A Church and Its Congregation Shouldn’t Let a Corporate Mentality Infiltrate It’s Thinking In “Why Business Practices Hurt the Church” we discussed how business thinking has improperly affected the big-picture perspectives of church. Yet the business mindset goes deeper than that, negatively influencing church practices and attendee attitudes. Spiritual Outcomes Are Not Quantifiable The business […]
Why We Shouldn’t Join a Church A few decades ago American Express unveiled the tagline: “Membership has its privileges.” Their ads implied that great benefits awaited those who qualified to carry one of their exclusive cards. To start, there was a high annual fee and, as I understand, minimal annual levels of usage for their […]
The Church of Jesus Needs to Focus on Three Things and Master Them All In our normal usage, church is a building, a place we go to—often on Sunday mornings. I’ll be there later today. Other definitions for church include a religious service, organized religion, and professional clergy. Yet a more correct understanding is that […]
The Things Religious Leaders Focus on May Not Matter to God at All Modern church priorities look at attendance, offerings, and facility size. Perhaps this is because the world measures success by the number of people, amount of money, and size of buildings. We’re more like the world than we care to admit. More people […]
Discover What to Do on the Sabbath Most Christians have a practice of going to church on Sunday. Some people even go twice. Why do we do that? Why do we go to church every Sunday? The quick answer that most people would give is that’s what the Bible says to go. But I don’t […]
Heed the Call to Rebel Against Status Quo Christianity All my life I’ve attended church, and throughout that time I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. Although participating in a faith community, I never truly felt part of it. For the first years of my life this was because those on […]
The Bible Tells Us to Not Give Up Meeting Together, but We Often Miss the Point As we persevere in our faith, one aspect of this is to not give up meeting together (Hebrews 10:25). Many people interpret this verse as a command to attend church. It isn’t. Not really. While meeting together could include […]
Gabe Hartfield Interviews Author Peter DeHaan about His Book Visiting Online Church Check out this video of author Peter DeHaan being interviewed by Gabe Hartfield. They cover what his research revealed about virtual church and discuss Peter’s new book Visiting Online Church, which is book 5 in his popular 52 Churches series. The interview was […]
Discussing Church 24 This church resulted when three dying congregations merged a quarter century ago, but with a worship team of teens brought in, today isn’t a normal gathering. I suspect it’s a more atypical church service. Consider these four discussion questions about Church #24: 1. Most of the congregation are senior citizens, with few […]
What Scripture Teaches About Meeting Together Is Far Different Than Our Sunday Services We talked about three options for a house church gathering: duplicate a typical service, participate online, or just hang out. Each of these three approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. However, in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives us some ideas […]