Perhaps you’ve noticed, our culture is often evaluating church in a negative fashion.Ā Church people are perceived as being hypocritical, looking very different in life expression than the claims from faith identity.Ā And, in a related way, the church message is received as irrelevant, out of touch with the reality of how faith intersects […]
I just heard some reports that attendance at most of this year’s MLK rallies and marches was way down. While in the restroom at the hospital this week I heard a man say to another man, “I don’t understand what this Martin Luther King Day is all about. Why do we have it?”
King started […]
The Myth of Spiritual Conversations is alive and well in most churches today. I see it every time I teach evangelism at with the Center for Ministry and Leadership Training at Phillips Seminary. As soon as I start the class, I can feel the dread hanging in the air like a fog. It’s a […]
The pastor was nearly spitting nails. She’d entrusted a congregational member to lead what should have been an exceptionally effective outreach event. But by 4 PM the afternoon of the event, it was clear that almost nothing had been done to prepare for the ministry and as you can imagine, that meant the whole […]
Iām posting this blog on September 11th, the day Americans, if not most of the world, are remembering the lives lost because of the airplanes that were hijacked by Islamic terrorists and intentionally crashed into the world trade center, the pentagon, and the one that was ditched into a field in Pennsylvania.
I am also […]
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 š
I teach preaching for the Center for Ministry and Lay Training at Phillips Seminary and one of those Pastoral Care kind of […]
There’s an axiom in the consulting world that goes: “Only two things grow a church ā¦ and about a million things keep it from growing.” Of course the second part is an exaggeration, to a certain extent, but the first part holds true across our nation.
Let me help explode a couple of myths that […]
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was recruited to be a church planter in metro area. Kris and I were invited to start a new church in any legitimate city in the US and we were torn about where to plant. We had a ready-made core-congregation in Atlanta, people we’d connected […]
We get asked about get church visitors back and turn them into returning guests pretty regularly. Over the years, we’ve been gathering some of the best ideas we’ve seen. Below is a list of some of the best practices we’ve seen used from first visit to membership. You’ll notice that most of the initial […]
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