Over the past few years I’ve seen a lot of struggling churches. I’m always looking for the common problems. One recurring problem I’ve seen with almost every struggling ministry I’ve worked with is a lack of adequate liquidity management. We all know it’s prudent to have some savings, but the ministries I’ve seen get into the most trouble have lacked the willingness or ability to set aside savings and live below their income. Once you make the decision to [...]

Earlier this week I spoke about the sickness that we currently see in our political system as well as many of our churches.  Since that post I have been struck by two different conversations that I think go a long way in helping us to be able to disagree well.  The first came from Zig Ziglar’s podcast on the Importance of Relationships.  Zig starts off by talking about how we can never really develop a [...]

One of the hardest parts of being a pastor is how easy it is to lose the “places” in our lives.  The idea of the third place has been talked about a great deal over the last decade, Starbucks has built its’ business plan on the idea of giving customers a third place in which to socialize and connect in.  The typical member of a church congregation has at least three spaces in which they [...]

Brinkmanship seems to be all the rage these days.  Whether it is the NFL owners versus the NFLPA or, President Obama versus John Boehner we do enjoy pushing things to the very brink of disaster.  As Seth Godin noted a few weeks ago, brinkmanship is a shortsighted way to go about things.  The mentality that dictates taking things to the edge of disaster has diminishing returns, and does significant long term damage to the relationships involved in [...]

One of the greatest gifts that churches like Willow Creek and Saddle Back have given the church over the last few decades is the idea that vision matters.  Love them or hate them, imitate them or vilify them, they have taught the church a great many lessons about the power and necessity of vision in leadership.  It is rare to walk into a church in this country, especially one of the evangelical persuasion, and not see, hear, [...]

One of the more difficult conversations that I have with churches in my role with Dime is about church check cards.  Over the last several years check cards have become an increasingly lucrative revenue stream for banks (one source I read states that banks receive nearly $1.50 per check card purchase), resulting in a push to put check cards in the hands of as many people as possible.  Until I began my time at Dime, [...]

Everyone who has served on a church staff at one time or another has gone through at least one job search.  Very few people that I have met actually look forward to the job searching process, and everyone I know is always looking for better ways to get to know the churches that they are interviewing.  Last month I saw a random tweet (I wanted to give credit, but couldn’t find it) for Wade Hodges’ [...]

Yesterday I promised to share a concern that I have for the church planting world. I love church planters, loved planting a church, and I think that church planting is a great way to continue the expansion of God’s Kingdom on this planet.  The last decade or so has been an exciting time for church planting: conferences like Exponential, planting networks like New Thing, and church planting champions like Ed Stetzer have worked in concert to develop [...]

Several months ago Leadership Network filmed me for their 30 Second Leadership Series of videos on their website.  I was asked to share one thing facing leaders today that concerned me.  To be honest, there are currently two things that I see going on in the church that concern me… but Leadership Network only gave me thirty seconds on film, which is probably one of the wisest decisions that they have ever made.  These two [...]

Back in the mid-nineties, while I was between colleges, I spent some time working as a fish cutter in a wholesale seafood market.  It was in that job that I learned the true meaning of boredom at work.  My day would start at 2:00 am by cutting open my first fish and for the next ten to twelve hours I repeated “knife goes in, guts go out” several thousand times.  In order to keep myself [...]