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.
Let us pray that God sends Barnabases to our churches! Let us pray that He will make some of us “sons of encouragement”! The need couldn’t be greater today!
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.
Conflict is to be expected; get in there and work on it. Possibly the best gift for your congregation is conflict training. The longer you wait, or the more you let fear paralyze you, the worse it gets.
With this article, we offer our perspectives, regrets, and takeaways of our conflict, so that others may learn to behave with more skill and wisdom. In this first part, we’ll talk about how we got to that point of conflict, and the actions we took to try to resolve things.
In the Old Testament, priests were called by God, had access to God, and were separated out because of God’s calling. Just like them, we are also called by God. We have access to God, and God has separated us out and marked us for His service.
Somewhere along the way, some churches have confused being close to power with being close to God.
We expect all of our members to be doing these three things: pray, invite, ask. The only problem with this is that we found it to be a catchy phrase, but we needed more depth and understanding. Pray what? Invite to what? Ask what?
God is the Help of the helpless. God is also the Hope of the hopeless. Oh, that we might all lose hope and embrace hopeless despair in order to discover our true Hope.
The effectiveness of leadership can be measured by the willingness to delegate responsibilities to qualified men and women. Men and women “attested to by the community,” filled with the Holy Spirit and wisdom, are the ones who should be leading the programs of the congregations.
How often in ministry do we try to give people what we think they need? Whether that is in a pastoral counseling session or in upcoming class offerings or even from the pulpit, many times we think we know the answer to people’s situations without hearing where they are coming from.
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.
What is true? What is pure? What is praiseworthy? These are the things we are to focus on. We must also practice the things we have learned in Jesus.
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!
As I waited for God to speak, I became increasingly disillusioned by His silence. As someone in vocational ministry, I felt inferior to those who heard from God often. I feared the silence because I thought I wasn’t disciplined or important enough to hear Him.
Only God could plant a church like this. And if He could do it then, He can certainly do it now. Listen to God. Talk about Jesus to everyone. Baptize all of them. Plant a church full of people that have only one thing in common: Jesus.
Love is wonderful. But what romance romance culture dresses up as love can be deceiving. As we hold on to the beauty of love, I want to encourage focusing on the posture in how you pursue love.
In their podcast No Really, I’m Fine, board-certified chaplains Aaron Metcalf and Mike Larson talk with healthcare workers in their Portland hospital about the stresses they face and how they cope emotionally with the daily demands of their jobs. The stories told in the episodes are authentic, heart-warming, and sometimes heart-wrenching accounts of real life in the trenches.
“RTS Bereavement Training: Perinatal Death” is a 10-hour online training program that focuses on caring for families experiencing early pregnancy loss, ectopic pregnancy, life-limiting diagnosis, stillbirth and newborn death. Topics include foundational relationship-based concepts and theories, grief and bereavement, communication skills, meaning-making projects, perinatal mental health, self-care and more.
When God connects saints and sinners, it is often the saint he is moving. Philip. Ananias. Peter. Sometimes he connects the seeker. The Ethiopian. Saul. Cornelius. Sometimes the person who at least on the surface has no God-interest.
