Effective church leaders are excellent volunteer managers. Managing volunteer teams within your church is a nuanced and mysterious journey. It's not always obvious what it takes to lead them well! Here are 5 truths that I've uncovered, which weren't obvious to me when I started leading in church: Volunteers are...

Chances are your church is looking for more leaders to serve within various ministries. Whether your kids ministry needs some more coaches to motivate the teams ... or your small group ministry is needs some great new leaders ... or maybe even your weekend services needs some support to ensure...

The late (and great) Howard Hendricks once asked his seminary class "How much ministry does $100 buy?" He paused and his class considered the question.  He went on to answer "About $100 worth!" As church leaders we need to be thinking about the funding of the mission that God has...

Today we have a guest post from Andy Tilly. Andy is the Pastor of Family Ministries at Crosstimber Church in Dallas.  He's an innovative leader in one of most dynamic ministries in the country. He's a speaker, author, consultant, film maker and pretty nice guy! I'm thankful that Andy was...

I started my ministry career as a youth pastor. It was a long time ago ... like so long that people were watching Seinfeld and kids were listening to Foo Fighters. Now as a parent of a middle schooler I think back on those days with a certain amount of nostalgia and longing. Today's...

If the core message of the church is "good news" ... then we should be a pretty fun bunch right? We have a message that literally sets people free to live the life God desires ... so people should feel freedom when they experience our environments! A relationship with Jesus...

Why does Jimmy Fallon sit behind a desk? Do we really believe that is his office and all these people are coming to see him? Why does he have that coffee cup and pens on the desk? Is he really drinking coffee and writing memos to his staff? For that matter...

Almost a year ago we started talking about doing a "40 Day Bible Challenge" as a leadership team. The big idea was to ask our people to read through the entire New Testament in the two months leading up to Easter 2013. Our goal was to have 3,000 people who...

By the time a church has packaged its learning into a conference or a "how to" book, their innovative years of ministry are behind them. Over the years I've become more and more partial to spending a weekend visiting lesser-known churches. I've found these weekends far more valuable for learning than...

This week I've had the privilege of traveling to Nicaragua with Living Water International (LWI).  We've partnered with them in variety of clean water projects.  We were in Nicaragua seeing some project areas that we might end up serving in the coming  years. I was humbled again to interact with some of the...