Try This Counter-Cultural Approach When It’s Time to Select a New Church There’s an astute saying, “If you find the perfect church, don’t join it—because then it will no longer be perfect.” The reality is that as long as a church has members, it will never be perfect. That’s because we’re imperfect, so the churches […]
The Best Christian Community Happens After the Service Is Over Last week I asked, Why do people show up for church late? My wife and I try to arrive ten minutes early, a practice we developed when we visited fifty-two churches in a year. This allows for time to interact with others, to enjoy a […]
The Timing of When People Arrive at Church Reflects Their Priorities When my wife and I went on our grand adventure of visiting fifty-two churches in a year, we decided we’d try to arrive at church ten minutes early. In doing so we would avoid breezing in at the last-minute, and we would have time […]
Changing Churches Should Be Rare In our Facebook group we discussed the post “When Not to Change Churches.” Justin asked a pertinent question: “When should you change churches?” I knew part of the answer, but I needed to contemplate how far to take my response. Part of my hesitation stemmed from the reality that sometimes […]
When We Go Church Shopping We Behave as Consumers and Don’t Honor God In today’s practice of retail religion, we pursue faith has a consumer and miss the purpose of church. We’re quick to change churches over the smallest of issues. Yet, usually the best action to take is no action: Don’t change churches. Often […]
Don’t Go to Church with a Passive Perspective: Be Engaged on Sunday Morning As a teenager, I often complained to my parents, “but I don’t get anything out of church.” Though they tried to reason with me, and they may have secretly agreed, their attempts to change my perspective didn’t help. What I wish I […]
We Need to Order Our Priorities With Intention and Do What Matters Most Whether we realize it or not, we form priorities to order our lives. For most of my adult existence my number one priority has been God. Though I held this out as my ideal, sometimes, perhaps too often, my actions didn’t live […]
Church Attendance May Relate to Faith or the Two May Have No Connection On a broader scope, I keep hearing reports that Millennials (or some other demographic) have turned from God and left their faith. What is the reason for this conclusion? It’s simple. They’ve dropped out and no longer go to church. Ergo they […]
Discover the Purpose of Church In my post “What is Church,” I suggested we are the church. Church isn’t a place we go—not really. It’s who we are. As the church we should be about worship, community, and helping others. There’s a lot I didn’t mention. That was intentional. Contrary to the actions and attitudes […]
If Church Doesn’t Provide Meaningful Connection, Then You Need to Fix It or Find a Different Church Despite being the most connected generation, Millennials are also reportedly the loneliest. It seems their massive number of online friends and followers offer them only superficial relationships that lack meaningful interaction. They crave connections with others that touches […]