Healthy Pastors Leading Health Churches
Leading through the gauntlet of local church ministry, I often forget some of the most motivating and important leadership truths. Change, staff issues, finances, and broken lives will leave you burying forward-thinking influence. These principles must be brought back to mind intentionally and distributed liberally to the leaders serving … [Read more...]
Church metrics. That’s not a very pretty phrase. In fact, for many, it seems cold. If church becomes a numbers game, then people become “just a number,” and when people are just a number, we’ve failed to emulate the ministry of Jesus. But if we fail to count anybody, we allow people to slip through the cracks and therefore fail to … [Read more...]
Having a structure to guide you as you develop new ministries and to restructure existing ministries helps keep all ministries functioning in a similar way. I have learned to accomplish this by having 4 major phases for our volunteer ministries. These phases start with the first phase being an introductory phase to the ministry … [Read more...]
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll cut to the chase. I’d like to introduce you to Evie Grace Wise. My daughter. She was born in downtown Des Moines on March 28. My wife and I hopped in the car just after 6 a.m. As the 20-minute drive progressed, so did Kerry’s contractions. We got to the hospital at 6:20 a.m., we were in a room by 6:25 … [Read more...]
Are you dreaming about the perfect way to do small group ministry? Or are you settling for a version of what you can already do? The preferred future is one of my favorite things to talk about in my consulting work. I illustrate it with this diagram (that I got from Glen Hiemstra). See it? Sure, you see it on the diagram. But do you … [Read more...]
When people are talking about what next step they should take — whether they should take a new job, buy a new house, or start a new relationship — they often talk about "open" or "closed" doors. “I was going to get married to _____, but God closed that door.” “I didn’t know what school I was going to go to, but God just … [Read more...]
I have a quasi-confession to make. I worked as an employee of a church for 10 years before I ever volunteered for anything. Don’t get me wrong, I worked for other ministries outside of my job I was asked to do, I just don’t see that as true volunteerism like we ask out of the people that attend our churches. It took years to … [Read more...]
When it comes to giving at church, I am one of those people that do not like carrying cash or writing checks. I cannot tell you how many times I have walked out of the house and arrived at church only to realize that I either left the check at home or did not write it out at all. Besides that, we are so in a rush Sunday morning that I do … [Read more...]
Structure doesn’t cause growth; the structure of your church determines how fast you’ll grow and the size to which you’ll grow. There is no clear organizational structure in the New Testament, and I think God did that intentionally so the Church can adapt to different stages, ages, and cultures. God gives us broad principles and not … [Read more...]
In 1990, my wife and I moved to Castaic, California to start a church. Because we had limited start-up funding and because we realized that starting worship services was the expected method to start a church, we determined to hold our Grand Opening on November 4th - just three months after moving. Once we set the date, we worked … [Read more...]
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