Faith communities are no stranger to difficult times. They know how to help people through death, despair, lack of food and other material resources, and many other dire straits. But usually there are only a few people in a church…
Read MoreShine Your Light: How to Build Buzz and Reach Your Community
It was a lovely winter Sunday, and I was sitting with four friends in the pews of a Unitarian church in the small town of Littleton, Massachusetts. Nothing terribly unusual—except that none of us were Unitarians and we had never…
Read MoreRick Danielson: “Beating the Odds: Successfully Following a Long-Term Pastor”
On a cold, winter Sunday morning, I entered my church study following worship and was startled to hear the door slam shut behind me. The woman facing me as I turned was an influential church leader. Her face burned as…
Read MoreWebsites That Work
Churches need websites if they want to be welcoming to potential visitors, says Lynne Baab, a lecturer in pastoral theology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and author of Reaching Out in a Networked World: Expressing Your…
Read MoreThe Leading Edge: Building Congregations in an Anti-Institutional Age
One of the classic ways that Christian and Jewish denominations in America have sought to expand is by starting new congregations. This is a sizable enterprise, estimated by some experts to involve as many as four thousand start-ups every year….
Read MoreCENTERview: Social Networking and Congregations
A recent YouTube video titled “Social Networking in Plain English” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc) claims networks are only as valuable as the people and connections one can see. If I think about real “friends” and connections in my life this makes perfect sense….
Read MoreTen Lessons about Being a Learner-Centered Teacher
I still remember what a shock it was to discover just as I was finishing my graduate training to be a theology professor, that I was about to have to start to learn to be a teacher. Suddenly I was…
Read MoreIn Support of the Incarnational Pastoral Search
I recently finished a pastoral search process that has left me with questions about how we, as the church, go about communicating with one another in this age of technology. Last spring I agreed to be considered as a candidate…
Read MoreOne Hour on Sunday Is Not Enough: The Power of the Internet to Inform, Form, and Transform People of Faith
During the more than twenty-five years that I served as either a director of family, youth, and young adult ministries or as an adult youth minister, I had a birds-eye view of the cultural shifts influencing parishes and congregations. Since…
Read MoreA Year of Conversation: How One Church Tackled the Same-Sex Marriage Question
At the board meeting where Gower Street United Church recently voted on the issue of same-gender marriages, members of the board made a clear recommendation: let’s share what we have learned with the wider church. There was a general belief…
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