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Mid-Life Planting: Staying Faithful When the Honeymoon Is Over
Dan Steel
Over the last decade, I’ve wrestled a few times with what it means to serve faithfully in our midlife. I turn fifty (fifty!?) next year, and I’ve been in paid ministry for over twenty years—long enough to have watched people...
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7 Organizational Leadership Questions for Church Planters
Jon Kelly
As a church grows numerically, more organizational leadership skills are required. Most church planters think like missionaries and love the flock as faithful pastors. But beyond preaching and shepherding, there is a need for the planter to think more broadly, strategically, and organizationally. In the early...
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The Gospel vs. Legalism in Men’s Ministry
Barnabas Piper
Every good pastor and church planter wants to see men grow–grow in their faith, grow in character, grow in discipline, grow in maturity. We want to see them grow as husbands, or in readiness to be husbands. We want to...
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How to Design a Sunday Morning Service
Mason Ballard
When we started planting our church, I intuitively knew what the worship service would look like. We’ll sing, we’ll preach, and we’ll pray. What else would we do? We just had to figure out how many songs, what type of songs, when to do an offering, and how to transition from one thing to...
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Planter, Get Low Before the Lord
Noah Oldham
There are several things in life that have a way of exposing what is really in you. Church planting might be at the top of that list. Even if you’re really good at masking the truth, striking out on the path to plant a...
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When Culture Trumps Strategy
Dan Steel
I can think of too many people—good, sincere, kind, sacrificial core team members—who didn’t just leave a church plant, but eventually seemed to walk away from the faith altogether. Not because they stopped believing the gospel intellectually, but because of...
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Your Church Should Be Stronger Than You
Will Basham
One of the most common questions I get asked at the church I lead in Appalachia is, “Why do you have so many pastors?” I usually jovially answer, “Because of my incompetence.” (The benefit of elder plurality is another article for another day.) That...
