I began coaching a leader in a growing organization recently and he came to an important realization: what had been working for leadership development and discipleship in the past wasn’t working as well anymore. Some of the dynamics had changed since the organization...
If you want to cultivate a thriving church, you must make the care and feeding of your small groups and their ministry leaders a very high priority. The leadership community meeting is a regularly scheduled meeting for this purpose. I often refer to the three...
Among my earliest memories are receiving Christ as savior and knowing I was supposed to work for God. At the time, the only people I knew who worked for God were missionaries, so I wanted to be a missionary. (I didn’t know that being a pastor was an actual job as...
One of my principles for doing ministry– especially with new or small churches– is this: We only do as much ministry as we have leadership to support. One of the problems new churches face is adding more and more ministries (usually in an attempt to meet...
We as the church of Jesus are supposed to “do life” together in the context of community. But how can we really do that, especially in the western context most of us find ourselves in? I believe our ministry does need to be very countercultural, since our context is...
If you give people the answers, you truncate their growth. That’s why I prefer asking them questions. If you want to develop people to their fullest potential, ask them questions that they have to wrestle with, think about, and answer. If you take the time to dialogue...
Some of you who have heard me speak may have heard me share one of my very favorite discipleship and church planting stories. It’s out of Honduras, and goes to illustrate how effective ministry can be with almost no resourcing, no technology, no telephones, no...
As we reach people from the harvest, we don’t shut them up in a barn. We send them right back into the harvest to glean more. That’s what Jesus meant when he told his disciples they would become fishers of men. Disciples are called to make more disciples: we take from...
When we see someone doing something poorly, what’s our natural inclination? To tell them what their problem is, of course. How else would they fix it unless we tell them what they’re doing wrong? Advice, “constructive” criticism, unsolicited feedback… these are our...
