We’re already moving into the third week of Advent, and I’d like to take a quick opportunity to reflect on some pretty amazing passage about John the Baptist taken from our Advent readings. They say: A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every […]
Category: Leadership
The Church is a living thing. It’s a body, not a building. When we talk about a healthy church, it’s important we make that distinction because often our plan for growing healthy churches is aimed more at the latter than the former. And they are very different in practice. Think of some healthy churches and […]
The tug of day-to-day church culture will always be away from Evangelization and Discipleship and toward simple maintenance. Why? Because it’s easier and church people will always try and drive the culture that direction. In maintenance mode parishioners don’t do any of the work and get all the attention, so why wouldn’t they lean that […]
In our travels we meet lots and lots of parish leaders. We have talked to pastors, parish life directors, faith formation directors, youth ministers, parish administrators. They have come from every kind of parish in every kind of demographic. And because of the types of events we typically speak at, most all of the parishes […]
This week we finished up our participation in Parish Catalyst, a four-part gathering of parishes all about parish excellence. Conceived and conducted by our good friends Bill Simon and Claire Henning, this first class of 12 parishes (they called us a cohort) was all about gathering dynamic parishes from various parts of North America, and […]
The Bible is full of the stories of some of the greatest saints and sinners in history. But based on this assessment, we often assume that these characters are either too good or too bad to teach us any really concrete life lessons. This summer, our parish has been surveying “imperfect” characters from the Bible […]
This is typically the time of year when churches experience staff transitions and changes. Here at Nativity we’re not expecting very many changes at all this year, but still I was thinking about it in view of some of our past experiences. Hiring new staff members is one of the most important things I will […]
Growth is a sign of life. Of course, weeds also grow, so it’s important that your church cultivates healthy growth. Whether your congregation is large or small, affluent or financially challenged, old or new, we all want our churches to be places where the Gospel can grow. As one writer puts it, the vision is […]
Culture is the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, ethics, custom, and probably many other elements in which we live and breath and have our being. Every organization has a culture, intentional or otherwise, and that means your church has a culture too. These days successful business leaders are very intentional about their culture. We […]
A big factor in our growth at Nativity was getting over our unwillingness to learn and borrow methods from growing, often non-Catholic, churches. But in the process we also had to learn what to look for. We realized that adopting successful methods from other churches required first paying attention to their ministry’s purpose-driven strategy, not […]
