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Getting Unchurched Bob and Barb Into Church

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 […]

Christmas Sunday 2022

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 […]

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 […]

Preach Patriotism

On July 4th 2022, the United States of America will be 246 years old.  In relationship with many other countries like Egypt, China, or Greece, America the republic, this experiment in liberty, is very young and yet we stand tall among the nations of the world. We continue to stand because of the principles […]

Start a New Message Series on Easter

For most churches, Easter is the best-attended Sunday of the year and many of those in attendance will be those who only attend on Christmas and Easter. Each year at this time I would ask myself what kind of series should I begin on Easter Sunday that would hopefully make everyone present make spiritual […]

Attracting Men To Your Church

Some years ago, after reading David Murrow’s book, “Why Men Hate Going to Church”, I realized that most people assume that men are just less religious than women, but this is untrue. Other religions have little trouble attracting males and Jesus was a magnet to men. But today, few men are living for Christ, […]

Should Sermon’s Have a Call-To-Action?

Every Sunday, thousands of church leaders stand up on their church’s platform and begin to speak. Like Jesus who took the scroll of Isaiah, read a passage, and then offered words of explanation, these leaders start with the scriptures and offer their (hopefully) God-given insights in the hopes of sharing something that will actually […]

War Ship Small Groups

I recently had a student who designed a new small group system for her church and called them War Ship Small Groups.

And she was uniformly eaten by a couple of students for using battle language … I guess because that kind of language is pointedly missing from the Bible (I don’t know which […]

Preaching Sin?

When it comes to preaching about “sin” of any sort, I’ve always been of the opinion we should confront sin in the same manner Jesus did … he only ever confronted the hypocritical religious people. He didn’t tell Zacchaeus or Matthew to stop stealing. He didn’t tell the fishermen to stop swearing. He didn’t […]