June 2019
People aren’t giving enough.
People aren’t attending enough.
People aren’t volunteering enough.
These are the complaints I hear most often from other pastors when we’re talking about the frustrations they have with church members.
Family Frustrations
Before ...
Of all the ingredients needed for a healthy church, one of the most important is a leadership team that works well together.
This is true for a megachurch with paid staff, and for a small church working entirely with volunteers.
One of the most visible and influential relationships ...
All healthy things grow.”
There may be no phrase that has caused me more ministry angst than that one.
For years, I pastored a healthy church.
For many of those years, it was a numerically growing church.
Then it wasn’t.
But, as far as I could tell, it was still healthy.
Most of what we do in the pastorate makes no logical sense.
At least not in the here and now.
We invest in people who fail us over and over again. We pray, counsel, cry, study, preach, give and sacrifice – and often we wonder what good it all does.
Then we do it again.
Why?
There’s something very freeing about letting go of the need to perform.
Even when our goal is something noble.
Recently, I had the chance to observe this in a very tangible, personal way.
I was speaking at a conference to a bunch of pastors – mostly from small churches ...
Church growth is great.
But I’m done with pushing for it.
Done with making it the reason I wake up in the morning.
Done with obsessing over numerical increase or decrease.
Done with thinking that our church has to be bigger to be better.
Church Growth Is Not Enough
Years ago ...
Why are most churches small?
The common wisdom is that they’re stuck. They’re broken. They must be doing something wrong. If they’d get their act together and fix what’s wrong, they’d start getting bigger.
Certainly, all of that does apply to many ...
There are two big myths about the way we view churches of various sizes.
Myth #1: Big churches got big because they compromised their message, stole sheep or had some special advantage unavailable to other churches.
Myth #2: Small churches stay small because they’re lazy, ...
Why don’t more small church pastors attend church leadership conferences?
It’s not because we’re lazy, uninformed or don’t want to learn. It’s because of several significant, but removable roadblocks that keep most of us from coming.
In recent years, ...
In nearly 40 years of pastoral ministry, I’ve learned so much from other pastors.
And it hasn’t just been from pastors of big churches. Pastors of small churches have taught me a lot, also.
Typically, I get one type of wisdom from those in big churches, and a different ...
They say you reveal your character, not when things are going well, but when the chips are down.
Not when everyone’s watching, but when no one sees what you do.
That’s true.
But it’s only part of the truth.
A Reversal Of Character
Some people seem to have the character ...
Great ideas are disruptive.
They don’t follow common wisdom.
But after you hear them, you often think, “of course! How did I not see that all along?”
In church leadership today, there’s no more common wisdom than this: if your church is not increasing in ...
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