evangelism
Wednesday I head off to San Diego for my fourth year at the National Outreach Convention, known affectionately as NOC. I hope you'll be there for all of the workshops, discussion forums, worship sessions, major speakers, and more. One of the really great things about NOC is the
invite others
I led a couple of seminars at the Billy Graham School of Evangelism this week, but we're the ones who received a blessing by being there. Everything about the week was encouraging to the participants, including Debbie and me. The School of Evangelism staff was wonderful. This was
Culture
Today Amazon delivered my copy of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett. A research professor of psychology at Clark University, Arnett became fascinated at the different choices 18-t0-20-something year olds were making compared to preceding generations. Further research bore out
Community
I'm starting to get into Facebook. Debbie and I have connected with old friends, our own family, former church members, and lots of new "friends" that we would not have met anywhere else. As experienced Facebookers know, not only can you find friends online, but you
bless the world
I'm playing around here and this is the rough draft of 101 Outreach Ideas for Small Churches. Any others you want to add? I'd love to hear any stories you have about any outreach ideas you've used. I'm working on a book,
Congregation
Whatever it takes, right? I mean, anything that gets people in church is okay, right? Because, after all, everybody needs to hear the gospel, so the ends justifies the means, right? Maybe not. What are the ethics of outreach and when do we cross the line from compassion to conniving?
church as abbey
Some in my Southern Baptist denomination are calling for more stringent church discipline. That's mostly because we can't find about half of our 16-million members. Obviously, some of our folks don't take church membership very seriously. The logical thing to do to solve that
Congregation
We had a long and intense discussion in a committee meeting tonight at our church. The subject: how can we reach more families and children? My challenge to the group was to lead the church to make a commitment as a congregation to the "what" -- reaching families
Congregation
Our youth ministry took another blow this week. Word trickled back to me that one of our families with young teens has found another church "where there are more kids." I've been here 4 years this month, and this is at least the fourth time this
Congregation
Last year for our 150th anniversary, we scheduled one special Sunday celebration per month from January through July. Our sesquicentennial Sundays were so successful that we decided to schedule one special Sunday per month during 2008. Here's what we did: 1. We chose the same Sunday of each
bless the world
Pastor John Carmichael at Evangel North Church tried the Easter Outreach Idea with great success this year. John left the following comment: We used this idea for Easter 2008. It doubled our church attendance for Easter. We average 105, on Easter we had more than 210. Largest crowd ever! The
bless the world
Last year, several of us in the Fuller DMin Missional Leadership program had dinner with Alan Roxburgh one evening. Alan is one of the DMin adjunct professors, and author of The Sky Is Falling, co-author of The Missional Leader, and contributor to Missional Church, edited by Darrell Guder, the book