I believe that a passion to help people experience the Holy, however it is defined, is at the root of every form of worship. Every liturgy developed by every movement at one point was designed to help people experience the…
Read MoreVirtual Community
My pastoral care professor in seminary instructed us to meet each member in his or her home during our first year at a new church. It was sound advice at the time. But there has been a change, a deep…
Read MoreAsk Alban: The Personnel Committee
Q: What is the purpose of a personnel committee, and what is it supposed to do? A: The personnel committee has the potential to be one of the most helpful or most dysfunctional committees at work in the life of…
Read MoreThe Leading Edge: A Dynamic History
In 2007, Emory University Professor E. Brooks Holifield made a pioneering attempt to shape the complex, contradictory, and largely unknown experience of America’s ministers, priests, and pastors into a single narrative. His God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy…
Read MoreDying as the Way to Life
Jesus spoke challenging words to those who would follow him. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34-35). The cross had only one purpose in the ancient…
Read MoreNurturing the Tree of Life
When I was starting out as a twenty-seven-year-old pastor, all I could think of was how much our congregation needed to grow, change, revitalize, and transform. Then I attended a small-church seminar, thinking that this would teach me how to…
Read MoreExpeditions into What is Possible
Where Moses stood, “the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed” (Ex. 3:2). In that holy encounter, he was being summoned into an experience of leadership that he would rather not pursue. After all, he was tending his father-in-law’s…
Read MoreThe Encouraging Leader
The ministry of encouragement is the primary way a pastor and lay leaders help a congregation discover and fulfill its call from Christ to make disciples. One of the advantages of evaluating ministry through the lens of encouragement is that…
Read MoreIcing on the Cake
On a beautiful fall Sunday against the backdrop of the Front Range of the Rockies, I was standing on our church grounds with a cup of coffee in my hand. Worship had ended and people were gathered in our grassy…
Read MoreYour Building Speaks
All buildings speak, and they speak in many ways. Sometimes they use written words. Drive through the Midwest and you see barns proclaiming, “See Rock City,” urging travelers to visit a massive natural rock formation atop Lookout Mountain in Tennessee….
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