Every ministry faces growth barriers. No church grows all the time without facing a plateau or season of struggles. The question isn’t if we will face growth barriers, it’s what will we do when they come? We will all face growth barriers, but we don’t have bow down to them! You can overcome them and…
When it comes to church and youth ministry, numbers matter. They aren’t all that matters though. The question isn’t should we count; it’s what should we count? I don’t see this as a tension to resolve as much as it is a tension to manage. Churches that are anti numbers tend to be uninformed and…
Recently I’ve become bothered by a common theme I’ve encountered among many program-sized and smaller corporate-sized churches (whose average Sunday attendance is between 150-600 people). These are churches that are typically well staffed, with at least one full-time clergyperson and many times two or more. They have either completed a successful capital campaign in the…
Hiring is hard, yet necessary. Few things are more important to the sustainability of a ministry than hiring the right people. Nevertheless, hiring the right people is difficult while finding the wrong ones is easier than catching the common cold. According to Craig Groeschel, the potential of an organization rests on the strength of its people….
Take heart, don’t lose heart. Have you ever found yourself discouraged in ministry? If you’ve been serving in ministry for more than eleven days, I’m going to guess that your answer is “yes”! I hit an all-time low several years ago. The church was growing, and we had just opened a new facility, but volunteers…
I was recently meeting with a ministry director who had been through a bit of a tough year. From an outsider’s perspective, his ministry was going well. Kids were involved and growing in their faith. Volunteers were showing up, engaged and leading with excitement. Yet something was a bit off. This director was leading several…
What do growing youth ministries have in common? What makes them so healthy? What causes them to grow while others don’t? I’ve never met a youth worker who didn’t want their youth ministry to grow. That would be like finding a 5 year old that doesn’t like cookies! It would be weird. However, even though…
No one warned us that we’d get mad at our church. You would hope that church work would be different, right? But church people are still people, and when the stakes are high and emotions are higher, most of us do a lousy job at holding a constructive conversation. The authors of “Crucial Conversations” say…