growth on Leadership

The Servant Leader The servant leader is the hero of this text.  And the example,  par excellence,  is the Apostle Paul. He has never shied away from holding himself up as a person to be imitated, as...

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

One simple sentence, from my first pastoral supervisor, has significantly shaped how I seek to discern God’s personal will. Each Wednesday during my first year of congregational ministry, we met to re...

Rabbi Jesus, Teacher of teachers, thank you for empowering us to know and grow in wisdom and truth. You challenge us and stretch us and open us. You grant us grace to grow over time. We bless you for ...

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...

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...

The only “church growth formula” the early church possessed was the body of truth flowing with the blood of grace. They drew thousands to Jesus by being like Jesus. But what does it mean to “be like J...

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...

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

A person's decision to attend your church is usually made in a moment.

Seeing crowds of people coming together to seek Jesus gives me great joy. . . . But does this business, this busyness, mean I’m a successful pastor? Maybe it does, but maybe it doesn’t. It may indicat...

A Story from the Philokalia A story is told in  The Philokalia  about a young monk who went to an older monk to confess a struggle. The older monk was appalled, telling the young monk that his strugg...

The excellence of the church does not consist in multitude but in purity.

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.

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...

It makes little sense to attract people on the basis of their own self-interest and then expect them to embrace an invitation to self-denial.

God’s kingdom is not best represented by franchises of McChurch. If you focus your energies on copying someone else’s methodologies or programs, you will miss something crucially important . . . The H...

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God's most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that...

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

At every point in the human journey we find that we have to let go in order to move forward; and letting go means dying a little. In the process we are being created anew, awakened afresh to the sourc...

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.

And so I say to you, the 1996 graduates of Southampton College, you are no longer tadpoles. The time has come for you to drop your tails and leave this swamp. But I am sure that wherever I go as I tra...

In many parts of the country, leaf clean-up is an annual chore. They fall from the trees, blanket our lawns, and we often bag them up and toss them out (or burn them). There’s a lesson in this… In my...

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...

I met a young man not long ago who dives for exotic fish for aquariums. He told me that one of the most popular aquarium fish is the shark. He explained that if you catch a small shark and confine it,...

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...

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...

The data here shows that churches of all sizes can turn around and reach the unchurched.

Church growth experts tell us that most people seeking a new church care little about its doctrines. They're mostly interested in the facilities of the church, its nursery, and opportunities for f...