Hopefully you’ve seen the TV show?  Mythbusters tests (and usually explodes) long-held myths and urban legends.  I wonder what the test results would be when they took on our  “friendly, relevant, uplifting, and compelling” church services? Or what the test result would be when they examined, ”how many people will ask me my name and actually engage [...]

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Denial and ignoring problems are a HUGE problem in the church.  This post discusses the importance of identifying & fixing problems, …and some helpful strategies to do so!

Have you seen the Safe-Lite commerical about the small crack in the windshield?  “You think that chip in the windshield is no big deal? One bump could turn it into a [...]

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Do Pastors and their Congregations start to look like each other? I think so. And obviously, this can become unfortunate!
Most pastors that I know WANT to be leaders, but do NOT want to lay claim to just how much THEIR personality and style influences that of the congregation. Indeed, the congregation DEPENDS on and is [...]

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DYSFUNCTION.
I used to think the Church’s general problem was lackluster programming and preaching, or congregational apathy. But the more time I spend in various congregations, and the more conversations I have with pastors and Christian educators across North America through my software and CE work, the more I have come to realize that DYSFUNCTION is the [...]

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Is Sunday School going extinct? …or are some churches merely suffering from their own ineptness, uninspired leadership, and the accumulated effect of bad habits?
(Now you know where I come out on the issue!)
According to a recent Barna Research Study, currently, more than 9 out of every 10 churches offer Sunday school for elementary grades (92%) [...]

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How do visitors and members connect with and understand your church?
Who is reaching out to them? How often?  Are they being “invited” to anything?
How do they know what’s going on? And how do they stay in touch with you?
What’s the “interface”?
Seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer, but in the last several churches [...]

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In tough economic times, donations in many churches go down and then the bean counters come after the “program budget,”  i.e., children and youth ministries. The problem is that drastic cuts in program budgets are often penny-wise and pound foolish. If you lose too much traction in your children and youth programming, those kids won’t be back as adults [...]

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I’ve been attending a church that I think is really a “chapel.”
Not that I think “chapel” is a bad word. Read on….
It’s primary mission seems to be to provide worship on Sunday -offering to God, and renewing our faith for the week ahead. Hence, my designation of it as a “chapel.” It has a very modest Christian [...]

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We need to make serious changes.
Our leaders have been talking about it forever. Problem is, the hole is deep, and our resources are already strained.
I’m not talking about the world’s current financial crisis. I’m talking about the Church.
As we creep into the 21st Century, there’s a growing skepticism about the church. I hear it from pastors. I hear [...]

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One of the problems facing the church is the quality of leadership available to lead them. The skill sets needed to move the church forward are often not the skill sets we look for when selecting leaders. We need to ‘hack’ this problem.
Quick Examples:
We focus the search on good preaching, but don’t focus on the prospective [...]

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…and what you can do about it.
Volunteers are a church program’s lifeblood and biggest challenge. I’ve seen it from all sides, -as a minister on staff, a program leader & recruiter, and as a volunteer in the pew, -in big churches, middle-sized and small.  I’ve also experienced it vicariously through the thousands of churches I’ve been [...]

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Church Accounting is positively scary in some churches…. and I’ve seen it from all sides.  I’ve been on staff as a minister, and I’ve been a “pastor in the pew” as volunteer. I’ve also been doing business with churches for the past 12 years through my www.sundaysoftware.com publishing work. I’ve dealt directly with church financial processes [...]

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