Can I make a confession? I love zombie stories.The “zombie apocalypse” genre has always fascinated me, for some reason. I find myself attracted to movies, TV shows, and books that feature some version of a zombie apocalypse and what happens afterward.Part of the reason I think I’m interested is because of the questions these stories evoke: What remains when all the …
Normally we think of evangelism as a process of telling. We are proclaiming or sharing something. And it is that, of course, but I’ve become more and more convinced that effective evangelism starts with listening. Here’s the thing: most evangelism strategies focus only on the telling part. They help people figure out what to say, how to present, the right things to proclaim. One size does NOT …
If you’ve been planting a church for more than a couple weeks, you’ve probably already encountered a good deal of disillusionment. And if you haven’t felt disillusioned yet… well, just wait. Sorry if that sounds ominous. Disillusionment isn’t fun. You thought one thing and it turned out to be another. You had hoped that family would join the church and …
I recently talked with a church planting couple I used to coach, and they’re planning to shut down their church plant and move on to something new. This might seem like the worst ending to a church planting story, but I actually encouraged them in their decision. Sometimes the best thing to do in church planting is “brush the dust …
I’m an Anglican priest planting an Anglican church in Indianapolis. Most people who come to my church comment on our liturgy. “I love the liturgy!” or “The liturgy sure is… interesting!” are frequent comments. But to call my church “liturgical” and another church not liturgical is false, I think. Every church is “liturgical” in that we have a pattern to our worship …
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – good advice from Winston Churchill Looking at the results and making decisions based on how it affects those results is called being pragmatic. It is a process of dealing with things sensibly, realistically, based on practical considerations as opposed to theoretical ones. So should we be pragmatic about church planting? This tends …
As a (half-hearted) Indianapolis Colts fan, it pains me to admit that Tom Brady is one of the best quarterbacks of all time. The interesting thing about Tom Brady, though, is that everyone almost missed him. He was drafted 199th overall as a 4th-string quarterback (hardly any NFL teams have 4th-string quarterbacks). He almost didn’t make it into the NFL! One of …
You’re a church planter. You’ve been working on your vision documents for months. You’ve been spending lots of money having coffee and meals in your home with potential team members. You finally feel like you’re gaining some momentum. It seems that this is the culmination of a lot of things God has been doing in your life for years, and …
In a previous post I talked about the subtle but powerful temptation to plant a church with a celebrity fan club culture instead of a missional movement culture. I talked about how to diagnose whether a celebrity fan club culture is creeping into your church plant. Now I want to talk about a few concrete actions you can take as …
To be a church planter, you need to have vision to see something that doesn’t exist yet. You also need to organize your life around the goal of seeing that vision become a reality. There are a million temptations along the way, mostly having to do with trying to take control of the process, attempting to make things happen instead …