A gasoline engine will not run on diesel fuel. I know that, and yet, several months ago I had to learn it all over. I picked up the wrong fuel can and poured five gallons of diesel into a gas tank. Everything was fine for a minute, but as soon as the fuel pump began …
Comorbidities. Preexisting conditions. These words rank up there with unprecedented in a competition for word of year in 2020. Prior to March of 2020, few of us ever used the word unprecedented, we didn’t speak of preexisting conditions, and we may not have even known what a comorbidity was. But, that was time before COVID. …
Healthy churches aren’t unicorns. Healthy churches exist, and you can be a part of one. Maybe you are part of a healthy church today. If so, then the steps listed in this post will help you to keep your church healthy. If your church isn’t healthy, you can be part of making it healthier. Try …
Is your church healthy? Does it have a foundation that can lead to growth and faithfulness? Are there healthy practices and commitments within your church that interact with other practices and commitments to lead to organizational health and faithfulness? These five components are essential for a healthy church:
Discipleship is hard and it is time-consuming. The results of discipleship are often discovered over years, not weeks and months, but discipleship is not an option for followers of Jesus, it is an expectation. It is the Great Commission. We have to speak up for intentional discipleship and create pathways for disciples to grow. We have to make discipleship an expectation of attenders and a part of the core DNA of our churches. We have to speak out against the idols in our culture that keep us from discipling and being discipled and we have to stand on the solid truths of God’s Word, even when it isn’t popular.
The common wisdom is that the tenure for most pastors following a building campaign is eighteen months. For that reason, I’ve waited to write this post until I had crested the eighteen-month mark. The story of our building process actually began in 2010. In the early parts of that year, we were growing rapidly and …
The most important task of any pastor is to clearly and carefully communicate the Word of God with his people on a regular basis. So important is the task of teaching and preaching that it occupies the vast majority of our ministerial training. In my own personal library, my collection of books on preaching takes …
It is October, which means many churches will be hosting fall carnivals. Most churches hope that these carnivals will result in blessing their community and in sharing the gospel. Event evangelism is not dead, but if it is not done well it might turn out to be a scary failure in your church. Here are …
There are good ways to be critical and bad ways to be critical. Critical condition in the hospital is bad, as is a critical spirit within the church. But, being critical to the ministry of your church is a good thing. Those who voice their criticism the loudest are often not trying to destroy the …
I’ve long been an advocate for emphasizing masculinity within the church and all of Christianity. If we are not careful, we can feminize the church to such a degree that men feel very alienated. I wrote last year about the need to reach men from the pulpit and I continue to believe that it is …