In the life of church planting, communication is so key. Especially in a time like we’re in – in the midst of COVID-19. I’m sure we’re all in the same boat, making decisions for our local spaces and gatherings, changing events and plans, but in the middle of all of this, we have a unique opportunity to invite those we …
Re-imagining New Scaffolding In planting a missional-incarnational church you will collide with the big question “How do we do leadership in this new but old way of being the church?” Re-imagining and reconstructing leadership scaffolding are essential for being a movemental church in Post-Christianity, but it can be hard to find templates. I confess that my own history in leadership …
“We are shaped by our stories. And these stories, or narratives are running and (often ruining) our lives.” [James Bryan Smith][1] Discerning God’s direction in life is often messy and confusing. The stories that we have picked up in life often times do not serve us well. We need regular periods of silence to help us identify these stories, examine …
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 …
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 …
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 …
“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 …
Luke 10:1-24 has an incredibly diverse range of wisdom and brilliant insights. Perhaps if it was the only portion of scripture that we had, it’s diverse range of wisdom would still be more than sufficient to help us understand so many realities of the Kingdom of Heaven and service to the King of Heaven; but let me paraphrase one insight …
We at The V3 Movement are pleased to announce Specialized Coaching beginning this fall. We hear from many of our friends, church planters, and practitioners that they would like to have a coaching resource from the V3 Movement outside of our learning cohorts and we are happy to be able to offer this now. This coaching is available to everyone …
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 …