Bigger churches aren’t necessarily better. Smaller churches aren’t necessarily broken, stuck or ineffective.

Effective churches exist in all shapes and sizes. Including churches that haven’t grown numerically in a while.

But the myths persist. Especially the ...

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When it comes to pastoral ministry, I've discovered an interesting (and sometimes frustrating) paradox.

The more I care for people, the less concern I have for increasing the size of the crowd – while the more I work to increase the size of the crowd, the less caring ...

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People don’t hate long sermons.

They hate boring sermons. Irrelevant sermons. Impractical sermons. Uninspiring sermons. Unprepared sermons. Over-prepared sermons… You get the idea.

A bad sermon can’t be short enough, but an engaging sermon can go longer than ...

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We are living more of our lives online than ever before. And our online time will increase for some time before it levels off.

While there are certainly a lot of downsides to this, there are also huge upsides that every church can take advantage of. With people spending an average ...

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In a couple recent articles, I wrote about current trends in church worship music. (You can read them here and here.)

If you worship or serve in a smaller church, you may have read those articles and shrugged, or maybe you saw the titles and didn’t even bother to read them. ...

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In the last few years there have been a lot of articles written about what’s wrong with worship music, and how to make it better. So many that they've been labeled the Worship Wars. This isn’t about that.

Instead, I want to suggest four trends that are not happening ...

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It’s easy to criticize today’s worship music. Too easy.

“It’s repetitive!” “It’s too loud!” “It’s theologically shallow!” “And it’s repetitive!”

Similar criticisms have been made for every generation ...