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One of the most important questions church leadership has to answer is: What is the purpose of our weekend services? This is a big deal. In our work with churches, we often find this basic question is never asked…and for a number of reasons, from “This is how we’ve always done things” to the daily pressures of ministry simply squeezing out time to even think about it. It seems there are 3 primary approaches to Sunday mornings. Of course hybrids of these are often the case. Bu

Here in the States we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving this week. Forget the pilgrims and corn—let’s just talk about the concept of thankfulness for a moment. Many years ago I took my first trip to Nigeria with my friend Emmanuel. One afternoon we drove outside of Jos to a rural village with a tiny church and an even tinier house. Emmanuel wanted me to meet the first pastor he worked under many years earlier. The pastor was quite old, thin as a reed, and wore thick black-rimme

Many years ago a fellow pastor introduced me to a graphic that was helpful for a wider view of the Church. He had adapted a construct from the late author Phyliss Tickle that described the landscape of modern Christianity and the Church (capital C) in quadrants. The quadrants were labeled as Liturgical, Social Justice, Renewalist, and Evangelical. The terms could be described thusly: Liturgical had to do with churches that lean on a liturgy with aspects of rituals and sym

In our work with churches in assessing the four key elements of healthy organizations, the first one we typically look at is the Earth/Integrity element, primarily because of its foundational qualities. At its most basic level, the Earth/Integrity element can be assessed by a simple metric: is the mission of the organization being accomplished? Any healthy organization has some way of measuring its success. It may even be by benchmarking and being challenged against itself ye

Lots of folks have been questioning what church life and ministry should look like post-Covid. To do that, I think it would first be best to understand where you’ve been. And by “where you’ve been”, I mean where your organization has been both circumstantially and emotionally. For many churches, Covid threw them into survival mode. Survival mode happens when your resources suddenly shrink or outside forces threaten your existence. Either way, you’re thrust into an unknown w