#11 The Twelve Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Church: What is our leadership development process?

 
World famous author and Christian leader John Maxwell has well said, “Everything rises or falls on leadership.” This is one reason it is so important for pastors and church leaders to actually lead instead of simply manage. The temptation for pastors is to put the church on “automatic” and focus on preaching and teaching, and [...]

The Top 10 SIMPLE DISCIPLESHIP Weblog Articles- 2008/09

I have been writing articles for this blog site for just over a year and I am pleased and surprised at the response. There are 224 readers of this blog on a regular basis. I know that does not sound like a huge success, but it is exciting for me. I have endeavored to offer [...]

The Twelve Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Church: #6- What Process Does Your Church Use to Make Disciples?

The key word for this article is “process.” Prior to the twentieth-century, churches saturated their ministries with discipleship rather than treating it as a separate entity. Worship, music, prayer, Bible study, fellowship, and so on, were recognized as being a part of discipleship. A paradigm shift occurred in the twentieth-century when many churches adopted a [...]

The Twelve Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Church

Leaders by nature must lead. I have heard an unusual number of pastors say, “I just want to preach. I don’t want to deal with strategy, planning, administration, counseling, change, and certainly not conflict.” However, this attitude is inconsistent with almost all of the biblical examples from Moses to the Apostle Paul and Elijah to [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #11- Lose Your Passion

Ok, so the Lord can say it in ten and I cannot—like Donald Keough I just had to add one more. In his book The Ten Commandments for Business Failure he said, “If you really want to fail, lose that passion for whatever it is you’re doing” (p. 174). As a leadership and a church-health [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #9-Thou Shalt Not Communicate Clear Expectations

In his book The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey used a sports metaphor to relate how ineffective organizations are at communicating expectations to their people. He used soccer for his illustration, but I will use football. Based on a study of 23,000 workers in prominent companies, the Harris Poll organization determined that most organizations are ineffective [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #8 Thou shalt love thy bureaucracy.

“This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #4 Thou Shalt Not Admit Mistakes

 
A prominent person in my life promoted the life philosophy that it is a sign of weakness to admit mistakes, which is a popular ideal today from the secular world. Many leaders in the business and political sectors devise a cover-up plan at the outbreak of a crisis as a result o a mistake. If [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #3-Thou shalt not be open and available to all people.

The moment a new pastor accepts the call to serve a church people begin to “size him up” to determine what kind of person he is. They quickly measure how open and available he is to the membership. Does he have an open door to the needs of the people or does he seclude himself, [...]

Ten Commandments for Church Failure: #2 Thou Shalt Not Change Anything!

A close second to “Thou Shalt Not Take Risks” is this one “Thou Shalt Not Change Anything.” I stated in my previous article that success is often a precursor to the fear of taking necessary risks (http://drthomreece.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/ten-commandments-for-church-failure-1-thou-shalt-not-take-risks/). Success intoxicates leaders into a belief that success will continue and is dependent on doing things the way [...]