Well, our reading plan in Ezekiel comes to a close tomorrow, and we start Daniel on Tuesday. It’s been tough going, but I said from the beginning, it’s a book to be felt more than analyzed. Beginning with chapter 40, we have a detailed vision of the new temple and life back in the land. “We’re in exile now, but one day…we’ll be home!”

The vision culminates in chapter 47 with a beautiful description of life-giving water from the temple. Again, let’s feel it, not analyze it:

Then he brought me back to the door of the temple, and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east). The water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar…

Again he measured a thousand, and it was a river that I could not pass through, for the water had risen. It was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be passed through. And he said to me, “Son of man, have you seen this?” Then he led me back to the bank of the river.

As I went back, I saw on the bank of the river very many trees on the one side and on the other. And he said to me, “This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, and enters the sea; when the water flows into the sea, the water will become fresh. And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes…

And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” (Ezekiel 47.1, 5 – 9, 12 ESV)

The water flows and brings life. Trees grow, bearing fresh fruit every month(!). “Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.”

Trees…reminds me of people who meditate on the Word:

They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do. (Psalm 1.3, NLT)

It was Ezekiel’s vision…and John’s:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22.1, 2, ESV)

Life’s a mess now, but one day we’ll be home.

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22.20, ESV)

There are those who say that God quit speaking when the canon of scripture was closed. I’m not one of them, and I’ve written about that before. For example, “Led by the Spirit” and “A Word of Knowledge.” That said, I’ve never had an experience quite like this one…

A friend of mine writes a blog, approximately weekly, and he usually sends them to me in advance for editing. I correct minor typos and occasionally suggest wording changes to clarify what he’s trying to say. We don’t always agree, and from time to time I make more substantive suggestions. Sometimes he takes them and sometimes not.

A few days ago, he wrote an excellent essay that was rocking along just fine until he inserted a paragraph, next to last, that echoed one of his favorite positions. It was completely unnecessary to the current essay, and including it distracted the reader from the points he was making. I told him so and recommended he delete that paragraph.

Imagine my surprise to receive this note the next day:

Morning Bob

I meant to get back to you to say thank you for your edits… and your suggestion re: deleting that one paragraph.  I took your suggestion, or rather, heard the Lord Jesus say to me last night as my wife and I worshipped Jesus at our church’s Friday evening Adoration service: “Bob is right. Delete it.”

Did it. Joyfully, I might add!

Thank you.

Wow. I responded, “Bless you, my brother. It’s not every day Jesus agrees with me and makes his agreement known!”

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. (Isaiah 30.21, ESV)

I apologize. I thought I was done ranting about the essay urging pastors to just “Run the Play” Jesus gave us. It’s the wrong play, and it’s not the one Jesus gave us!

Josh Howard, writing eloquently for discipleship.org, published “The 45-degree Shift that changes everything” on August 22, 2026. Please read it in its entirety. Here’s the idea: the 45-degree shift is changing a plus sign to a multiplication sign.

Here’s the heart of his blog:

Our team decided to make the shift—from addition to multiplication—and it changed nearly everything about how we operated:

• Our job description flipped. We went from players to coaches. Our job wasn’t just to do ministry, but to train everyone else to do it too.
• Our structure flipped. Leaders moved from the top to the bottom—lifting and supporting, not commanding.
• Training became universal. If you were breathing, you were being trained to share the gospel and make disciples who make disciples.
• Sunday morning changed function. Instead of treating our gathering as “the game,” we started treating it as the locker room—where the team gets equipped to go play the real game all week.
• We released control. And in exchange, our influence multiplied exponentially.

Note the fourth one: “Sunday morning changed function.” It wasn’t “the game” where we ran “the play.” It was “the locker room – where the team gets equipped to go play the real game all week.”

I rest my case.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 18.18 – 20, ESV)

Please note that “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” includes the command he just gave! And “teaching them to observe” is more than teaching the commands, it’s teaching them how to do the commands, i.e., training.

That’s “the play.”

This is the fourth in an unplanned blog series beginning with a pastor’s arguing for continuing to run the Sunday morning “play.” I think this is the final entry! Thanks to Sahil Bloom (again!), I’m reminded of another reason why it’s sometimes hard for churches and pastors to add in more intentional discipleship. They can’t add because they’ve already added too much!

Here are snippets about subtraction from Sahil’s August 21 newsletter:

Dr. Leidy Klotz, an engineering and architecture professor at the University of Virginia, pioneered the study of the psychological bias toward addition.

After watching his young son fix a Lego structure by removing a block, an action the boy took while Klotz was reaching for a block to add, he became interested in studying this effect in the lab.

…

Klotz and his co-authors summarized their findings across eight experiments, writing, “people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.”

Leidy Klotz has written a book: Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Here’s the promotional paragraph from Amazon:

We pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings.” We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: we don’t subtract. Klotz’s pioneering research shows us what is true whether we’re building Lego models, cities, grilled-cheese sandwiches, or strategic plans: Our minds tend to add before taking away, and this is holding us back.

Do I need to tell you that most churches continue to add programs and ministries while not taking away any existing ministries, even if they’re not effective? My friend and former pastor John Ed Mathison succinctly articulated the solution:

If the horse is dead, dismount. – Dr. John Ed Mathison, Pastor Emeritus, Frazer Church, Montgomery, AL

The Apostle Paul said it first:

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent… (Philippians 1.9, 10, ESV)

In our personal lives, our churches, our businesses, we need discernment to “approve what is excellent…” and I would add, “subtract that which is not excellent.”

We’ve observed the past two days that pastors like to run the Sunday morning “play” with hymns, preaching, and Communion without necessarily giving thought to whether Sunday morning alone is sufficient or even primary for disciple-making. One brother, when he was the Minister of Discipleship of a large church often questioned the effectiveness of Sunday morning. Now, he’s the lead pastor of a small church, and doing Sunday is all he seems to have time for.

So there’s definitely inertia going for the traditional Sunday morning form, so much so that if a slight modification is considered, the response is “That’s Not Church!”

Sometimes, pastors themselves see no need for change other than to try to constantly improve the Sunday morning presentation. Why? Maybe because ALL their training and ALL their experience leads them in that direction.

On August 19, 2026, Sahil Bloom told this story:

In 2013, a group of researchers at the Visual Attention Lab, a collaboration between Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, asked 24 trained radiologists to ​review chest CT scans​ for the appearance of lung cancer nodules.

On the final scan, an image of a gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted into the scan image. 83% of the expert radiologists (20 out of 24) failed to see it. More damning was the fact that eye-tracking data showed the majority of the radiologists who had missed the gorilla had actually looked right at it.

Sahil explained:

The radiologists weren’t blind. Their attention had just been specialized and refined over years of dedicated effort to find one specific thing. It worked exactly as designed for the task they were trained for. It found what they were looking for. But missed what they weren’t.

It’s called inattentional blindness. The term was coined in 1992 by cognitive psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock to refer to the mental lapse where you fail to notice an unexpected event or object in view because your focus was trained on a specific task.

Inattentional blindness is the source of your internal gravity. Each year you spend narrowing in on one thing is a year that builds the gravity that blinds you to everything else. It’s a sort of gravity you never even feel. Because it’s not that the change feels too heavy. It’s that it never occurs to you in the first place.

You can’t choose a door you can’t see.

Chilling: “You can’t choose a door you can’t see.” The Pharisees and other religions leaders missed Jesus:

Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains. (John 9.39 – 41, ESV)

When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus. (John 12.9 – 11, ESV)

Why did they miss Jesus? Because they were looking for a different kind of Messiah. Why do some pastors miss disciple-making, at least the kind of disciple-making that involves skills training and character transformation? Because disciple-making doesn’t fit the Sunday morning model, and they can’t see it.

If you’re a pastor and you don’t have my book That’s Not Church!, write to me, and I’ll give you a copy. You don’t even have to read all of it: it’s filled with standalone blogs from The Ewellogy.

If you’re a (lay) church leader, don’t force your pastor to spend all his or her time on the Sunday morning service. Encourage your pastor to get in touch with me or someone from Navigator Church Ministries to get some coaching on how to add some new plays to the playbook.

He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. No prolonged infancies among us, please… (Ephesians 4.11 – 14, MSG)

PS The gorilla is black and near the top of the right-side dark gray area.

PPS Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at the age of 80.

The country music legend combined great talent with gratitude, generosity, humility, and good humor. Erica Andersen, “Dolly Parton’s Legacy,” published by World Magazine, August 26, 2026.

The only thing I would add to Erica’s tribute is that she was married to the same man, Carl Dean, from 1966 until his death last year. Nearly 60 years, quite an accomplishment and an inspiration for us all.

Yesterday, I reacted to an essay which argued for pastors being faithful running Sunday morning, likening it to a football team’s successful play:

Week after week, the work of the church looks about the same. We gather to sing and pray and open the Bible and preach it. We baptize new believers and bury old saints. We take the Lord’s Supper together. We sit with the sick, we comfort people who are grieving, and we go looking for the ones who have wandered off. The songs and the sermons change, but the shape of the thing stays remarkably steady. Sunday comes, and then it comes again. – Josh Reavis, “Run It Again,” August 18, 2026.

That would be fine except the mission of the church is to “equip the saints for works of service” (Ephesians 4.11, 12), and one duty of pastors is to train “reliable people who shall teach others also” (2 Timothy 2.2). A pastor friend of mine used to say, “We can’t put all the weight of the church’s mission on the Sunday morning service. It can’t carry it all.” Amen.

My friend and Navigator colleague Ron Bennett has written a marvelous little book: Intentional Disciplemaking: Cultivating Spiritual Maturity in the Local Church. He explains that if our objective is making disciples, we need more than the Sunday morning service. He likens the process to golf: you can’t put the ball in the hole with just the driver. You need…

• a Driver: the Sunday morning service – worship and celebration
• the Long irons: mid-size groups (20 – 70 people) – community
• the Short irons: small groups (3 – 12 people) – training
• a Putter: one-to-one – in-depth training/mentoring

To go back to “the play” analogy, football teams have more than one. Moreover, to run that play (or any play) requires individual disciplines, training, and practice.

This is not rocket science, but many pastors seem to have trouble getting beyond the Sunday morning service as their primary ministry method. Why? Stay tuned.

Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. (Colossians 1.28, ESV)

I’ll probably get in trouble for this blog…

A brother wrote a powerful essay published by World Magazine. He opens by talking about how football teams should run the play that’s working until it doesn’t. He applies that principle to churches:

Week after week, the work of the church looks about the same. We gather to sing and pray and open the Bible and preach it. We baptize new believers and bury old saints. We take the Lord’s Supper together. We sit with the sick, we comfort people who are grieving, and we go looking for the ones who have wandered off. The songs and the sermons change, but the shape of the thing stays remarkably steady. Sunday comes, and then it comes again. – Josh Reavis, “Run It Again,” August 18, 2026.

He continues:

Here is what I have to keep preaching to myself. We do not keep doing the same things because we lack imagination. We keep doing them because Jesus told us to. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). That is the play, and He drew it up Himself. He did not hand His church a playbook and then invite us to improvise a better one. He gave us the ordinary means of grace, His Word preached, and His people gathered around the table, and He promised to build His church through them.

But is the “play” the author described in his essay really what Jesus meant in what we call “The Great Commission,” Matthew 28.19 – 20?

When people ask what I do, I reply with something like, “I help pastors and church leaders make disciples. Churches are very good at running Sunday morning, but not so good at making disciples, at training and sending.” I’ve never had a non-pastor disagree with that assessment. Once I told some friends I was on my way to India to teach pastors how to make disciples. The response was immediate: “We need that here!”

I posted a comment to the essay:

I marvel that we can take our form of church, the “play” that churches all over the world are running, attribute it to Jesus and call it making disciples. Jesus didn’t run that play, he trained 12 men (Mark 3.13, 14). Paul said the job of church leaders was to “equip the saints” (Ephesians 4.11 – 12). Paul also told “Pastor Timothy” to train reliable people “who will also be qualified to teach others.” (2 Timothy 2.2)

I’ve written about this problem before:

• Primary Tasks? reviews an essay in which the pastor’s functions are described around “the play,” and DON’T include training and equipping.
• That’s Not Church! tells the story of what happened when a pastor suggested a Sunday morning format different from “the play,” demonstrating people’s commitment to “the play” over Bible-based alternatives.

FYI, here are the verses I cited in my comment:

And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach… (Mark 3.13, 14, ESV)

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ… (Ephesians 4.11, 12, ESV)

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2.2, NIV)

PS This is NOT a stand-alone blog. I’m criticizing an over-reliance on one “play.” Let’s continue our discussion tomorrow.

A few pictures from a sunset dog walk at YMCA of the Rockies at Estes Park a few days ago.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Psalm 19.1, ESV)

What?

Seth Godin shared some practical, common sense advice on August 13. He called it Emotional Hygiene. Here are some snippets:

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go to Fantasy Island, a low-rent amusement park not far from my home. I soon figured out that while the spinning rides seemed appealing and daring, they would always make me sick and ruin the whole day. The good idea? Don’t go on the spinny rides.

Our culture creates traps and opportunities. There’s social and commercial pressure to engage in activities and jobs that don’t serve us very well. If horror movies give you unsettling nightmares, don’t go. No matter how many times your friends invite you, no is a complete sentence.

If being in debt is going to cause a long, stressful spiral for you and your fiancé, then don’t have an expensive wedding.

If doomscrolling your social feeds puts you in a bad mood, put down the phone and go for a walk instead…

Persistent emotional turmoil can undermine our peace of mind, and it might be caused by an ongoing spiral that’s fueled by the short-term choices we make. Cultural and economic pressure can make those choices feel non-optional, but if we can protect ourselves early, we may be able to create enough value for others that our hygienic choices easily pay for themselves.

There are countless opportunities to thrive. But we might have to make hard choices to find them. Don’t go on the spinny rides. We need you at your best. – Seth Godin, August 13, 2026

How about, “If watching the news depresses you, quit watching the news.”? Seth says “…those choices feel non-optional…” but they’re not. But, Bob, I have to know what’s going on in the world! No. You don’t. And if something is really important, you’ll find out about it.

If reading others’ political comments on Facebook riles you up, stay off Facebook…or at least avoid posts that make you angry.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4.8, ESV)

Avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on. (Proverbs 4.15, ESV) (You figure out what your “it” is!)

June’s brother Paul lives in the tiny town of Piedmont, South Carolina, population less than 6,000. He begins his days walking his dog, Catfish, the German Shepherd. Often he documents the walk with a Facebook post. Here’s a sample from August 23:

The peaceful dawning of a late summer morning. The grass along the marsh is beginning to turn brown. Soon the population of geese on the mill pond will multiply as the autumn migration begins, but this Thursday morning it’s just the year round residents who are sitting around, chatting idly about the heat, and getting fat. — Paul Porter in Piedmont, SC

Paul is spreading grace and beauty in the world. A real artist in words and pictures with no interest in monetizing his art. Thank you, brother.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is…lovely… (Philippians 4.8, NLT)