The wise preacher reminds us in Ecclesiastes 3:7b that there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” But if you are a pastor, elder or ministry leader then you may feel the tension of discerning which one you need to do at any given moment.
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Church growth writers talk about the bell-shaped curve that characterizes the growth of many churches. The left side of the bell curve is exciting (vision, outreach, growth, etc.), but the right side is challenging (nostalgia, decline, division, etc.).
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What comes to mind when you think of attrition in your church? Perhaps you think about the attrition of membership or attendance. Maybe you think about financial attrition. However, I want to draw your attention to a different and often overlooked category: cultural attrition.
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We live in a day when the busyness of families and the many facets of the culture enticing the hearts and souls of our kids is off the charts. In the last three churches I have served, we found that one of the best tools to combat these challenges is to train Christian parents to celebrate the spiritual and physical milestones of their children.
Chuck Lawless says he's still learning how to pursue his wife even as he runs the race of ministry. In this article, he offers 10 helpful tips he's learning.
Student ministry is often where rules about minors break down in the church. Student ministries don’t need fewer rules than children’s ministries. They need different rules. Though rebellion seems to be a rite of passage for many teenagers, they are far more receptive to guidance than you might think.
Most groups in local churches don’t fall apart overnight. They slowly drift from life-giving to maintenance-driven. Leaders don’t usually quit because they don’t care anymore – they quit because the structure they are working inside can’t sustain long-term disciple-making.
Too often, our approach to the Bible is problematic because we want to be instant experts. We have very little tolerance for unanswered questions, forgetting that answers come as we keep visiting the text.
We’ve seen a steady decline in both Christian identity and church attendance with each passing generation in the U.S. A stat that should concern all church leaders is that among teenagers who were active in church for at least a year during high school, 2 out of 3 are not attending shortly after graduation.
Churches hoping to engage younger generations must move beyond comfort, familiarity and fear, says Illinois pastor Rayden Hollis.
It’s spiritual warfare against the evangelist. That’s one reason—a reason we don’t often think about—that evangelism is hard.
The proliferation of non-peer reviewed information together with advancements in Artificial Intelligence has propelled us from an age of information to an age of disinformation.
The Christian faith is a singing faith. A singing saint brings deep joy to the heart of God. There is not a chapter and verse in Scripture that explicitly states this, but when you consider the sum of singing commands and the role singing plays at so many critical points in redemptive history, we easily come to the conclusion that our God really, really likes to hear his people sing.
But how do we put the lust within to death? The answer is only found in Scripture. We put lust to death in the same way we put all habitual sins in our hearts to death: by loving God and His design more than we love our sin (Colossians 3:1-17). A lust problem is a love for God problem.
