2019
Recently I heard a pastor say two words that hit me like a punch to the gut.
I was watching him in a short online video teaching clip, when he referenced an article he’d read on a blog a couple years ago.
Before talking about the content of the article, he off-handedly quipped, ...
There are healthy churches of all sizes.
In recent years there’s been a renewed emphasis on defining health numerically. But that’s not the only way to measure church health and effectiveness.
In my previous article, Effective Small Church Metrics: Why Average Results ...
One of the challenges of pastoring in a small church is that there’s nothing typical (or normal) about anything we do.
Our schedule, our skill-set, our facilities (or lack of), our staff (or lack of), our salary (or… you get the idea…). None of it is typical. ...
Recently, I've had several conversations with friends who teach church growth principles. Several of them have asked me some version of the question in the title of this article.
“Why is there so much more pushback against church growth principles lately?”
I’m ...
Preaching is one of the most important responsibilities of the pastor in a small church context.
It’s important, not just because it is the most visible function of a pastor, but because it is one of the primary tools for discipleship.
As pastors, our primary job is making ...
There are two churches in America. The church inside the Bible Belt and the church outside the Bible Belt.
The ones inside the Bible Belt often look at the ones outside as compromised and soft on sin because of their rejection of long-held traditions.
Meanwhile, those outside ...
There’s something very sad and scary about the way too many pastors are leaving the ministry lately.
It’s never been unusual to hear about pastors dropping out of full-time ministry when the demands of the calling are different from their expectations. Especially ...
If a church wants to break growth barriers, here are some of the principles pastors need to follow:
- Equip church members to do ministry, not just have ministry done for them
- Train the people you have to reach out to the people you don’t have
- Be friendly and welcoming to your guests
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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