Words of Wisdom from Pastors with Tenure (Part 1)
A 2011 Lifeway Research poll found that the average tenure for pastors in a local church is 3.6 years. Some have suggested that the number may be higher. Nevertheless, pastors who stay at a given church for ten, twenty, thirty, or more years are a rare occurrence. Yet the pastors that we tend to admire the most are those who have stayed at and labored in a single local church for an extended period of time. Furthermore, some...
When Ministry and Seminary Collide
I never intended to pursue a Master of Divinity degree. It was an avenue that was made available to me by the grace of God, which I began pursuing in January of 2015. One course in particular that transformed my thinking was the Ethics of Wealth and Poverty with Dr. David Jones in the fall of 2015. In this class, I realized the necessity of bridging classroom studies with my personal life and public ministry. It was sobering to think...
Top Books of 2016
Preparing to enter into the new year includes taking stock of the preceding months—what went well, what did not. The same goes for our reading selections. When we looked back over the previous year’s publications, we found a few that were especially good and wanted to pass them along to you. A couple of our recommendations actually came out during the latter half of 2015, but we thought they were worthy of mentioning here. In...
The Vine Project: A Review
Does church make you tired? By this I don’t mean do the sermons make you sleepy. But are the programs, events, and demands too many, and the laborers too few? From my experience, many pastors, deacons, and laymen feel this way. They’re overworked, underequipped, and a bit distressed by the seeming lack of success that their church is experiencing. The problem may be that twenty percent of the members are doing eighty percent of the...
Are You Ministering to Humans?
In the 1982 blockbuster Blade Runner, (or its literary precursor Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is assigned to track down bio-engineered replicates and “retire” them—that is, kill them. Of course, the duplicates and humans look and sound exactly the same. The only way to distinguish between a human person and a facsimile is to use a test, the Voight-Kampff, which focuses on their...
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