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One summer when I was a little boy, my mom sent me to something called “Vacation Bible School.” If ever there was an oxymoron, that’s it. I knew “Vacation” didn’t have anything to do with “School”. And then you throw the “Bible”-word in the middle and you had all the excitement of an after-school special on dental hygiene. But I went. Once. We outlined pictures of stained glass and colored them with Crayolas. That was the last time. So each day mom sent me to VBS, I would lea

Please welcome our friend and guest blogger Boyd Pelley! Boyd co-founded Churchteams, a leader in church management software. In this blog, he touches on the radical differences they discovered between tracking “first time guests” and “Giving” in churches during Covid-19. Several months ago, the executive pastor of a large church in Florida mentioned to me that they no longer think of first time worship attenders as first time guests. They had discovered, even before the Cor

At one point at the church where I pastored, we were doing seven identical services every weekend. In a room that seated 570 people, we had stumbled into some crazy momentum. The thing is, momentum seems to shift from time-to-time. You notice it easily watching football: one team is suddenly tearing up the field for three-and-a-half quarters and then it suddenly shifts to the opposite team in the last ten minutes of the game.  There are all sorts of reasons, but that’s a blo

Over the years I’ve found myself ruminating on why pastors are often reluctant to engage with outside organizational assessors, consultants, and coaches or even in-house team-based reviews and surveys. I think it’s the human condition in general that makes us reluctant to expose our weaknesses or fear of change in front of others. Over decades of pastoring, I watched a somewhat similar dynamic with marriages that were going south. After finally recognizing the need for marr

I recently spoke at a friend’s church and mentioned that I believe Jesus teaches that we become more whole, more joyous, more fulfilled, as our focus moves away from ourselves and more outward. For instance, Jesus once told his disciples not to worry about what they’ll wear or what they’ll eat, that instead if they focused outwardly on what the Father was doing, all those things would be taken care of. That’s a radical outward-focus. Honestly, I’ve met very few people who