Archives For Pastors.com Staff

unnamedIt doesn’t matter how much you work out, how healthy you eat or how much you sleep, if you’re not feeding and exercising your spirit you’ll run out of gas. Yes, we must take care of our bodies, but we must not neglect to re-energize our spirit. And the only way to do that is through the Word of God!

That’s why we’ve put together this new interactive guide called Re-Energize Your Life. Created from Pastor Rick’s most practical teaching, this first-of-its-kind resource guides you through everything you need to know to “charge your batteries” the way God intended. Step-by-step, Re-Energize Your Life takes you on a journey of restoration, rest and renewal.

Re-Energize Your Life shows you how to:

  • Renew your spirit by letting Jesus lighten your load
  • Reduce stress in 3 easy steps
  • Recognize how to live a balanced life
  • Rediscover what matters most
  • Re-activate your passion and purpose

The new year is just around the corner, so what better time to join with pastors across America and Re-Energize Your Life!

I want to Re-energize my Life! »

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426116_1_ftcI wish I had loved more.…
I wish I had been smarter about money.…
I wish I had thought about God more.…
 
We all have regrets about the past. Many of them come from our attempts to fulfill unmet longings. Dave and Jon Ferguson call this back and forth between longing and regret the Sorry Cycle—and they want to help us escape it.

In Starting Over, Dave and Jon show us how to recognize specific regrets and then release them to God as we learn to see our regrets as opportunities to start over. Finally, we can see God redeem our regrets as he takes the worst things in our lives and uses them for a greater good.

Your regrets don’t need to keep you from the joy God has for your life. As you apply the recognize-release-redeem process to your financial, relational, and personal regrets, you will find new freedom in living out your God-given dreams.

Fall in Love with Your Regrets

It sounds impossible. How can we learn to love our mistakes? Instead, we go over and over them in our mind. Could they ever bring us—or anyone else—good?

Drawing from scientific research and biblical truths, Jon and Dave Ferguson give us…

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Books

Re-Energize Your Life

pb304801_grandeBy Rick Warren

It doesn’t matter how much you work out or how healthy you may eat, if you’re not feeding and exercising your spirit … you’re going to feel run down and tired – you’ll run out of gas. You’ve got to do more than just take care of your body. You’ve got to energize your spirit! And the best way to do that is with God’s Word! That’s why we’ve put together this new interactive guide called Re-Energize Your Life!

In this first-of-its-kind guide, created from Pastor Rick’s most practical teaching, you will learn everything you need to know to re-energize your life the way God intended. Step by step, you will begin a journey of restoration and renewal. It’s a hands-on guide you take at your own pace. No need to rush! In fact, we encourage you to stop and linger where you want to spend more time. You’ll benefit from biblical wisdom and learn how to apply it to your life in practical ways.

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Who Moved My Pulpit? Leading Change in the Church

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Op-ed from Dr. Jamie Aten, founder and co-director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College and Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism

Lessons on Hurricane Katrina’s 11th anniversary on preventing clergy burnout from those that have been there…

Dear Louisiana Pastors,

On this day, the 11th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we want to share one of the most important ministry lessons we learned from experience, serving in the midst of disasters, and clergy interviews conducted in the aftermath of the worst natural disaster to ever strike our nation. Don’t forget to take care of yourself as you care for others.

For some of you the current Louisiana flood is your first experience with disaster ministry. Others likely pastored congregations that were affected by Katrina in some way. If not by the winds and rain then by the flood of people who evacuated to your communities in need of shelter. Today you are experiencing a different kind of flood. Regardless of your experience, you need to read this, because you are at risk of compassion fatigue and burnout.

Your church and community need your help now. But they are also going to need…

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By Rachel Baker

It’s been nearly six months since the people of South Sudan have had government supplied electricity, only those with generators have access to this resource. Farmers are not farming and businesses are dying, as a baby country groans in its infancy amid tribal and political conflict. Africa’s 55th nation became its own in 2011, but quickly after its birth has experienced threat of failure and famine.

Currently the country, which is primarily composed of former refugees, faces staggering statistics. A mere 27% of the population aged 15 years and above is literate, with two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30. The infant mortality rate is 105 in 1000 and only 17% of South Sudan’s children are fully immunized. Roughly 38% percent of the population walks an hour round trip for drinking water and nearly 80% of the nation does not have access to any toilet facility.

Political tension keeps the country ravaged, as President Salva Kiir and his former Vice President Riek Machar are at war with each other, a feud that has resulted in 50,000 deaths, as guesstimated by the United Nations and ICG (International Crisis Group), though…

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Screenshot 2015-12-17 11.44.53Tony Morgan and the Unstuck Group have just released a great new ebook, Reaching and Leading Millennials: Practical Conversations to Get You Unstuck. From the introduction:

Churches have to understand:

  • Writing off a generation because they have diferent issues is a stubborn and unproductive approach.
  • Millennials were born into a very different world, and it is essential that they learn to live out their faith differently than their parents’ generation.
  • Fulfilling God’s purposes requires guring out how to speak the language of all of the different generations.

To borrow from Shaw, we have to start having the right conversations. Too many churches get hung up on talking about why young people won’t come to their church. Instead, they need to be talking about what they are willing to do differently.

Check it out!

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Screenshot 2015-10-08 21.13.53If you’re exploring the world of church planting, you’ve probably realized calling is a big deal. Because church planting is difficult, it’s important to know that the God of the universe has called you to do it.

But calling can be a tricky business, can’t it?

I was in my dorm room the first time I sensed a call to reach lost people, but it was 1:30 in the morning, so I didn’t think much about it. Besides, the only form of ministry I’d ever seen involved dingy fellowship halls and out of touch sermons – not a very compelling picture to a nineteen year old college football player.

Fast-forward a few years, after a summer workout, a thought hit me that coaching football was a great way to marry by burden for the lost with something that involved more Dri-FIT than flannelgraph. However, two years into my dream coaching job, all I wanted to do was listen to sermons and read blogs about church planting. I couldn’t shake the sense that I was created to do something else. I found myself caring more about our team chapel service than the conference…

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The United States is rapidly becoming multiethnic. Within ten years we will probably no longer have a majority race. Every facet of our American culture is transitioning to multiethnic . . . except the church. The church remains the most segregated institution in America. It will take multiethnic churches to reach a multiethnic America.

So how can your church transform into a gospel-centered, mission-shaped, multiethnic local church?

In The High-Definition Leader author, Derwin Gray, issues an invitation for church leaders to help their congregations embrace Christ’s call to the early church—a call that crosses ethnic and socioeconomic barriers to create heavenly colonies of love, reconciliation, and unity.

THE HIGH-DEFINITION LEADER WILL HELP READERS . .

  • understand that planting and transforming churches into multiethnic groups is a biblical calling church leaders must encourage
  • identify and implement the best practices to help leaders build multiethnic churches
  • recognize that reconciliation between ethnic groups in the church is not just a social issue but a theological issue church leaders cannot ignore

The apostle Paul built multiethnic, socioeconomic diverse local churches of Jews and Gentiles. We must follow his godly wisdom and leadership if we want to be the church for which…

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Lobby

We’ve all been to church conferences or seminars where great speakers dispense great information. But we have noticed that most of the practical learnings and best practices are shared “in the lobby” with other Small Group Ministry leaders like you. The Small Group Network is gathering the sharpest, brightest, and most innovative 20s/30s small group practitioners from around the world for the purpose of exchanging ministry strategies, learnings, and best practices in a peer-to-peer environment.

Learn More or Register Now!

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Gaining by LosingPeople are leaving the church J.D. Greear pastors. Big givers. Key volunteers. Some of his best leaders and friends. And that’s exactly how he wants it to be.

When Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission, he revealed that the key for reaching the world with the gospel is found in sending, not gathering. Though many churches focus time and energy on attracting people and counting numbers, the real mission of the church isn’t how many people you can gather. It’s about training up disciples and then sending them out. The true measure of success for a church should be its sending capacity, not its seating capacity.

But there is a cost to this. To see ministry multiply, we must release the seeds God has placed in our hands. And to do that, we must ask ourselves whether we are concerned more with building our kingdom or God’s.

In Gaining By Losing, J.D. Greear unpacks ten plumb lines that you can use to reorient your church’s priorities around God’s mission to reach a lost world. The good news is that you don’t need to choose between gathering or sending. Effective churches…

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