Happy Saturday! I am back from a crazy stretch of travel to Dallas and Atlanta and have been spending a good bit of time getting reacquainted to my man chair and some quiet nights with Theresa.  This week also marked the arrival of my new niece and nephew, Clay and Callie, who waited until the day after my birthday to grace us with their presence.  All in all, a pretty great week! With the start [...]

Growing your church starts with watering the core.   Early on there will be a few key people who are influencing you, guiding you, serving as mentors, providing advice and feedback, cheering you on, and (most importantly) reaching new people.  It is important to thank them for their generosity with their time, influence, and resources.  Everything that you will accomplish through your new ministry is a result of generosity: from the grace given by God [...]

My friend Todd Rhoades has been putting a great deal of work into a project that I am pretty excited about.  Today, starting at 1:00 pm (eastern), Leadership Network will be presenting groundSWELL, a conversation with the rising generation of church leaders. What I love about this is that everyone speaking will be between the ages of 13-19, love Jesus, and love the church.  I have written a great deal about the need for the church [...]

Organizational change can be hard.  Regardless of the context in which we lead, change is a difficult task.  John Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change is the seminal text on guiding an organization through transition.  Through the course of the book Kotter maps out a process and strategy for helping an organization go through the process of organizational change. Ten years after Leading Change’s publication, Kotter and Holger Rathgeber wrote Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any [...]

This is the seventh installment in a series based on my adventures in planting a church.  For more information on the series, or to see what else we have walked through, check out the original post.  My hope is to use this series to develop a resource for planters as they are thinking about diving in, or need to process their current situation… this resource is incomplete without your contribution (that is a subtle way of [...]

I am a fan of the Washington Capitals. I have loved the Capitals since before the Alex Ovechkin bandwagon, and I know that regardless of how well they look during the NHL’s regular season, that my heart will end up being broken in the playoffs.  My Capitals’ fandom makes buying Christmas and Birthday presents for me easy, and often times I will receive tickets to see the Capitals play when they are in town.  My [...]

After a three day road trip to the XPastor Conference in Dallas, I am back on the G’Island in time to celebrate my birthday (what did you get me?) before heading to Atlanta for ChurchPlanters.com’s Velocity Conference.   If you will be in Atlanta, next week, I’d love to grab coffee, or a meal with you! So, take a break from shopping for my birthday present and check out what has been going on here, and at [...]

With tax day rapidly approaching, I asked Bill O’Connell from Wisdom Over Wealth to share some of his wisdom on what pastors need to be thinking about come tax time.  Bill’s team does great work, helping pastors all over country with their tax questions, and I am grateful for his wisdom today. It is sometimes viewed as a badge of honor. After years of study, much heartache, and a life-changing commitment to Jesus, a clergyman [...]

This is the sixth installment in a series based on my adventures in planting a church.  For more information on the series, or to see what else we have walked through, check out the original post.  My hope is to use this series to develop a resource for planters as they are thinking about diving in, or need to process their current situation… this resource is incomplete without your contribution (that is a subtle way of [...]

I met Andy Needham ten years ago while he was leading worship at youth ministry retreat in New Hampshire.  Andy has a heart for worship, and is a talented worship leader (a rare gift)… his new project, The Andy Needham Band, is doing some amazing things all up and down the east coast… you really need to check them out and follow what he is up to.  Check out some of Andy’s thoughts: Our new [...]