Effective Evangelism – The Difference Between Conversion and Subversion

One of the things that gets people in trouble when it comes to evangelism is trying to subert people rather than convert them. The word subvert comes from a combination of the words sub – from beneath and the Latin vertere – to turn. The word convert is similar but rather than turning from beneath [...]

Quick Bible Study on James

I challenged our 20s & 30s to pick a book of the Bible and study it. We can talk about how to all day long but it does no good if Bibles don’t come off shelves. I encouraged them to start with James due to its brevity and practicality and several of them have taken [...]

10 Ways to Help Deacons Be Effective

As Jay mentioned earlier, one problem many churches face is helping their deacons to be effective. Often through poor communication and unrealistic expectations things fall through the cracks. It vital to the health of the church that we take the necessary steps to help our deacons be effective:
1 – Realize this is volunteer help and [...]

Connect. How We Put On An Invovement Night at Northwest

Two months ago our elders and ministers had a one day retreat to talk about the future and direction of the church. In that meeting several things came to light that we decided to act on that included new ministries to add/expand existing ministries and trying to get 100% involvement from our membership in service/ministry.
Following [...]

Keeping People Between the Front Door and the Back Door

When talking about retaining people church leaders often use the terms front door and back door to refer to bringing people in (the front door) but not wanting them to go out the back door (leave the church). I think this terminology needs to be examined because I think underneath it is the old facility [...]

Chris Gallagher Posts Free Teacher Training Material

Thanks to Chris for posting his material for free. It looks like he spent considerable time creating this material and it looks well done. Have a look at his blog to download it (30 pages of material in MS Word). Here is the link. He even encourages you to edit it to fit your congregation.

Wes Woodell on Becoming More Evangelistic

I thought these thoughts from Wes were very practical and helpful. I hope you will take a look and share these with other who might benefit from them. Here is the link.

As For Me and My House

An often quoted verse comes from Joshua 24:15 – “But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” There are a lot of interesting features in this chapter when it comes to covenant and theology but one that we talk less about is challenging the enthusiasm of potential God-followers. Joshua knows they [...]

Balancing Rest and the Mission of God

When I am writing lessons I find myself often trying to motivate people to be more invested in the mission of God. As I was writing a lesson last week I began to wonder if we don’t often develop a culture of Christian business where people are faced with positive opportunity after opportunity and feel [...]

The Future of Spiritual Formation (Houston Heflin)

Thanks to guest blogger Houston Heflin for these challenging thoughts:
The world is changing in ways that leave us with one of two choices in Christian discipleship: move our teaching outside the walls of the classroom or bring the outside into our teaching.
Everything from our terminology to our practice needs to be challenged if we are [...]