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Small Church Finances: 2 Security Lessons I Learned The Hard Way
Trusting each other doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put proper financial checks and balances in place.
Small Church Finances: 4 Budgeting Lessons I Learned The Hard Way
Money isn’t the goal of ministry. But it is a tool – and an important one. When we manage our money well, we can do better ministry with it.
Recruiting Volunteers In a Small Church
Intentional mentoring is a great way to expand your church’s capacity for effective ministry and fulfill our mandate to make disciples and equip God’s people.
Quit Trying To Fix Your Church’s Ministries – Until You Do This First
Church health is not about making our current ministries better, it’s about doing better ministry.
The Discipleship Mandate: Bring Mentoring Back
Small churches have a serious advantage when it comes to discipleship. If we’ll use the right tools.
Pastoring A Small Church Is Not A Penalty, It’s A Specialty
For years I bucked against the idea that I am a small church pastor. Instead of seeing it as my calling, my heart and my passion, I treated it like it was my penalty for not having the skills to be a big church pastor. So I consumed every church growth book and devoured all
Bigger Fixes Nothing (What Reality TV Taught Me About Healthy Churches)
When healthy small churches grow, they become healthy big churches. When unhealthy small churches grow, they become unhealthy big churches. So instead of telling struggling churches to get bigger, let’s help them become healthy.
The Three Undeniable Realities Of Pastoral Ministry
Since every pastor will lead a small church for at least some time in their ministry, shouldn’t we learn how to do it well?
7 Reasons to Stop Staring In Your Church’s Rear-View Mirror
What do all these quotes have in common?
“People have stopped singing in church. We need to use hymnbooks again.”
“No one wants solid bible teaching anymore.”
“People used to have respect for God’s house. Now they show up late with a coffee in their hand, like they just rolled out of bed.”
“The church started collapsing when we stopped holding Sunday evening evangelistic services.”
“Pastors in this day and age aren’t preachers, they’re entertainers.”
All those quotes have two things in common. Three, actually.
First, they were all said or written by fellow ministers recently.
Second, they’re all backwards-looking.
Third, none of them are true!
The False Idol of “The Way It Used To Be”
Sure, the church of today has problems. But that’s nothing new. The church has always had problems. Half the books in the New Testament were written to address problems in the first century church – a church we’re guilty of over-idealizing to the point of idolatry, sometimes.
It’s a myth that the church was ever an ideal place of pure worship and fellowship. Not in the first century. Not when we were kids.
It’s also a myth that the way to fix the problems in today’s church – both real and imagined – is to go back to the way we used to do things.
Of course we need to constantly re-establish our faith in Jesus, our teaching of the bible and our obedience to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
But none of those things are old or backwards-looking. They are the most forward-looking, paradigm-shifting, inertia-busting principles the world has ever known.
Every car needs a rear-view mirror. So does every church. But you can’t move forward by staring into it.
The past is gone. The future is coming – fast.
