What’s That Mean?

WARNING: This isn’t one of our church growth posts. Instead, I’m taking a moment to share what I believe is an important pastoral care/theology kind of question. Read on with that warning 🙂 I teach preaching for the Center for Ministry and Lay Training at Phillips Seminary and one of those Pastoral Care kind of […]

The Five Bare Minimums of Church Growth

Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of pastors and congregations who claimed they were ready to grow their churches. I’d love to tell you that virtually all of these congregations flourished, but the truth is, that’s rarely the case. The fact is, most churches fail to grow because they miss out on one […]

Quick Strategies for Tiny Churches

This morning, I had the opportunity to reach out to a colleague who was struggling to grow his church. He was averaging about twenty-five, but on Easter there were over 100 who showed up. Since then, though, his congregation has been mostly unwilling to step up to do the work of transformation. He was asking […]

Meet Ray

Ray is twenty-seven years old and works in IT at the local university. He’s been married for three years and he and Jessica just had a baby girl a couple of months ago. Life is pretty good for Ray and Jessica. They own their home … well, the bank owns it, but they bought it. […]

No One Left Behind

I was watching one of “those” movies the other day. In this case, the space ships were flying and the ground troops were storming the asteroid. Suddenly reinforcements for the axis of evil show up and the good guys have to regroup and retreat to fight another day. Except one of the ground troops was […]

It’s a Good Idea … For Someone

When I wrote If You’ve Got to Herd Cats, You’ll Need a Big Mouse, I wrote about the reality that your church members have no end of “good ideas” about the direction their church should go. Those good ideas include what new programs should be started, what the church needs to stop doing, and of […]