2016
The church I pastor isn’t like your church. If it was, one of them would be unnecessary.
Our church probably shares many traits with yours. Starting with core biblical theology, I hope. But we are uniquely us. And you should be uniquely you.
Here’s a short metaphor ...
Megachurches, we’re with you.
You’re our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our partners in ministry.
We know that the task of reaching our communities, nations, cultures and world is an enormous one. And an enormously important one. We don’t expect you to do it ...
I want my church to grow.
I want your church to grow.
But more than anything, I want The Church to grow.
I want as many people as possible, all over the world, to know Jesus.
The good news of the gospel can’t be confined within the walls of my church, the distinctives of my ...
Good stories matter.
They can tell us truths that drill themselves deep into our core.
As Easter approaches, many pastors will be tempted to tell a feel-good story of spiritual renewal, personal growth and universal hope to our larger-than-usual congregations.
That's a good ...
(This post has been updated – twice – with Stanley’s apolog(ies). Scroll down to see them.)
I hate situations like this.
I just listened to a sermon from a guy I like, who insulted me, my church and 90 percent of the churches on earth for no good reason.
For over ...
The world doesn’t need more Episcopalians.
No one wakes up with a hunger to be a Methodist.
No child says "I want to be Assemblies of God when I grow up."
We live in a post-denominational world. The day of being Presbyterian because we grew up Presbyterian is ending. ...
I’m a big believer in planning. But I’m not a fan of meetings.
Yet planning requires meetings. So what’s the answer?
We can do more effective planning by having more effective meetings.
In fact, when the meetings are more effective, we can usually have fewer of ...
Patterns are good. Ruts are bad.
Patterns give us structure. Ruts keep us stuck.
Everyone who speaks in public develops speaking patterns. The danger is to not let those patterns become ruts.
That’s why I purposely change the way I preach every few years.
The title of today’s post comes from something I read on a friend’s Facebook timeline last week. The parentheses are mine.
Before I explain why I used such a controversial comment as a blog post title, I’d like to expand on it.
You can also unfriend me if you're ...
I led a dying man back to Jesus last week. And it would not have happened if I wasn’t a small church pastor.
Here’s the story.
He and his wife have been attending a nearby megachurch. She is a committed believer. He is not.
Whe he realized his illness was reaching a ...
Just about every day a blog post or video comes across my path that claims to say ‘what no one else has the guts to say.’
That claim is usually followed by an angry tirade of extremist and/or conspiracy-theory rhetoric that we’ve all heard a thousand times before. ...
Fear of failure kills the innovative spirit. It's one of the main reasons many churches don't try new things.
But failure is a part of life. And ministry. It's especially a part of doing innovative ministry, because we can’t know if something will fail ...
We're in love with the spectacular. Superhero movies, bigger buildings, viral videos and over-the-top personalities.
It’s the same in a lot of our churches.
We've become very noisy and personality-driven in our presentation of the gospel.
I love the church.
For a lot of years, “I love Jesus, but not the church” or “the church may stink, but it's the only thing afloat” have been cool things for a lot of Christians to say.
I used to be one of those people. Not anymore.
I love ...
Three facts sit atop my list of things I wish someone had told me in Bible college.
FACT #1: 80-90 percent of pastoral ministry students will never pastor a church larger than 250 people.
FACT #2: Virtually all of us will pastor a small church for at least some time in ...
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