In order for a church to be an effective missional church in the present culture, a pastor is often forced to lead the church through a period of change. New methods must be utilized and a new paradigm established. I’ve watched as a massive number of pastors have been forced out of their church because they were understanding of the need to change, but unwise in going about making change. Here is a list of ten practices of those pastors I’ve seen make change and survive to lead the church they had always dreamed of leading.

1. They pray, study God’s Word, and seek wise counsel until they are 100% certain God is requiring them to lead the church through change.

I got my first iPhone in 2010, as I started a role in communications and helping lead social media for a campus ministry.

“I’ll see if I like it. I might take it back,” I told my friend Cory over lunch. He smirked. “Adam, no one who gets one of these phones ever goes back to life without one.”

He was right, of course. A tremendous amount of my life moved from other spaces into this tool: maps, books, newspapers, calendars, music, notes, lists, alarms, reminders, photos, banking, files, recordings, calls, calculations, weather forecasts, and even my Bible and my friendships. Nearly all aspects of my life were somehow tied in with or managed through this little item of metal and glass in my pocket.

With so much of life tied up in my constant connectivity, I started to expect everything to always involve my phone. If I wasn’t using my phone, I felt like I wasn’t doing anything. If I wasn’t looking at my phone, I wasn’t seeing anything. If I wasn’t touching my phone, I wasn’t living.

Studying heresies is a way of studying how orthodoxy came into full expression. As I said in recent post, heresy is the mother of orthodoxy. It is problems that give rise to solutions or resolutions or articulations. In that context Roger Olson, in his fine new book Counterfeit Christianity: The Persistence of Errors in the Church, examines what I would say is America’s deepest heresy: deism. It is both historic — Thomas Jefferson — and pervasive — in Moral Therapeutic Deism. It is with us and it is probably here to stay. To re-use an image Olson uses from Karl Barth lat in this chp, the gospel is a gift taken in hand, but some deist hands then think they can control the gift and reshape it.

Hence, a heresy. There are three parts here:

First, Folk Religion.

As Olson puts it, this heresy is a kind of folk religion: “heresy rears its ugly head in the form of what some sociologists of religion call “folk religion” (138).

Folk religion is to religion what folk medicine is to the science of medicine and what folk psychology is to the science of psychology. 139

Growing up the only girl among four brothers, when I pictured myself as a mother, I never saw myself having daughters. In my mind, girls meant girl drama. Despite my lack of imagination, God still graciously gave me two daughters, and over the past 18 years, I’ve learned over and over again how wrong I was to believe the negative hype around raising girls.

Girl drama is definitely a thing, and a well-documented one at that.Queen Bees & Wanna Bees (the book that inspired the movie Mean Girls) examines the unique tensions of adolescent girls, specifically stemming from their relationships with each other, and countless teen movies, books, and TV shows rely on these-all-too-common tropes.

Anyone who has spent time around tweens or teens has probably noticed these kinds of power plays: pouting, shunning, hyper-sensitivity, clinginess, playing favorites, spreading gossip. Though girl drama is nothing new, today’s technology makes it even more pervasive. Drama no longer pauses when the school bell rings, it follows our daughters around in their pockets wherever they go. It does not sleep, and it never takes a summer break.

I’ve written posts for this site and my own that describe some of the negatives our church consulting teams and “spies” have found in churches. The goal of this post is to show some of the positives we’ve seen in different churches. The topics vary, but perhaps something will help you in your church.

1. Greeters at every door. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally every one of our team members is greeted when each of us intentionally enters a different door. Those churches are ready for guests.

2. Strong security in the preschool/children’s areas. Sometimes our team members gain entrance to these area much too easily, but we’ve been in churches that physically halted our team from going beyond the boundaries. I’m pleased to report to the church that their security system worked in those cases.

3. Name tags for everyone. Several folks disagreed with my suggestion about this topic in previous posts, but our team appreciates it when everyone can quickly learn names. Name tags simply make it easier for folks to have conversations with people they don’t know.