The journal of a life in ministry

If you’re keeping up, you know that our church is celebrating its 150th anniversary — our sesquicentennial year.  Try making that announcement on Sunday morning!  Anyway, our committee is doing a wonderful job of inviting former pastors, musicians, and members, and gathering photos and other memorabilia for our 7-month long celebration.  Among the artifacts, clippings, [...]

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A surprising liturgical experience

I was out-of-town for the weekend and attended an Episcopal church today.  The church is much larger than mine, but had a similar gothic design so I felt at home in the sanctuary.  I love the Episcopal liturgy, but was concerned I might not be familiar with what this church was going to do.  But, they [...]

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Creating commitment to your church

Tom Holland and I have been emailing back-and-forth about how small churches keep their members.  Tom and I have both experienced families leaving our churches to go to larger churches where the programs are a draw.  If the two of us are dealing with this issue of “closing the back door” as Thom Rainer puts it [...]

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The devil is doing fine by himself

The next time someone says, “I’m just playing the devil’s advocate” use this quote from Seth Godin: “The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.” – Seth Godin, posted January 25, 2007, on Seth’s Blog

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One vision of the future of the church

  “I imagine our congregations becoming smaller, not bigger, yet teeming with the life of his body.  And I hope there are more of them, so many of them in fact, that they become the alternative to the Starbucks of our day.  I hope our churches become known for servanthood in the neighborhoods and warm [...]

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How to Make Baptism Part of Your Life, no kiddin’

This is what I love about the internet.  I ran across a site called eHow.com — a virtual “how-to” about everything, even religion.  So I look and sure enough, there is a post on “How To Make Lutheranism Part of Your Life.”  Not exactly the way I would phrase that, but I’ll give them the [...]

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“We will see him, again.”

Ray Chan was my first appointment on my first day in Hong Kong in the spring of 2002.  Ray was the sales manager for a windchime factory.  I had found his factory on the internet before I flew to Hong Kong.  I had exchanged emails with him, and now we were meeting for breakfast at [...]

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SuperBowl Sunday outreach

Anybody doing anything with the SuperBowl this year?  The big game is Sunday, February 4, with kickoff about 6:30 PM (I think, but the SB site is not clear).  Anyway, we’ve done a couple of things from in-home fellowships to last year’s big 8′x10′ screen in the fellowship hall.  We’re not doing anything this year [...]

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The umpire calls the game

Lyle Schaller, my favorite church consultant, led a retreat for the Atlanta Baptist Association when I was pastoring in Stone Mountain, Georgia.  Schaller said two things I remember from that conference: Act your size. Average US church attendance now is about 90.  If your church is larger, you’re bigger than average — act like it.   His point was [...]

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Invitation to joy

  If you read my post, Don’t Quit!, you know that I left the ministry for 13-years.  Much of that time I spent trying to get back into the pastorate, and that was hard.  But the really hard part was finding a church where we could worship and fellowship.  So much of a pastor’s life is tied up with [...]

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