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The Gatekeepers are Gone: Unlikely Wisdom for Pastors from a Stand-Up Comic
“The gatekeepers are gone”, said stand-up comic Patton Oswalt in a talk that has huge implications for pastors and other communicators. Oswalt continued as he held up his iPhone to a crowd of comedy bigwigs. “In my hand right now I’m holding more filmmaking technology than Orson Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane. I’m
4 Ways Your Church Can Help People Simplify Christmas
It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but Christmas is also the busiest. A few years ago, our Small Church staff decided we weren’t going to compete with all the shopping, school plays, office parties and visits to Santa that were filling people’s calendars. We weren’t able to keep up, so we
Is the Era of the Megachurch Over?
All my life I’ve heard preachers talk about a coming worldwide revival. But it’s never happened. There have been pockets of excitement, from the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, to the church growth movement of the 1980s. The 1990s brought local spiritual outbreaks in places like Toronto and Florida, along with controversy over their genuineness
3 Words That Can Make Your Sermons Sticky
Impact. It’s what every pastor wants from their Sunday sermons (or talks, messages, homilies – take your pick). We want to have impact. We want the message, as Larry Osborne might put it, to be sticky. We want the words we speak, not just to make people feel good when they’re in church on Sunday, but to
Where Are All the Small Church Experts?
Quick quiz – name an expert on big churches or church growth. There are probably several that come to mind immediately, right? There are plenty of well-known authors, speakers and academics, some of whom are pastors themselves. Now name an expert on Small Churches… I’m waiting… If you can think of one, it was probably
Don’t Despise the Size
I spent too many years telling good people that the way they wanted to do church was wrong. These people weren’t heel-draggers or vision-killers. Not all of them. Not most of them. They weren’t the grasshoppers. I was. They were followers of Jesus who attended the church I was pastoring because they found their spiritual
3 Starter Principles for Becoming an Innovative Small Church
Innovative? Small Church? Do those words belong in the same sentence? Can innovation happen in a Small Church? Is it even possible in an older Small Church? Turning a tired, dying congregation into a fresh, innovative church is one of the greatest challenges a pastor can tackle – even if the congregation is in full agreement.
The Over-Enthusiastic Volunteer Syndrome
One of the best characteristics of many Small Churches is that everyone wants to pitch in. One of the worst characteristics of many Small Churches is that everyone wants to pitch in. Sometimes that volunteer spirit has great results. Sometimes…not so much. The split-screen photograph in this post is an especially hilarious example of the
Could You Be OK Giving Your Success Away?
We want numbers to verify our successes. There are two huge problems with that sentence – and they’re found in the words “numbers” and “our”. First, not all successes have numbers to verify them. Second, the successes of the church are not our successes. We need to start getting comfortable, in the first instance, with
