ChurchPlanting.com

A Bob Roberts quote really caught my attention lately. He said, “We don’t plant churches in America. We plant worship services.”  Ouch. 1. If your Super Bowl party last night was full of church people and small group holy huddles…you have planted a worship service. **I know we are missional, incarnational, organic, blah, blah, blah. [...]

I love mountain biking. It’s probably my favorite pastime. Early in my mountain biking experience, I was riding at a regional park near my home.  I was surprised to spot a group of cactuses up ahead and was worried about hitting them. I kept looking over at them, gauging the length of their spikes and [...]

When I was a young church planter my team and I spent countless hours trying to deal with the kinds of complicated pastoral situations that inevitably come up – marriages on the rocks, mental illness, interpersonal conflicts and such. It is amazing how much trouble a small group of people can get into. The problem [...]

There are a lot of new buzz words and strategies these days for planting churches. I must admit, I am from a small town and I need things to be simple in order to understand them. Studying through the book of Acts, it seems the first church planted new churches and “turned the world upside [...]

About three years ago I met a middle-aged man who had been working as an art conservator during the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), the Socialist Germany. He had been fired after the reunification of Germany and was since then jobless. He had been through a hard twenty years, most of that time in the [...]

Somebody once told me that if people were talking about me, they were leaving someone else alone.  Somehow that never consoled me.  And if I heard that my husband was being criticized, rightly or wrongly, it drove me crazy. People come to a church plant with differing expectations.  If these expectations are not met, rumblings [...]

In real life, arranged marriages can work well.  In church planting, not so well.  Here’s what I mean. We have neighbors who are from India, and they’re in an arranged marriage which is doing quite well.  The story is interesting.  He was born in America, so he’s a natural US citizen.  When he was getting [...]