What is a Faithful Church? It Is Not What You Were Told
Is a faithful church one that has found the pattern in the New Testament and copied it? Is a faithful church one that has apostolic succession back to the first century? Is a faithful church one that is filled with the Holy Spirit? Is a faithful church one that is on mission for Jesus? What […]
Help Them Discover God Or Discover You?
We all like attention. We also like to see “success.” Then we like credit for it. Our flesh and the evil one are really good at taking wonderful things and twisting them up into evil things. This can be true of evangelism and making disciples. What starts off as a wonderful thing can be turned […]
Church – Warning Shots Were Fired But No One Was Paying Attention
A number of years ago Willow Creek posted the results of their massive internal research – the Reveal study. It showed that the approach that had been the panacea of approaches to church – the program-based attractional church model, was severely flawed. The promise was that building attractive programs to draw people to attending the […]
Discipleship Is Not A Program – So What Is It?
There seems to be a confusion of definitions when it comes to defining discipleship. People want to define discipleship as all the things they are already doing. And what churches are already doing are typically programmatic. Let’s be clear – Discipleship is not a sermon or a Bible class. Discipleship is most likely not your […]
Biblical Preaching May Not Be What You Think It is
I love to preach. It is energizing…challenging…and a deeply spiritual event. There really isn’t anything like it. What can I say? It is special. But what if there was more to preaching than what we generally think of it in terms of something that is done by a single person on Sunday? What if you […]
Time to Sound the Alarm! We Have a Discipleship Crisis in the American Church
This crisis is on two fronts. 1 – Failing to Mature Existing Disciples: How does a disciple mature? How do they go from milk to solid food (1 Cor 3:1-2)? I believe our assumptions of what creates a mature disciple are faulty and left untested, therefore, they perpetuate without question. If you think attendance and […]
The Three Biblical Keys to Kingdom Growth Are Already In Your Church
And here they are… 1 – Prayer. Prayer movements always precede kingdom movements. The largest movements in Christian history have always started with fervent prayer. Movements in Acts began in prayer (Acts 1 led to Acts 2, Acts 10 starts with Peter in prayer, Acts 13’s prayer and fasting led to a missionary journey). Anyone […]
A Startling Number on Church Growth!
Do you have any idea what percentage of growing churches are growing from evangelism and making disciples? Go ahead and get a number in your head…put it in the comments before you go on. I will put the number at the end of the article so you can’t peek! The number is abysmally low. The […]
Why Some Christians and Churches Never Get Well
Our culture is obsessed with pathology. The moment you feel a symptom you rush to WebMD to find out that you think you have some rare South American fungus that is stopping up your intestines. Anyone who studies abnormal psychology walks away thinking they have a dozen psychological disorders. No one goes to the doctor […]
Tips for Recording Sermons for Livestream, Facebook, and YouTube
With so many preachers now preaching to empty rooms while we are all maintaining distance during the COVID-19 pandemic I would like to share a few ideas to help you get up and running to record and stream your services to continue to get a weekly message from the Bible to your congregation. Video – […]