background on Church Revitalization

Churches, seminaries, and nonprofit organizations are notorious for saying they need change and then resisting the very leader they called to bring it. One of my consulting clients told me that he cal...

I was in London browsing one of the ubiquitous British tabloids and an advertisement for a new health club grabbed my attention. The picture was of a magnificent gothic church sanctuary that had been ...

In one generation, the place of Christianity within culture dramatically shifted as we experienced what theologians and sociologists of religion call the “death of Christendom.” Christendom isn’t Chri...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and im...

There’s a quote by H. Richard Niebuhr that I believe is absolutely true.  “The great Christian revolutions,” he argued, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen w...

I was taking a tour of the Church of Scotland’s beautiful Glasgow Cathedral, which is technically the High Kirk of Glasgow. It is estimated that over 50,000 university students live within walking dis...

In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

Right around six years into what would become a thirty-three-year ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper was stuck. His board wanted to enact some significant changes and he felt like he had...

Maltbie D. Babcock, author of This Is My Father’s World and a Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn, introduced a free pew system in his church, upsetting a wealthy woman who found strangers in her us...

Noteworthy in this regard is the contribution of the Reformers, particularly Martin Luther, though John Calvin’s contribution is also very significant. Both called for a spirituality in the world that...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own sermons, as I was trying to help a congregation see itself not as a building, but the body of Christ. It has been adapted for TPW. No...

Churches, seminaries, and nonprofit organizations are notorious for saying they need change and then resisting the very leader they called to bring it. One of my consulting clients told me that he cal...

Leonard Sweet shares an interesting story in the introduction to Neil Cole’s book, Organic Church , about a parish pastor who lived in a Scottish village near Edinburgh called Davidson’s Mains. ...

Churches want to hear nice, optimistic messages, free of the mention of sin or a call for repentance. Churches want nice, lean programs, directed at nice, clean families, leading to growth without sac...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

I came to appreciate liturgy during a time in our church’s life when we were rediscovering the gospel. We planted the church in 2000, and for the first several years, we struggled to discern the best ...

In this short excerpt, professor and pastor Tod Bolsinger describes how the changing world of ministry (in the West) has led some pastors to simply give up trying: About twelve years ago, I heard a ...

The story goes about a young man (or woman!) with dreams of growing a small church nestled in rural Oklahoma. Despite his relentless efforts, the church continued to teeter on the edge of extinction a...

It takes a great deal of freedom and love to be therapeutic with a group. Many years ago when Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, was lecturing in this country, it was reported that when he prea...

The disgraced megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll once described his church’s growth by saying that there was “a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, he added, “and...

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes-central role in education, that is exactly what i...

Today, the church in America seems to have traded in its mandate to be eccentric and aimed instead at an unconscious conventionality. Rural norms are too quaint, urban norms too dangerous, so the chur...

The Church is not a clean, well-lit place where everything runs smoothly and actions automatically match ideals. It is, in the words of the Gospel, a field of chaff and wheat growing up together and b...

In smaller congregations any growth is usually highly prized, but wise pastors realize that not all growth is good growth. Also, missional pastors know that the best growth is conversion growth. A hea...

Recently we found ourselves around a table with a team of faith leaders from an influential Midwestern church. Their restlessness was palpable. “Peace has been one of our core values for years,” they ...

What is happening to us, we who are the ministers of Jesus Christ? Many of us are professionally, spiritually and financially depressed. The figures produced by studies only serve to quantify what we ...

In this first-person memoir, Pastor Peter Chin shares a story that most pastors can probably relate to, the reality vs the expectation of a church-planter or even the pastor of an established church: ...

We were recently with a collection of pastors in San Diego and were asked to share about our common call to peacemaking. Fully aware of the posturing and isolation of many of these churches, we found ...