If you pray for the lost, God will answer. He will send you people, and you will share Jesus. God will give the increase, more than you can ask or imagine.
All in Church
The Unhurried Work of Love
This book surfaces pastoral practices and echoes of the Fruit of the Spirit that can shape both our personal relationships and our ministerial lives.
Lazy Conclusions about Decline Aren’t Helpful
Lazy conclusions about the causes of church decline aren’t helpful. A more thoughtful approach would be to go back to the basic idea of building a healthy church and then constantly renewing it.
Wait, What?? Modern Lessons from a Biblical Communication Breakdown
Both groups are being faithful to the Lord; they just can’t get along with each other. We must learn how to handle the conflicts that happen with each other so we can fight the real enemy together.
Becoming an Intergenerational Learner
Developing an intergenerational spirit of learning is a skill we develop throughout our lives. This means beginning to see the gifts that every age group—older and younger—has to offer to my life and the life of my church.
The Important Role of Small Churches in Ministry Preparation
We frequently view these smaller churches as merely being recipients of help. Instead, they are partners that often serve as incubators for future ministers and lay ministers of all-sized churches.
The Every Sunday Ask
The Holy Spirit will connect us to non-believers. May God bless us as we seek to draw them, invite them, call them into a relationship with Jesus.
A Call for Greater Consideration of Small and Rural Churches
When a small church closes, a community loses both its anchor and the energy generated when it responds to local needs.
Mending Generational Divides: The Practice of Listening for Unity
We all have the capacity to make relational choices that can help mend age segregation in our churches. Specifically, I want to offer one practice for followers of Jesus that can help all of us swim upstream towards greater unity in the generational body of Christ: the practice of listening for unity.
Minister and Elder Relationships
I want to share some encouragement and guidance for how I am trying to maintain and develop healthy relationships with my current shepherds. I am by no means the expert on this dynamic, but I will share what little I have learned in over a decade of congregational ministry, serving in various roles for those churches.
Faithful Conversations in Difficult Spaces
The posture reflected in Acts 15 is the same posture that I encourage my ministry students to practice in our classroom. It is the one that I pray they will eventually bring into the churches they serve. And I wonder if this is the posture that we are currently longing for many of our own churches to pursue.
When Power Replaces Pastors: Matthew 4:8-10
Somewhere along the way, some churches have confused being close to power with being close to God.
Launching the 2026 Ministers' Salary Survey
For over twenty years, the Siburt Institute Ministers’ Salary Survey has sought to help ministers and churches as they navigate the tricky waters of minister compensation. Before launching the 2026 version of the survey, our associate director, Dr. David Kneip, sat down (virtually) with our research director, Dr. Suzie Macaluso, to talk about the survey specifically and congregational research in general.
Are You Worried About the Future?
We know that church leaders need vision to see God’s work, clear eyes to see our ministry contexts, and hope for God’s redeeming work in the world. We know that the future is uncertain, but we also know that God is at work, that the world is not just our enemy, and that we have good grounds for hope!
Spirit of the Living God
The real reason we typically don’t acknowledge the Spirit’s presence in our congregations and in our lives is that if we really took that “potter and clay” stuff seriously, we would have to let go of our control. Our fear of letting go is often stronger than our desire for the presence of God’s Spirit in our lives.
The Spiritual Discipline of Asking Questions
Jesus was quick to keep questions on the forefront of the disciples’ minds. He allowed questions to create space for people to discover, collaborate, discern and commit themselves more to His Spirit and Truth so that they could know more about themselves and about God.
Becoming a Future-Ready Church
By empowering and encouraging rising generations of leaders, you have the opportunity to faithfully steward the responsibility of those whom God has entrusted to your care.
The Twelve Minor Prophets for Today’s Church (Part 5): Imagining the Future
The Twelve Minor Prophets remind us that today’s hot trends sometimes become tomorrow’s embarrassing discards, while seemingly obscure or insignificant things can assume great importance in the future.
The Twelve Minor Prophets for Today’s Church (Part 4): Narrating the Past
The main lesson of the past is not to overvalue the past. Distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, mercy and cruelty, hope and despair. Without that ability to see clearly the stakes and the stakeholders of the moment, we all perish. With it, we live.
The Twelve Minor Prophets and Today’s Church (Part 3): The Prophets as Models
Zechariah is probably not commenting on the literal immortality of one group of people or extinction of others. He means instead that the prophetic word and therefore the witness of the prophets’ lives continues to exert a powerful influence. They spoke in ways that others must reckon with.