A Look Back: Fresh Ideas From 2025

This year, we shared many ways to help your church take bold steps of renewal. Below are ten fresh ideas we think are worth re-visiting as the year comes to an end!

Ten Fresh Ideas from 2025

1. How to overcome resistance and get unstuck

• Over time, churches tend to become complacent and stagnant by default. Why? It is human nature to fear the unknown and to gravitate toward the known. However, getting unstuck and moving again may not be as hard as it appears!

2. Dealing with disengagement

• Many churches are finding that volunteerism has not returned to pre-COVID levels. Disengagement is high among lay leaders, council members, staff, and others in ways that are important to face head-on.

3. In Defense of Church Growth

• Many people are skeptical of using attendance or membership growth as key metrics to measure church health. Some resist the shallowness of church growth movements and techniques. But this article makes the case that the goal of growing Christ’s church is still a noble goal, and measuring it numerically still makes sense!

4. How to keep a new vision alive

• Vision is leaky! Aligning a church around a new vision can feel like blowing air into a balloon that has a pinprick in the other end. The work is never done! Discerning a new vision is only the first step; getting it to take root requires constant reinforcement. This article details easy ways to do that!

5. Four essential traits of a leader

• What do followers need from leaders to thrive? New research from Gallup helps us to understand what effective leadership looks like and offers helpful insights for church leaders. Across demographics, locations, and industries, followers consistently identified four key traits they value in leaders.

6. The anatomy of church renewal

• Church renewal requires us to enlist every single member of the congregation in the effort. But each person has a different role to play, and we have to make sure people end up in the right place within the body (1 Corinthians 12:12). This article uses the image of a human body to offer a simple way to think about complex strategies.

7. Just do something!

• The healthiest and most fruitful churches are the ones who find this balance: they trust fully in God and move boldly in obedience. They cultivate a bias toward action and trust that God will direct their steps along the way. What keeps us from moving? This article presents five common obstacles that often paralyze us — and how we can overcome them.

8. Asking better questions

• Getting the right answers is useless if you’re asking the wrong questions. Yet, how often do we pause and zoom out to make sure we’re asking the right questions in church renewal? But what are those questions? This article offers six questions every church should ask.

9. A fresh look at church planting

• If you care about church renewal, you cannot ignore church planting! As we seek to move our congregations out of maintenance mode and into a multiplication mindset, church planting should be on all our radars! In Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, we explored various aspects of church planting from a fresh perspective.

10. Preventing and overcoming pastoral burnout

• Healthy churches need healthy leaders. In order for churches to be renewed, their pastors have to be renewed. However, new research shows that about two in five pastors may be at high risk of burnout, and 42 percent of pastors say they have seriously considered quitting ministry in the past year. In Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, we unpacked how to recognize and reverse burnout.