In the wake of increasingly ominous data about fledgling church attendance, most church members and ministers (myself included) want to see the church grow instead of decline. There are church growth handbooks, church growth conferences, and even church growth consultants….
Attendance bullying: it contributes to church decline, author says
Michelle Van Loon has seen several sides of Christianity as a child of the Jesus movement who ended up, for a time, in a fundamentalist church. So she can spot the difference between concern and control in a congregation. She…
Churchless believers?
Emerging Paths for Fresh Ministries The religious and church landscape is definitely shifting today! We have the traditional members and churches, the missional communities of faith, the multi-site congregations, workplace ministries and a growing host of faith-based non-profits and para-church…
What’s in a name? Religious nones and the American religious landscape
Over the last several years the term religious “Nones” has become a major topic of discussion and analysis by those who pay attention to religious trends.
Brave church
Brave churches are particularly faithful churches, if you ask me. They make bold choices. They favor holiness over appearances. Their modus operandi is counterintuitive. How brave is your congregation? Your church staff currently consists of two Associate Pastors who are…
Is your church enlarging its bandwidth?
It was a simple question from a CHC colleague: “Larry, do you have enough bandwidth to help me with a church staff analysis?” Initially, I had no idea what he was asking. “Bandwidth?” I had to catch up with the…
Tapping the Millennial Imagination: On FAO Schwarz, Don Quixote, and the Dying Church
Millennials are more optimistic than they have any right to be. Does this signal hope for the dying church? Millennials are the “in” generation. Love us or hate us, every day stories scroll across my newsfeed filled with statistics and…
In organized Christianity, some people are gone and others are done
Do we need another category to describe people who are either no longer related to organized Christianity or never were? Probably.
Let’s bring back blue laws to increase church attendance?
Should we bring back Blue Laws to increase our Sunday worship attendance? No, but the thought of it does raise some interesting questions. What were Blue Laws? Actually there are still some around so “was” is not in every place…