Resources by Daniel McCoy:
God Renews Spirits, Minds, and Lives
God is a God who loves to renew things. Like what? Here are three. God renews crushed spirits. You ever been crushed underneath the weight of something dark you did in secret? You ever try to hide something because you just know that, if people find out about it, they’re going to stop admiring you?...
Daniel McCoy
6 Takeaways from Our Learning Community Event on Artificial Intelligence
On Thursday, March 16, we held our latest Learning Community event for the almost 280 senior ministers/pastors in the Renew.org Network. The Learning Community event takes place every two months, and this time, the topic was “Artificial Intelligence and the Senior Minister.” Artificial intelligence has advanced to where AI programs are now adept at content...
Daniel McCoy
God Renews Strength, Selves, and Sinners
God is a God who loves to renew things. Like what? Here are three. 1. God renews exhausted strength. You find yourself tired most of the time? Busier than is healthy? Under pressure and overextended? Guilty because of all the obligations you still haven’t gotten around to? And what’s even worse is that the way...
Daniel McCoy
Keep Speaking These Unspeakable Words
We’re discovering some words which used to be fine to talk about, but which now have become increasingly unspeakable. These aren’t cuss words; rather, they’re Bible words. One of these increasingly unutterable Bible words is sin. The culture might still talk about sin as a guilty food pleasure or as a periodic habit of gambling. But when it...
Daniel McCoy
What Is the Glory of God in the Bible? A Q&A with Donnie Berry, PhD
Editor’s Note: What is the glory of God in the Bible, and why does it matter to learn about? Far from being a peripheral concept, God’s glory is actually central to the gospel—to the good news about King Jesus—and central to understanding God’s agenda for our lives. To help us understand God’s glory better, I...
Daniel McCoy
Jesus Is Lord: On Finding Our Identity by Discovering the Identity of Jesus
What does it mean to declare that Jesus is Lord? The Greek word kurios is a word that can mean lord, master, or sir. It is also the Greek word which the translators of the Septuagint (an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) used when translating YHWH, a Hebrew name of God connected with...
Daniel McCoy
5 Biblical Responses to Anti-Christian Slander
Why isn’t my church in the 21st century more like the early church of the 1st century? Where are the 3,000 baptisms in a single day? The opportunities to preach the gospel to kings and governors? Now, if we’ve got open eyes, we can see that God is doing some amazing things in our churches...
Daniel McCoy
10 Unromantic Bible Verses That Describe Real Love
Love can be celebrated in sappy ways. (That seems to be what Valentine’s Day is for.) Yes, the Bible celebrates romantic love and all that comes with it (have you ever read the Song of Songs?!). But the love described most often in the Bible isn’t sappy or sensual. It is real and dependable. This...
Daniel McCoy
The Turkey-Syria Earthquake: 7 Ways to Pray
Could you take a moment and pray for the people of Turkey and Syria affected by the recent earthquake? Here are 7 ways to pray for them. Early Monday morning, February 6, 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria. At the time of this writing, there are at least 11,600 dead from...
Some Reflections on Foreign Accents
Isn’t it interesting that you don’t have an accent? Doesn’t it feel like you talk normal, while other people from other places are the ones who have accents? One of the unfortunate facts of a fallen world is that we can tend to judge and make assumptions of people by how different they sound from us. The word barbarian,...
Daniel McCoy
Is Change Good? Reflecting on Why God Placed Us in Time
Is change good or bad? As we look back over our lives, we can spot changes that were obviously good as well as ones which felt very harmful. But as we take a step back and look at change itself, how should we feel about it? What good reason might God have for positioning us...
Daniel McCoy
The Remarkable Power of Preferred Pronouns
I told myself I wouldn’t brag about this publicly. For years, it’s been a bit of a Clark Kent-Superman dilemma: should I tell people about my secret power? Should I keep it under wraps? At the risk of sounding vain, I’m going to go ahead and tell you. I know a lot about pronouns. Like,...
Daniel McCoy
Jesus Turns Water into Wine…And Turns Worry to Faith
The Gospel of John narrates how, to save a wedding feast which has run out of wine, Jesus turns water into wine. As Jesus’ first public miracle, the Gospel of John describes it as “the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory” (John 2:11, NIV). What do we learn about Jesus from...
Daniel McCoy
What Ethics Do We Learn from Generative AI?
First off, what is generative artificial intelligence (GAI)? Artificial intelligence has been around for a while now. It’s your phone deciphering between your fingerprint and someone else’s. It’s the chatbot attempting to answer your online question, hopefully quicker than it takes to connect with a customer service agent. More recently, it’s your car’s dashboard beeping...
Daniel McCoy
Jesus’ Baptism: What It Did and Why It Matters
What was the point of Jesus’ baptism? Of all the baptisms John the Baptist did, the one that most confused him was when the Messiah himself came to be baptized. Jesus’ explanation was that he needed John to baptize him in order to fulfill righteousness. But how would Jesus’ baptism do that? And what significance...
Daniel McCoy
12 Bible Verses about Trusting God
Why take the time to walk through multiple Bible verses about trusting God? Isn’t it enough just to, well, you know, trust God? At first glance, trusting God would seem to be a fairly intuitive thing you can do without needing to study what the Bible says on the topic. And yet, as I’ve looked...
Daniel McCoy