I started writing this series because some people I love and work with had spiritually crashed and burned. And as bad as things seem for them, there is much hope in the fact that they no longer are able to hide their choices to use deadly sin as a means to comfort...
Easter Sunday morning, a number of Converge churches were baptizing new believers. One pastor told me they baptized seventeen. Another relayed that his church baptized ten new believers. I love these reports, because hearing about people moving from the kingdom of...
A friend of mine reached out to help a believer caught in a staggering situation. Her businessman husband in jail, all personal assets seized, with no money or job skills to live on while raising small children, she faced both the public embarrassment and a lonely...
I was just with a leader who coaches leaders of church planting movements all around the globe. He wanted to know more about church systems and structure. As we were looking at the Healthy Church Systems Matrix, he surprised me with the outburst, “There is a system...
The workaholic who can afford all the goodies of life but his wife and children feel like he is a stranger. A depressed woman who spends her day wishing for a better life – or death. The person with five maxed-out credit cards. The guy who secretly watches...
Imagine sitting in the shambles of a church’s leadership team. At one time they were excited about the potential future of their church. Most of them were basically new to church leadership, but they had found it exhilarating and rewarding serving alongside their...
The church I was visiting had grown from a plant to over 1000 attenders. I sat with the pastor before the Sunday morning celebration and listened to him express both the blessing and challenge of leading such a large congregation. As I probed his current needs, he...
I suspect that no one is surprised by the idea that a good leader needs a team of people around him. John Maxwell calls this The Law of the Inner Circle, meaning “Think of any highly effective leader and you will find someone who surrounded himself with a strong inner...
I know of a church that has a congregation of over 500 attenders, but only one pastor on staff. Looking in from the outside, you might wonder how one person can possibly handle the demands of so many. But if you take an inside look and see, you would discover that...
So back to the question: Why do we choose pathways that lead us to being much less than we could be, pathways that lead us to destruction? There is not one among us who does not, on our best days, want our lives to line up with the life God has promised us in Jesus....
