Understanding how visual media influences us.

What Caught your Interest.

Learn from these mistakes.

3 biblical models for effective, lasting ministry.

How to get them to say yes next time.

Why your church might end up before a judge and jury, and what you can do to prevent it.

6 distinguishing marks of divine discourse.

Finding the real bottom line in ministry.

What it takes to deliver a healthy new church program.

With all the crazy things that happen in a church service, it's amazing that anyone can actually worship!

The inexact but essential art of bringing freshness to ministry.

How to move men on the fringe into active, focused discipleship.

The essential traits of that most difficult role.

And keys to unlock them.

How to protect your church kids from sexual abuse.

In tough times, you need to radically increase your ministry's volunteer quotient.

Pastoral prayer is a scalpel, not a massage.

How "lead worshiper" Joseph Garlington helps people recognize holy moments and encounter God.

A diagnostic tool for evaluating your service.

How to develop a worship team.

How "vectoring" adds depth and strength to conversation with God.

Secrets of an effective board.

What kind of church would we like to be?

Debunk these myths to help your volunteers reach their full potential.

Before taking a call as a pastor, ponder these three considerations.

One question changed my tune and taught me to move in step with them.

Why it's time to raise the bar.

Be the gift of support to God's leaders.

Assessing if dishonesty has crept into your life.

The complainers place me in an awkward position, seeking God on their behalf when I'd rather give them the boot.

How to measure your church's ministry.

Americans are desperate for a sense of community.

When you make it loving and redemptive.

How to react and how to recover.

It's the unstated, underlying purpose that really drives a church.

Vacancies can alert you to a better way of doing ministry.

4 ways to renew your strength.

How to create want-to, can-do workers.

Help for the tug-of-war.

Balancing the purposes of your church.

Finding the right balance.

Lay leaders explain how they maintain that essential but elusive equilibrium.

When can active lay people find rest and refreshment?

Practical help for avoiding burnout.

How do you gauge if your people are getting stronger?

Finally, a complete guide to the vibrant, dynamic, empowered, totally awesome, and really, robust church.

Honest talk about leading change in the smaller congregation.

Healthy dissent is ok.

Closing the back door with a four-legged stool.

Jesus' interaction with his disciples teaches us about true community.

How to respond to church conflict with grace.

How one congregation traded the "poor little us" mindset for new confidence.

7 steps to better conversations with tough talkers.

Three basic principles that can be adapted to deal with your church conflict.

The way to handle the most dangerous aspects of conflict is from the inside out.

How to keep tough choices from fracturing the church.

How do you connect first-time guests to the church body?

Your church passed their first visit, but will they come back?

How to help them connect.

How one pastor is building Christian community where it doesn't come easy.

One way to build trust.

4 rules for navigating this unique friendship.

Complaints to the board need not ruin its effectiveness.

Practical help for a pressing problem.

Test your leadership against Bill Hybel's checklist.

To lead a healthy church takes more than technique.

Spiritual strength, as Billy Graham experienced it, means remaining connected to your power Source.

Ten different ways to lead God's people.

How I came to terms with my role in the church.

Personal issues that affect you as a teacher.

Three Principles to make your church board thrive.

Helping your staff to be successful.

The "best practices" of ministry include keeping key people in touch.

Putting the pieces together.

How to overcome the common myths of leadership.

Five steps to make the process a bit easier.

With leadership comes great responsibility.

The struggles and joys of taking charge.

A great deal of balance is needed.

How I learned to take correction - and give it.

How to deal with the growing gap between key leaders and the grassroots.

It's all about risks, the Holy Spirit, and reproducing.

Nowhere are the demands and rewards of leadership greater than in the church.

It differs from plain, ol' leadership. Henry Blackaby's checklist.

For Pastors, it's not necessarily easier to give than to receive.

Equipping the next generation for leadership.

Good news: There is no one "leadership personality."

How to overthrow the status quo.

How can a service be both a worship service and seeker friendly?

Personal and corporate involvement in evangelism.

A profitable way to spend your summer.

The world of the U4s.

Seemingly unremarkable and ordinary attempts to love others really do get God's attention.

Research on today's most unreached group.

What I considered a horrible idea turned into a moment of transformation.

Understanding their hearts and minds.

Integrate evangelism into every hour of the week, so that Christ is carried into people's lives, into our work, play, and socializing.

Their seven most common responses about the churched.

How the gospel affects our strategy.

People saw us as a heroic congregation that helped the poor, but something was missing.

How to reach the world that's moving into your neighborhood.

How the media can help you reach out.

How to share your faith when it doesn't come naturally.

Personal evangelism means planting, watching carefully, and waiting.

4 myths about reaching the unchurched - and 4 ways to draw them in.

Four approaches to congregational evangelism.

Just because your people don't like to evangelize doesn't mean they can't share their faith.

Natural forces drain evangelistic energy, but your church can keep its outreach strong.

5 churches' bright ideas for a warmer welcome.

The spiritual transformation from casual to complete Christian.

The focus of leadership should be on the ones being served.

Ways to avoid losing your saltiness.

Making a difference through pastoral care in the workplace.

Letting go of victimhood.

Instead of providing answers to problems, this mentoring strategy guides people to devise their own plays.

Shepherds endear themselves to the flock. It's a wonderful style of ministry.

Making devoted disciples.

Your job as a leader isn't over until over until you've prepared the next generation.

The kid is self-absorbed and directionless. Does he have a future as a leader?

Reviving an ancient teaching method that adds life to ministry.

The best measure of a church is how many people walk out to be the royal priesthood on Monday.

An essential step in preparing people to minister is to encourage them to be willing to take big risks.

The first step in helping people move into ministry is to remind them that they are part of a royal priesthood.

Encouragement can help people discern God's will for their lives.

Some personalities require extra attention.

Getting beyond superficial relationships in a fast-paced world.

How to keep your groups growing vibrantly.

Beginning small groups requires much work, time, prayer, and a vision.

5 practices that take small groups beyond polite "sharing" to the disciplines that change lives.

Some historical perspective on small group ministry.

7 important questions to consider.

What happens when small groups use Sunday's message as their conversation piece.

Can't find a time or place for your small group to meet? Try meeting in cyberspace.

Home Bible studies don't always operate by the textbook.

An excerpt from Leadership Handbook of Outreach and Care.

Lessons learned the hard way.

Why relational affinity leads to healthy small groups.

Only when we let God have control of our ministries can we rest.

Those who experience godly success understand God's fundamental design of human beings.

Using the disciplines to keep ourselves in check.

Steps to a fresh start with God.

There's a cure that's freely available.

How you can still your racing thoughts in order to enjoy the presence of God?

Learning from Jesus how to be productive without becoming frantic.

Pastors must maintain boundaries.

Developing a personal ministry code of ethics.

A hard-to-recognize hazard for Christian leaders.

Some are called to maximum service with minimum notice. Must I be?

How to gain, and maintain, your people's trust.

How to develop people of character, commitment, and clout.

Twelve questions to keep your personal accounts in order.

When you've exhausted your knowledge, tap a deeper wisdom.

How to read the people you lead.

The essential survival skill for leaders buckling under information overload.

Eight great stewardship ideas.

How discovering your spiritual gifts benefit your time management.

What must you know—and what can you safely ignore?

Five questions for pastors to ask.

How can church leaders help people handle money wisely?

Six ways to balance when the budget goes red.

Learning to follow Jesus' model of generosity.

How a small congregation was reinvigorated by making membership mean something specific.

How a purpose-driven church develops consistently generous givers.

A new Leadership survey reveals that most churches make some debt work to their advantage.

How to assess your financial strength.

12 tools for cultivating an unselfish church.

The right rewards, relationships, and purpose incite action.

Key ingredients for potential leaders.

You can't build a head of steam for a weak idea.

What a pastor can do to grow the relationship.

One church's solution to volunteers' confusion.

Making the most of each person's time, talents.

5 principles to help leaders in business become effective in church.

Chances are, you didn't get into ministry to become a human resources manager.

Tips for boosting your memory.

Selecting staff and volunteers you can trust.

The gateway is personal relationship.

Don't lose your volunteers to burnout.

Ways to mentor other leaders.

What do you do when no one signs up?

To lead well means allowing others to lead.

How to keep them motivated.

Bringing out the best in people.

Four must-have traits.

Three important steps to remember for this important process.

An executive looks at why churches don't run like businesses.

3 reasons for delegating, no matter the group's size.

7 questions to measure a candidate's most important qualification.

5 questions for John Maxwell.

How to transform members from passive to active.

How to prevent volunteer burnout.

Turning your church into a place where people serve willingly and well.

This leadership position, missing in most churches, is key to increased volunteer ministry.

Creative ways for enlisting people in ministry.

8 areas churches must address to transform committees into caring communities.

Secrets to helping people actually enjoy committee and board assignments.

What you should know about hiring and firing.

What it takes to make your ministry a true contender.

Tips to look past the "business items."

Leadership is not something you do to people; it's something you do with them.

Are your "to do's" too long?

Steps toward a solid plan for your church.

Lessons we've learned about how to multiply groups, services, sites and churches.

People and institutions begin to corrode when fleshly zeal is tied to spiritual goals.

Five guidelines to evaluate your staff.

What's behind the rising popularity of multipurpose buildings?

Doing things differently can pay off.

5 steps to a new future.

Creating your organizational future before it happens.

How to turn talk into action.

Looking at leaders from Scripture.

The importance of developing authentic vision for your church.

Your church has agreed on a vision statement, maybe even core values. Now what?

Your toughest management challenge is always yourself.

Every leader can develop better intuition and discernment.

Five questions, asked in the right order, will boost your church's vitality.

To talk or not to talk - that is just the first of the questions.

Some of the strengths of this new life form.

Mastering six overlooked fundamentals of clear communication.

How church vision gets caught.

What to do before you present a proposal.

Planning to build? Here are the questions - and answers - a church needs to know.

Can you maintain consistent direction with changing boards?

Worship is seeing what God is worth and giving him what he's worth.

A discussion with three of America's top worship leaders.

The ever-changing "clothes" of worship.

When we say "amen" to God's will, amazing things happen.

If worship is for God, why are so many songs about us?

We want to nurture an atmosphere where people sense God's presence and respond to him.

Building worship into your daily life.

Drama helps satisfy the desire within all of us to be understood, even in our secret parts.

4 ways I'm learning to guide artists.

Both free-flowing praise and traditional hymns can be included in an extended time of worship.

Q & A with Sally Morgenthaler.

Un-confusing the process of hiring a worship leader.

A word to worship leaders.

What's this disagreement all about.

There's something about worship that can drive even a king to strip down and leap up.

A guide to service planning.

Q & A with the fab five of worship.

5 points to make when your congregation dukes it out over musical styles.

What worship is - and what it isn't.

Matt Redman explains why worship is more than just a popular trend in Christian music.

Michael W. Smith wrestles with the concept of worship.

It is impossible to encounter the presence of God and remain unchanged.

When you’re swamped, the temptation is to work harder.

When you hit the wall at work or in life, God sometimes shows his presence in unexpected ways.

Scripture consistently places "being" before "doing."

Gray hair reflects the splendor of a person whom the years have seasoned.

"Image is nothing; thirst is everything" was an advertising slogan for a popular soda "image is nothing; character is everything"—describes the apostle Paul.

Conflict, while often painful, is inevitable.

Though our attempts to do God’s work resemble seeds—small and insignificant—they will result in something larger than we can imagine.

Effective delegation involves developing others.

Jesus had a deep sense that he had fulfilled what God wanted him to do.

Ephesians reminds us that Satan and his agents lurk behind the struggles we face in our lives—but also that God gives us his weapons.

The Bible vividly teaches that we choose to live according to God’s ways or choose to turn away from him.

God's will is not for his children to be miserable.

It’s important to accept and even embrace this tension—we're clay pots fulfilling a divine purpose.

Wherever you are, God wants you to tell others about him.

King David was a great sinner, but he was also a great confessor.

As Christians, we can be confident in the truth of the gospel and in the Holy Spirit’s ability to take what we say and change a life.

There are many ways to speak up for Christ other than simply talking.

Barnabas was remembered for his encouragement.

So often it seems easier to do things ourselves; we wish we didn't have to deal with so many varying personali­ties, agendas, and diverse ways of seeing life.

God weeps over your unsaved business colleague.

Jesus spent at least as much time with the hurting as he did with the healthy.

Effective business and professional leaders are naturally performance-oriented

Professional athletes often credit their success to a coach in high school or college.

At life's darkest moments, our faith becomes more than a belief, but a rock-hard reality on which to hold.

A recurring, and reassuring, theme of the Bible is that God honors and uses even the smallest effort.

The pressure of work can push the pri­ority of family down the list.

"What are you going to be when you grow up?"

In our spiritual life, we can't perform to earn God’s grace.

Though painful at the moment, rebuke is profitable in the long run.

God specializes in using our weaknesses to further his purposes.

God is not a slave driver who wants us to squeeze out every minute of the day for activity.

While it's tempting to feel suspicious of those who seem different, such feelings are as old as Old Testament Israel.

When facing major forks in the road, we desperately want to hear clearly from God.

God calls us to worship joyfully with shouts and songs.

In many corporate mergers, the top executives end up with a golden parachute; the rest of the employees plummet to Earth.

The Bible, commands us to spend time with the broken and helpless.

Leaders need to regularly take honest, rigorous inventories of their character.

Only the church has the true basis for racial unity.

Character always trumps the bottom line.

A strong sexual relationship with one's spouse makes an extramarital affair less likely.

Experiencing the presence of God brings joy to our lives.

In his last words, Joshua challenged the Israelites to choose God.

When two disciples of Jesus requested a place of prominence in Jesus' kingdom, Jesus instructed the disciples on the true meaning of leadership—not "lord-leadership," but servant leadership.

The person we despise most may be the person God wants us to reach most.

"Email regret" occurs when you click "send" but wish you hadn't.

In the Old Testament, David found out that even those he counted on turned against him.

Even in a nation of abundance, fear is a universal human emotion.

God doesn't let us off the hook by offering us a life of ease.

Even Jesus, though he was God and could have done every­thing by himself, chose to gather a group of key followers to help him carry out his earthly ministry and to keep him company along the way.

Even in trials, we can experience joy.

Even the most outwardly confident achievers often struggle with self-accept­ance.

Our work is a gift from God.

The world val­ues instant success and ready solutions, but God takes a much longer view.

Striving for excellence in life is a worthy goal, but perfection is impos­sible.

As Christians, we wait for something greater in the life to come.

We need a regular break from the stress in our lives.

The greatest leaders in any industry are risk takers.

Midlife for most people prompts a need to reflect and reevaluate.

When you're geared to think about the future, you come to realize how short life really is.

God wants us to realize that no work is small when he, the Lord, is in it.

If believers must someday give an account to God, then enlisting other believers for prayer support and encouragement in the here and now makes good sense.

The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah warned against making such things as wisdom, strength, or wealth the driving passions of our life.

In today's world, "intolerance" seems to be the greatest sin.

King David knew the pain of a wayward son.

Proverbs 6 offers an "ant documentary" to make a case for diligence.

Even in the church, the people with money to give are often awarded power and privilege.

The Bible is clear: sex is a good gift direct from God.

Sometimes ambition can be destructive.

The Bible shows why we need to worship.

Where does God want to take me?

Before the apostle Paul ever counseled his younger colleague, Timothy, to work hard at his min­istry, he urged him to pay attention to his own personal life—to put first things first.

Someone once said that too often we run on fumes rather than out of a full tank.

Trust is one of the basic bonds of relationships.

God alone is our source of identity.

Wise investors always take the long view—that over time, the stock market will rise.

Speaking truthfully sometimes requires a word of caution or an honest insight.

To be fully truthful sometimes requires us to admit to others our feelings, which might not seem appropriate.

Only in Christ do we find true worth.

Jesus offers more than happiness.

Most entrepreneurs are visionaries; they see the future and then take great risks to create it.

In our spiritual life, sometimes there are no solutions we can provide.

Few decisions in life are clear-cut.

Psalm 46 affirms the sufficiency of God’s mighty presence when life gets too big for us to handle.

Few successes at work are achieved without a team.

People fit to worship God practice integrity in their speech, in their relationships with neighbors, in their business dealings, and in their financial transactions.

In the Bible, the apostle Paul, perhaps the greatest missionary of the church, shows his humanness, which makes his words even more powerful.

Waiting seems to be about 95 percent of life.

Jesus used a small-group strategy to shape a generation of leaders.

The roots of a joyful spirit.

With so much suffering in the world, where do we start?

What hospitals can teach us about appreciating our unpaid workers (and other thoughts from my journal).

What the growing gap in our culture means for churches, leaders, and volunteers.

Each church has a unique make-up that's essential to its life, health, and future.

When my ministry adventure fcaptionered, I found spiritual help from unexpected direction.

The not-so-secret key to effective ministry and leadership.

This article is fourth in a series that answers the question "What are we doing?".

Everyone knows church attendance slides in the summer, but should we care?

The unintended consequences of using visual media in ministry.

What the growing gap in our culture means for churches, leaders, and volunteers.

Two non-Christians paid to visit churches are impressed with charity not facilities.

And he wrestles with the advantages and disadvantages of mainline and nondenominational churches.

Win a copy of Skye Jethani's new book.