7 Big Tips for Funding Your Ministry Vision This Year

7 Big Tips for Funding Your Ministry Vision This Year

What’s the ONE subject almost no church leader enjoys talking about? Yep. Money. Talking about money feels icky. Asking for money makes us feel like we’re begging. So we tiptoe. We skirt around the issue, assuming that taking a softer and more silent...
Announcing: The Digital Leadership Lab

Announcing: The Digital Leadership Lab

All around me, I see leaders – pastors, business owners, industry leaders – who are on an important mission to get their message out, but who don’t know exactly how to lead to their full potential in this rapidly changing, digital age. Next year,...
Overcoming Three Big Leadership Fears

Overcoming Three Big Leadership Fears

I’m a leader. And it’s likely that you are too, whether you’re in an officially recognized leadership position or not. Leadership is influence, and it’s pretty much guaranteed you’re influencing people – employees, kids, a spouse, a...
What Real Rest Looks Like for a Pastor

What Real Rest Looks Like for a Pastor

Resting isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. Our traditional definition of rest is simple enough: Do less. A more fleshed-out, biblical understanding of rest, however, is a bit deeper than merely doing less. It’s really doing less to allow time and space...
8 Ways to Stop Biggering and Start Bettering the Church

8 Ways to Stop Biggering and Start Bettering the Church

Remember the Once-ler? From The Lorax by Dr. Seuss? He was a fairly normal guy who wanted to build a big business at the expense of the environment, so he kept “biggering and biggering” until all the trees were gone, the wildlife had vacated the landscape,...
Actually, God Calls the Qualified… Into Leadership

Actually, God Calls the Qualified… Into Leadership

Years ago, a sweet lady in our church handed me a little slip of paper to encourage me on my journey. I unfolded it and it read: God doesn’t call the qualified; he qualifies the called. I’m not sure who said it originally, but I’ve heard and repeated...
Spiritual Warfare and the Lives of Pastors and Church Leaders

Spiritual Warfare and the Lives of Pastors and Church Leaders

The struggle is real. When you drop the phrase spiritual warfare into a casual conversations, you often get mixed reactions. On the one hand, a lot of people are skeptics when it comes to anything invisible or supernatural. In fact, many people will believe in heaven...
3 Components of a Healthy Church Planting Model

3 Components of a Healthy Church Planting Model

We’re so “ether-or” in our viewpoints, aren’t we? We have a tendency to form an opinion, stake a position, and defend it against anything that looks different. Tension can be good. Out of tension flows a creative discussion and differences of...
Boring Preaching Is A Crime! 7 Ways to Be Interesting

Boring Preaching Is A Crime! 7 Ways to Be Interesting

No, this is not a post about the loss of our religious freedom – it’s a reflection on a quote I’ve looked at many times since I first wrote it down about nine years ago at a conference on preaching… If you think the gathering of biblical facts...