40 days is a significant time period in the Bible. In the Old Testament, when God destroyed the earth with water, He caused it to rain 40 days and 40 nights. Moses was on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights receiving the 10 Commandments. In the New Testament, Jesus was tempted for […]
We were talking about preaching to your target audience – your Outreach Avatar – and one of my preaching students shared that one of his elders was complaining about the sermon du jour on his way out on a Sunday morning. “Why do you preach about things that don’t relate to us?”
The pastor explained […]
When I served as a pastor – and in almost every church I served – one of the complaints I occasionally heard was that someone wasn’t being spiritually fed. Apparently, that’s not a new problem. Paul addressed the issue with the Corinthians and the writer of Hebrews addressed it as well. Apparently, those who complained […]
Years ago, I took a business management course and I believe it was Tom Peters who drilled it into my head that when leadership determines the need for a culture change, that it begins and ends with leadership – starting in the C-Suite and spiraling out from there. He went on to assert that the […]
For years as the pastor of a growing congregation I would take time at the end of each year to be quiet and asked God to bring to my mind the significant things He wanted to teach me about the last year. I would also ask God to impart to me what changes He […]
As each New Year approaches, I take a day to get away to pray and ask God to put on my heart a Biblical verse that is to be my personal scripture verse of the year. I memorize it, meditate on it, preach on it, and seek to live it out in practice throughout […]
There are two ways to try and grow a church.
Plan A has years of tradition behind it: Convince those in the pews to get off of their blessed assurance and move out into the mission field to make disciples. Pastors have been trying to do that for longer than any of us have […]
Think about the implications of that statement. If you’re committed to growing your church, that means:
The people you’re trying to reach intentionally didn’t want to go to church.
And more to the point: They didn’t want to go to YOUR CHURCH.
There are a LOT of reasons why the unchurched “say” they don’t want to […]
Remembering back to when I was pastoring a growing church, I had to face a particularly issue in both 2005 and 2016. Those were years when December 25th fell on a Sunday. This year, 2022, Christmas day is also on a Sunday.
So how should your church plan services as Christmas day is Sunday, knowing […]
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