Many churches know something needs to change. They can feel it. Attendance patterns have shifted. Volunteers are harder to find. Outreach feels more difficult. Younger generations seem less connected. The surrounding culture has changed. The …
Is Your Process of Decision-Making Slowing Down Your Church?
Today, we are wrapping up a series of articles about common bottlenecks that keep churches from growing. One of the most common bottlenecks is the process of decision-making and governance. Many churches end up with a …
Is Decision-Making Slowing Down Your Church
In this series of articles, we are exploring ministry bottlenecks that keep churches from moving forward. In the last article, we explored how the pastor can become a bottleneck when too much depends on one person. …
Can The Pastor Be A Bottleneck?
In the last article, we explored the idea of ministry bottlenecks. Like a traffic jam caused by one narrow chokepoint, churches often slow down not because everything is broken, but because one part of the …
How to Find and Relieve Ministry Bottlenecks
Have you ever been in a traffic jam? Traffic gets backed up for miles and moves at a snail’s pace, adding a half hour to your trip. When this happens, it is usually not because the …
Facing Reality: Volunteer Decline
In this series of newsletters, we have named six challenges churches today cannot ignore. We have already discussed the first two challenges, aging congregations and leadership pipelines running dry. Today, we’ll turn to this third challenge, the …
Comparing Five Church Planting Models
Church planting is one of the most effective ways to reach nonbelievers with the gospel. As we noted in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, they tend to be more nimble and more …
To Livestream Or Not To Livestream
Does offering a worship livestream siphon people off from participating in-person? New data by the Pew Research Center says that is generally not something to worry about. Most people are not substituting online worship for in-person …
Renewal leaders and the need for greater agility
A lot has changed with respect to ministry planning in the past few months. A year ago, a congregation’s ministry horizon was, generally speaking, 3-5 years into the future. Major decisions demanded attention but they …