Notable Voices and the Week in Review: January 14, 2017
Six Statements That Can Kill a Church
How to Renew Evangelistic Growth in Your Church – Rainer on Leadership #292
Fifteen Top Responses to the Word “Baptist”
Five Church Communications Questions for the New Year
How to Adjust When Church Giving Decreases – Rainer on Leadership #293
3 Ways to Recognize Workaholism in Ministry — Eric Geiger
Ministry leaders, like all leaders, are prone to either laziness or workaholism. On your worst days, on days when you are not living in submission to Christ, you either move toward being lazy or move toward finding your meaning in work. By God’s grace, we don’t need to live in either. But how do we recognize workaholism in ministry? What does it look like in our hearts? Here are three indicators:
The Challenge and Blessing of a Multicultural Leadership Team — Daniel Hyun
One of our desires when we started our church was to reflect our increasingly multicultural world through the beauty of a multicultural church community. We still have many areas to grow and many things to learn in these efforts but we’ve been blessed to experience a growing diversity of cultures represented by the people who are our church. I think diverse leadership has been an essential factor in cultivating these dynamics. However, a collaborative leadership model was not in our DNA when we started the church. This led to some early missteps.
The Necessity of Prayer in Sermon Prep — Erik Raymond
Do we give our study proportional prayer? I often hear ministers ask for prayer for their preaching, but rarely do I hear requests for their study. I am guilty of doing this very thing. Furthermore, we tend to weight our own prayer for the sermon towards the delivery of it. Why do we do this? As I consider this a few reasons come to mind.
For the Pastor with a Bad Case of ‘The Mondays’ — Jared Wilson
There is water for you today, whether you push through on these difficult Mondays in the quiet of your study or the busyness of the visitation route or whether you take these Mondays off to recuperate at home. There is water for you at every moment, living water flowing freely from the pierced bosom of Christ. It is water to satisfy your thirsty soul, water to heal your ministry wounds, water to cool your heels, water to cheer your “Monday face.” Don’t look for it anywhere but in Jesus.
Does Sermon Prep Get Easier? — Richard Caldwell
The right kind of experience is always a good thing. We have all known what it is to try something for the first time and to feel like we’re all thumbs. Then, with a little practice, whatever it was that seemed so difficult becomes second nature. Is it like that with sermon preparation? Can I expect that the longer I preach, and the more times that I prepare sermons, the easier it will become to be ready by Sunday?
3 Simple Words That Can Help Your Sermons Stick — Karl Vaters
A few years ago I had one of those “aha” moments in which I realized that despite all the work, prayer and study to prepare my Sunday messages, there was one step I was missing that could really make them stick. And that step can be stated in three simple words.
