Church Growth

Surviving Your Building Project

The common wisdom is that the tenure for most pastors following a building campaign is eighteen months. For that reason, I’ve waited to write this post until I had crested the eighteen-month mark. The story of our building process actually began in 2010. In the early parts of that year, we were growing rapidly and …

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Book Review: The Power of Habit

I was in Boston a few weeks ago and had an opportunity to visit Harvard and its bookstore. When visiting one of the world’s leading educational institutions, the bookstore is intuitive about the way that Harvard is shaping the world. Unfortunately, I was unable to spend nearly as much time as I would have liked, …

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Preaching, (re)Planting, and Apologizing

I’ve recently read three books that I feel would be worth your time as well and wanted to share those here.  The first, on preaching, is Preaching the Cross, which comes out of the Together for The Gospel movement.  Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, and Mohler combine with John MacArthur, John Piper, and R.C. Sproul to bring …

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Are You Too Big for God’s Call?

Tim Keller has posted an interesting article on his blog entitled, The Country Parson. In this article, Keller, the ardent advocate of urban church planting lauds the small country church as a training ground for young pastors. Keller is probably the last person you would ever expect to encourage pastors to live out their years in …

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Internet Church?

I laughed hard at this video clip, but it did get me to thinking about the new craze of internet worship services. I am thankful for the internet and for the opportunities to share the gospel this way, just the same way that many churches (including ours) are able to use television to share the …

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Church Decline and Death in Real Numbers

Is your church healthy? Most of you who will read this have heard the numbers time and time again. Eighty percent of SBC (and other evangelical denominations) churches are either plateaued or declining. My concern is that we’ve heard that number so many times that we really don’t allow it to sink in.  Recently, I …

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Crash Test Your Church

In the Video below, you will see a crash test between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Chevy Bel-Air.  The head to head test was created and performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to highlight the advances that have been made in vehicle safety over the past fifty years.  Practical wisdom would …

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Book Review: Total Church

Total Church was a freebie for me that I picked up at Advance O9.  My first reaction to the book in the first fifty pages was less than stellar. It wasn’t that I found the book bad, so much as ordinary.  The first few chapters do not stick out as anything different or “radical” as …

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Jonah and the SBC–The Reluctant Missionals

Missional is a big catch-word in church growth circles these days, and in the SBC.  In conversation with some friends recently, I suggested that maybe the divide between many churches was ideological in part and could be defined along a missional line, ie. missional verses non-missional churches.  The problem, as pointed out in that conversation, …

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Is the SBC Another Example of Church Decline?

Though it may be a stretch to say that the SBC is a church since it is a collection of autonomous churches, it might not be so far-fetched to suggest that the current decline (plateau at best) in which we find ourself as a denomination mirrors the decline that many churches within the SBC are …

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