photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash If you are like me your life right now is filled with Christmas activities. I have attended two turkey dinners already with several more on the way. I have been to a beautiful Christmas…
The Lack Of Evangelism In The Church
This past week I attended an event in Calgary in which the Flourishing Congregations Institute released some preliminary findings of a church survey that they are conducting. If you haven’t seen their website https://www.flourishingcongregations.org/ you should pay it a visit.…
The Forgotten Essential
photo by ben-white-14695-unsplash I know that I am taking the following sentence out of context but I think that it extends beyond just the immediate context of the passage in which it is found. “You do not have because you…
Programs Versus Relationships
JoJo on Unsplash When I look back to my teenage years almost all of my best memories of church grew out of relationships. I remember a Sunday school teacher that took a bunch of teenage guys to his cottage for…
The Importance Of Being Intentional
I firmly believe that one of the advantages of a small church is the potential impact it has on its youth. My evidence for this is all anecdotal. I don’t know of any study that has been done that shows…
Two Reasons Why You Should Think Like A Small Church
I love it when people send me links to something that they think might interest me as a small-church consultant. Usually the blog entry or podcast or article is well worth the investment of my time. A good friend sent…
Building A Leadership Team: Trust
In his book The Advantage Patrick Lencioni talks about the need of trust within a leadership team. It is a very special kind of trust which he calls vulnerability-based trust. The first time that I read through his book I…
Building A Leadership Team: Growing Leaders
Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestselling book, Outliers, refers to a concept developed by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson called the 10,000 hour rule. The rule suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of work to become an expert in any field. The…
Building A Leadership Team: Finding The Right Pastor
In his excellent book Good To Great business researcher Jim Collins tells the story of Rubbermaid and its CEO at the time, Stanley Gault. Rubbermaid grew from obscurity to number one on Fortune’s annual list of America’s Most Admired Companies…
Four Questions
I had a dream. I wanted to bring leaders together from all across Canada so that they could discuss the issues facing small churches in the 21st century. The dream didn’t become reality. The National Forum that we had planned…