Notable Voices and the Week in Review: December 3, 2016
Five Personal Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned the Hard Way
The Intersection of Theology and Worship featuring Louie Giglio
Five Dangers of the Church Cartel
Five Reasons You Should Start (or Continue) Blogging in 2017
The Relationship Between a Pastor and Worship Leader featuring Jim Shaddix
Why Pastors Are Committing Suicide — Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
Pastors aren’t immune to the rising suicide rates. More than half of pastors have counseled people who were later diagnosed with a mental illness (59 percent), and about a quarter say they’ve experienced some type of mental illness themselves (23 percent). According to LifeWay, 12 percent have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
Why Big Church Solutions Can’t Fix Small Church Problems — Karl Vaters
You’re looking for help to make your church better, healthier, stronger and more kingdom-minded, but almost everything you find comes from a big church perspective. That’s not bad. But it often means there’s very little, if anything in it to help you in a small church context.
How Your Control Freak Tendencies Stunt Your Church’s Growth — Carey Nieuwhof
There’s a lid that comes with your control freak tendencies. You will eventually hit a wall in which the size of your church shrinks back to the size of your personal span of care. Until you let go. In other words, if you want to limit your church’s growth, attempt to control everything.
One Big Way to Reduce Ministry Stress — Sam Rainer
The way you counter rising stress levels is to correspondingly raise your level of compassion for others. Obviously, this mentality is not natural. When I’m stressed, I have about as much compassion as a boxing champ stepping into the ring to defend his title. Or worse, I want to go full Bob Newhart on people in my counseling sessions. Since the point of ministry is not to beat people up, something has to give. Here are some practical steps in order to raise your level of compassion during a season of rising stress.
7 Tips to Make Your Sermons Shorter — Jeremy Roberts
In a previous post, I established the WHY behind preaching shorter sermons, and in this post I want to explain the HOW behind decreasing your sermon length.
3 Common Ways Churches Overcomplicate Their Calendars — Eric Geiger
A busy church calendar can keep people at church and away from the broader culture. Not only is mission thwarted but people also have a difficult time navigating what their next step at the church is. When there is a plethora of programs/events on the calendar, it is hard to know which ones are really important. How do churches get to an overcomplicated church schedule? How does busyness creep in? Here are three common ways:
