Become More Attached to Your Place

[The following is a guest post from our friend Steve MacDouell. Steve teaches at Fanshawe College, is the co-founder of Good City Co., as well as a Senior Editor at The Localist.  He is from Woodfield—a neighborhood in Central London, where he enjoys instigating place-based projects, hosting workshops, and inviting everyday citizens to leverage their time, their ideas, and their creativity for the sake of their …

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 …

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 …

Peaks and Valleys – A Core Leadership Team Exercise

Every Leadership Team experiences highs and lows, peaks and valleys. Peak: The day you host your first gathering! Valley: the first time someone leaves your community. Any time you gather a committed group of people you experience the pendulum of life, the best and hardest parts, together. This is the beauty of community and presents its own gifts and challenges …

Questioning Paradigms

The questions we ask ourselves will define our practices.  Think about the questions you ask either consciously or subconsciously and they will shed light on your daily, weekly, and yearly practices.  For example, we would probably all agree that the question “how do I live the most comfortably?” is a deep value of Western Culture. If this is the question …

Free Webinar – Embracing Leadership Limits

Leadership is a buzz word but we all know leading is unavoidable. Many of our current models for leadership highlight their communication skills, their strategic brilliance, or their theological acumen. Is this healthy for the soul of our leadership? What freedom might we find in living into Paul’s promise that in our weakness, God is strong? And are we willing …

Does God Want Single People to Plant Churches? 

Single church planters are like four-leaf clovers: we’re hard to come by. If you think about it, neither living the single life nor church planting is easy. It takes a certain special combination of maturity, character, grit, and giftedness to plant healthy churches, and it takes a particular blend of patience, faith, wisdom, and self-control to live the single life …