Map showing percent of population claimed by 236 religious groups, density of religious groups   7 keys to preventing pastoral burnout by Thom S. Rainer, Posted on Jun 1, 2012 1. Remember your call. 2. Pray for your critics. 3. Wait a day before responding to critics. 4. Be inten

I based the dialog in the video on a conglomeration of a few actual conversations that I’ve had recently. The character doesn’t represent any one person. The guy on the left in the video is me. Do you have someone like the other guy in the video in your church? The passion

Gratitude is the prescription to cure a host of human maladies. One of the chief afflictions of humans is pride. Thanksgiving is the remedy for pride. Here is how it works: whenever we receive a compliment, we should “deflect” the complement to others who helped you. For example, “Tha

I was in a room of leaders from around the country that gathered together to design a process to create church planting centers to recruit, develop, and send more church planters. These church planting centers are to be connected, but have decentralized leadership and become church pr

The North American Mission Board (NAMB) has decided to focus on church planting. In 2009, NAMB spent 28% of its budget on church planting. In 2011, 37%; in 2012, plans to spend at least 42%. This has resulted in mass staff restructuring at NAMB and resulted in a 16% decrease on the NA

Had another meeting between leadership of three churches in our church planting network and the state denominational (Baptist Convention of Iowa [BCI]) staff and officers recently. After nearly three hours of discussion, here is my analysis of the issues:

Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand in the presence of kings. He will not stand in the presence of unknown men (Proverbs 22:29). What if you aren’t born with the right skills? Research shows that skills are more developed from practice than from being born with the rig

Leaders Respond Rather than React. Steinke enables readers to quickly get a 50,000-feet view of what happens when challenging events occur in churches. This perspective enables leaders to properly analyze the problem and have confidence and emotional strength to implement solutions. F

With the conclusion of the Desiring God conference recently and the popularity of the go-and-listen-for-three-days conferences, it is important to get your time and money’s worth.  If you are like me, you are a bad conference attendee. Normally, a good conference for me is to ge

At meeting a few days ago there a pastor who had been serving at a church for a year and was “bragging” about how bad his church was. He went on for fifteen minutes cataloguing how bad it was. Some of his claims were ridiculous, e.g. “No one at church knows why it ex

Change your perception of what makes a good leader Failure of Nerve is one of the best books that I’ve read on leadership in a long time. Friedman’s thesis is that many approaches to leadership end in failure because they fail to recognize that leadership is more about a leader’s own

One escape technique of a poor leader is to become a data junkie. Getting more information gives the impression of responsible action, but it is often an escape for making a difficult decision. It is a way to kick the can down the road in hope that the tension of not knowing what to d

Met a new state denominational leader this week.  As we were considering a new partnership between the organization and our church, he said something surprising. He said that the state denominational organization has an identical function as a local church, but the only difference was