. Repent.

I’ve got more such tales. I wouldn’t handle them all the same way now that I did then. Sometimes that’s a matter of brainstorming after the fact and coming up with a more gracious or wiser approach. Other times, I’ve grown in discernment and interpret things differently than I used to. I didn’t do everything right in the past, and I have no illusions that I’ll do everything right in the future. And you know what? Back when I refused to go to those places and spend time with those people, I never made any of those mistakes.

But avoiding people and places that Jesus wouldn’t avoid was just one more thing I needed to repent of. I did, and I’ve no regrets. If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him. Get out there. Whoever those people are for you, Jesus loves them. You should too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

In the Company of Badasses

6 May 2025

One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.

Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!

My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”

As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.

But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.

My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.

These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.

Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).

Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.

Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!

Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.

These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)

I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.

Comments Off on In the Company of Badasses | Autobiography, Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Don’t Miss the Confession

16 April 2025

One of the basics of good shepherding is to remember what you don’t know. When they say “We had a fight last night,” you don’t know if it was a minor argument, a shouting match, or a physical brawl. You have to ask more questions if you need to find out. But there’s also another key mistake you can make: missing what they are telling you.

Jack and Jill have been dating for a while, and things are starting to turn a bit more serious. Then one day, Jill breaks it off. “I just don’t think we can have a good relationship if we’re not honest with each other,” she says.

Jack is baffled. Over a beer with his buddy Eli, he vents: “I don’t know what she’s talking about! I’ve worked so hard to communicate clearly and listen well! I’ve been as honest as I know how to be! I just don’t get it!”

Eli nods. “She thinks you’re dishonest with each other, but you’ve been honest with her.”

“Yes!” says Jack.

Eli sips his beer and steeples his fingers. “So what does she know that you don’t?”

Obviously, when Jill tells Jack that they’re not being honest with each other, she’s confessing that she hasn’t been honest with him. She thinks it’s mutual; she may be right or she may be projecting. But she’s wildly unlikely to be wrong about herself.

When people say things like this, don’t get so caught up in defending yourself from the embedded accusation that you miss what they’re telling you about themselves.

Comments Off on Don’t Miss the Confession | Mentoring/Disciple-Making | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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