Asking the Right Questions

Two questions that people often ask me about how to engage in the neighborhood where they live are; “What are some things I can do to engage in my neighborhood?” and “How do you ever find the time to get involved in the place where you live?” Those questions, as simple and honest as they are, concern me. What is …

Starting Well In Church Leadership

In my last blog, I encouraged churches to form non-representative leadership teams for three reasons. Often in constituency representative teams “the priority of the ‘good’ of the constituency displaces the overall good of the organization [church].”[1] “the leadership team may or may not be composed of people who actually have gifts related to leadership.”[2] “inevitably one constituency is deemed more …

Faithfully Pragmatic in Church Planting

“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 …

Free Webinar: Fund Your Church Plant

We here at V3 are excited to partner with Tom Mauriello and Reliant to offer this free webinar on Creative Ways to Fund Your Church Plant. Missional churches and church planting present unique challenges and opportunities with their funding needs.  Does your fundraising model align with the mission?  We’ll explore the methods and models we can approach funding and fund …

Post-Christendom Gathering

In a previous post I discussed a guaranteed method to reduce workloads for overwhelmed pastors and church planters: reduce the number of monthly worship services. In this edition, I ask a related question: do worship services have expiry dates? Or does what we have now work great?   In terms of expiration, high church liturgies don’t update or shift much at …

Feeling Like an Evangelistic Failure?

Do you feel like a failure if you haven’t converted anyone? This was the question that my friend asked me about my work in the neighborhood where I live. My friend who is not a Christian, had read my book Urban Spirituality: Embodying God’s Mission in the Neighborhood. In this book, I write about the work I do in my …

The Cure for Overwhelmed Church Planters and Pastors

Cut the number of worship services in half. Sound far fetched? It’s possible to do, and it would cut workload considerably. Of course, then you may have to justify your salary. Ultimately, it may be the best move to re-connect with a post-Christians culture. If we look at budgets and responsibilities, the majority of money and time in a church …