In today's post, I look at the positive side of being a pastor. Most of these leaders love their work and the churches they serve. So I took to the Twitterverse again with my poll question asking pastors what they like most about their work. Here are..
Let me state the obvious: Pastors are humans. That means they have preferences, likes, and dislikes. So I did an unscientific Twitter poll to find out what pastors really don't like about their jobs. By the way, one pastor cautioned me about calling ..
For now, I have provided four examples of what non-Christians are asking of Christians. They were all comments at different points on my blog. Each section represents a different non-Christian.
In this post, I want to approach the issue from a slightly different perspective. I want to ask the question: How many hours must a pastor work each week to satisfy the congregation? Ultimately, I prefer to hear from pastors and church members and ge..
In my Monday post, I looked at the issue of pastor/staff relationships from the perspective of the lead pastor or senior pastor. In this article we hear from the staff perspective, those other than the senior pastor who serve on a church staff.
I remember well receiving a call from one of my sons. It was his first day on the job as a new pastor. It was also his first fulltime ministry position. His words were amusing: "Okay, Dad. I'm here. What do I do next?"
It is one of the most unpredictable jobs one could have. There will be weeks when there won't be much taking place out of the ordinary, and the pastor will work a "mere" 40 to 45 hours. There will be other weeks filled with meetings, emergency hospit..
Okay, I'm joining the crowd. The majority of Americans are tired and angry about political leaders who put off major decisions, often called "kicking the can." It's called breaking the law when I kick the can. It's called politics when they do it in ..
Though this blog is four years old, I did not get serious about the pace of my blogging until about two years ago. If you have spent any time at my blog, you know that I devote a lot of my writings to local church matters in general, and to pastors s..
I feel like I'm walking on metaphorical eggshells with this blogpost. My challenge is that I am asked about this issue almost as much as any other. The question typically comes from a pastor or other church leader, but it could come from a leader of ..
What is fascinating, if not discouraging, about this survey is that virtually all of the challenges noted by these pastors and staff were internal challenges. It appears that many of our churches in America are not effective conduits of the gospel be..
Most church members give little thought to the amount of time it takes a pastor to prepare each sermon. In reality, sermon preparation is a large portion of a pastor's workweek. Unfortunately, this work is invisible to typical church members.
After 25 years of consulting and researching local congregations, I have found four common approaches churches take to break attendance barriers regardless of size. There are certainly more than four possibilities, but allow me to evaluate these four..
Preaching is central to the worship services in most churches. Indeed most services are built around the message. The sermon is critical to the life and health of a church.
Christians look at everyone else as if they've got targets painted on their foreheads. Nobody likes being hunted down or treated like someone else's project. Love does not seek to create clones of itself. Selfishness does.
I arrived on Saturday, so I have already had an opportunity to interact with a number of people. Most of those I have spoken with are here for the SBC. A few of them, though, work in Houston. I would like to share summary comments from two of them.
I was serving a church in St. Petersburg, Florida, when it hit me hard. One of my young children had playfully fallen on the floor in the foyer after a worship service. A deacon in the church came up to me and spoke forcefully: "You need to tell your..
My burden to see struggling churches become turnaround churches grows daily. There are an estimated 100,000 churches in North America that would be deemed terminal by most pundits. There are another 100,000 to 200,000 that are very sick and could soo..
There are few vocations that can engender burnout like the pastorate. The demands on a pastor's time, emotions, and energy can be overwhelming. When I was a pastor, I often felt at least the symptoms of burnout.
Most church leaders don't grasp the value of a website to get guests to their churches to hear the gospel. Most church websites are terrible