Rick Warren's Online Community for Pastors and Church Leaders
Thom S. Rainer is president of LifeWay Christian Resources. This column first appeared at ThomRainer.com.
Most church leaders want their churches to grow, and for the right reasons. They want new people to encounter God, grow in their faith, and join God on His mission of serving others. But there is often a wide gap between a church leader desiring to grow and the church possessing a mentality of multiplication.
During my church …
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I’ve been on the road a bit more than usual. My job as CEO of LifeWay requires that I spend most of my time in Nashville, but I do get out to speak and preach frequently. These past seven months have been unusually heavy travel times for a myriad of reasons, but I have tried to make the most of my trips.
Though I’ve not been a …
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In last week’s post about an autopsy of a deceased church, one of the characteristics was the members had “more and more arguments about what they wanted.” This selfishness both created and sustained one thing no church can tolerate very long and survive: disunity.
It is very common for pastors and church members to desire …
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I am especially grateful to have the opportunity to hear from pastors’ wives since much of my focus is on pastors. Our recent, informal survey simply asked the open-ended question: “What do you wish you had been told before you became a minister’s wife?”
Thank you to the pastors’ wives who were willing to give us such great …
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Many years ago I was serving as pastor of a church where I was an avid supporter of door-to-door outreach. But I struggled with leading people to be involved in the ministry. We kept decent records, so I got the old “outreach cards” for the previous year. My brief research shocked me.
I estimated that we had invested nearly 1,500 …
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In an informal survey of pastors, I asked a simple question:
What do you wish you had been told before you became a pastor?
Some of the responses were obvious. For me, a few were surprises.
I note them in order of frequency of response, not necessarily in order of importance. After each item, I offer a representative quote from a …
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With apologies to Gary Chapman for playing on his well-known "Five Love Languages" theme, I asked 24 pastors how a church member might speak to each pastor in his own love language. And though 24 persons do not constitute a massive survey, I was amazed at the consistency of the responses.
To fit the theme of five, I determined at the …
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With apologies to Gary Chapman for playing on his well-known “Five Love Languages” theme, I asked 24 pastors how a church member might speak to each pastor in his own love language. And though 24 persons do not constitute a massive survey, I was amazed at the consistency of the responses.
To fit the theme of five, I determined at …
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“Happy” is a nebulous term. It is usually understood better than defined. So I know I am taking a risk when I used such a subjective word.
Please allow me to explain. For almost twenty years, I served as a consultant to churches in the United States and Canada. After working with hundreds of churches, I saw several patterns …
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Many of the failures in leadership are failures to communicate well. No matter how smart we are or how good our strategies are, they are doomed for failure if no one understands them.
In previous articles, I dealt with poor written grammar, so much so that some of my friends refer to me as “the grammar cop.” In this article, I deal …
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