An Academic Pursuit of Religious Knowledge Can Cause Much Harm When I wrote about the dangers of pursuing a right theology, I noted that God doesn’t want us to know about him. He wants us to know him on a personal level. In our pursuit of knowledge, we seek to categorize our understanding of God. […]
A Church and Its Congregation Shouldn’t Let a Corporate Mentality Infiltrate It’s Thinking In “Why Business Practices Hurt the Church” we discussed how business thinking has improperly affected the big-picture perspectives of church. Yet the business mindset goes deeper than that, negatively influencing church practices and attendee attitudes. Spiritual Outcomes Are Not Quantifiable The business […]
Study Scripture and Then Use Other Resources as Needed My book Jesus’s Broken Church was about a decade in the making, perhaps longer—maybe even a lifetime. When I sensed something wasn’t right with how today’s church functioned, I begin praying and searching for answers. Over time, piece by piece, God’s Holy Spirit revealed the answers […]
Why We Shouldn’t Join a Church A few decades ago American Express unveiled the tagline: “Membership has its privileges.” Their ads implied that great benefits awaited those who qualified to carry one of their exclusive cards. To start, there was a high annual fee and, as I understand, minimal annual levels of usage for their […]
The Church of Jesus Needs to Focus on Three Things and Master Them All In our normal usage, church is a building, a place we go to—often on Sunday mornings. I’ll be there later today. Other definitions for church include a religious service, organized religion, and professional clergy. Yet a more correct understanding is that […]
The Things Religious Leaders Focus on May Not Matter to God at All Modern church priorities look at attendance, offerings, and facility size. Perhaps this is because the world measures success by the number of people, amount of money, and size of buildings. We’re more like the world than we care to admit. More people […]
Many Churches Try to Operate Like a Business Even Though That Model Doesn’t Apply In our culture we’re familiar with the structure of businesses. We either work for a business or we run one. It’s a natural extension to apply these business practices to the church. But we shouldn’t, because a church isn’t a business. […]
Follow Jesus’s Example to Live in Community and Be Missional I often talk about the importance of being in a spiritual community. Though this community can happen anywhere, when it comes to church, forming meaningful spiritual connections is more important than the music or message of the Sunday service. Another critical element of our faith […]
Make Sure That What You Do Advances the Kingdom of God Many people talk about being a missional church (and a missional follower of Jesus). This is an ideal goal, yet people have different understandings about what it means to be missional. Before giving a holistic definition of this often-misunderstood word, let’s first look what […]
Discover What to Do on the Sabbath Most Christians have a practice of going to church on Sunday. Some people even go twice. Why do we do that? Why do we go to church every Sunday? The quick answer that most people would give is that’s what the Bible says to go. But I don’t […]