church on Church Revitalization

Too Busy for God? American work culture is all-pervasive. For many members of your congregation, it can be a real fight to get actual time off—and cell phones and the internet has made it possible to...

Our churches struggle with being evangelistically effective because they are locked into a self-affirming subculture while the larger culture continues to move in other directions.

Every congregation looking for revitalization must declare its mission succinctly, and then outline the essential tenets that encompass its theological outlook and emphases. The congregation then shou...

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...

Many churches never experience a comeback because they want the community to change while they remain the same. But comeback churches are different. They realize that no one remains the same when they...

Leader: God of mercy, we come before you with honest hearts. We bring not only our praise, but also our pain. We confess that at times we have lost heart. Hear now our lament, and kindle in us your ho...

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...

As the church get older and older it becomes harder to keep evangelism on the front burner because of all the competing issues that keeps pushing it back.

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...

Comeback leaders know that our Lord considers commitment to Him and His desires an indispensable ingredient to growing spiritually and numerically.

The majority of church members need to be involved in the change or it will soon produce resistance.

In most cases, the existing church culture is from a former era that is only meaningful to those in the church, not those in the community.

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...

Unhealthy churches disengage from the world around them, while healthy churches are focused on their mission and have an outward orientation that starts with their own locale.

A Multi-faceted Church Who loses by the church and parachurch’s lack of unity and cooperation? Absolutely everyone : congregations, ministry organizations, ministry leaders, individual believers . ....

In her excellent book, Liturgy of the Ordinary , author Tish Harrison Warren deals with an issue on many people's minds: why is it that so many people, especially younger generations, don't...

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...

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...

Comeback churches care about the things God cares about. They display that “lost people matter to God” by the way they live, pray, and witness.

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. ...

Among healthy churches, 93 percent of members considered themselves to be involved in some form of ministry (though not necessarily at their church), compared to only 11 percent of members in the less...

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...

Who's Playing Hooky? There’s a local market not too far from the church – and, sometimes, I’ll go there after Sunday morning services to grab some sweet corn to go with dinner (it’s New Jersey, b...

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...

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...

We have the best materials, media, and methods, but we lack spiritual power. Christians of the apostolic era had none of our advantages; they didn't even have the New Testament. Still, they turned...

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...