Every Sunday at 7:30 am I join a small group for prayer before the day’s activities begin. It’s such a great way to start a Sunday morning. There is something special about praying together. I love praying on my own, but I have found that in the presence of others, God often blesses me with focus that I lack on my own, with a sense of his presence that I sometimes miss on my own.

In the world of non-denominationalism, the tendency is to scrape theology down to its bare minimum and make room in our local churches for as many in the family of Christ as possible despite our theological differences. The spirit behind this reductionism is admirable: to not create unnecessary division. Why can’t we join together as a church in unity despite our minor disagreements?

New Life is swimming against that current. In a day and age many church’s doctrinal statements could be printed on written out on a napkin; we have a 37-page doctrinal statement.

What is your “date-on-the-whiteboard” as a leader? How can you make sure that you are demonstrating to your clients that you are attending to them, details and all? Don’t forget to change the whiteboard, fellow leaders.

Whatever power I’ve been given, I pray that I humbly steward it, recognizing it’s more than I deserve and more than I can handle on my own. God is gracious when he gives us an xB’s worth of power and gracious when he gives us Ferrari’s worth of power. And whatever he offers us, may it make us trust him and his transforming power within us.

There once was a church. It had everything going for it. Three weekend services with growing numbers. Meaningful ministry in the community. Evidence of people growing more mature in their faith. Programs and classes for all stages and phases of people’s lives. Robust youth, kid’s and college-aged programs. One could easily say that “God’s hand was on this church”.
There was just one problem.

Every year in the past I have read between 20 and 25 books. At the beginning of 2023, however, I made the lofty goal of reading 50 books for the year. And, I did it!

What’s THE most important trait of a leader? Can we even find one key trait that all great leaders must possess?

In this brief series I have shared how significant the process of creating our staff culture document was for our staff. The document represents who we are when we are at our best. In that sense, it is a hope, it is a prayer we have lifted up to God. “Lord, by your grace, shape us to be this kind of team,” we have offered up to God.

…the process we went through a year ago to create a staff culture document and then to begin to invest time and energy toward making strides toward our staff culture document.
The process of choosing those values was messy, but the mess was important. Ultimately the process took just less than three months. I share our process not because I think we navigated the process perfectly or that we’ve arrived or that I would recommend the same exact process for another organization, but because there were important points of learning along the way for us that I hope can benefit you.