As we gathered together with Parish staff and leadership last week we spent some time looking at things we’ve learned from others, especially the very best practices of some of the most successful Churches in America. As an exercise, and for purposes of our current discussion, we identified 7…obviously there are many more, but 7 […]
Category: Making Church Matter
Saturday our Parish Staff gathered together at Loyola College with about 40 leaders from our Church: members of the Parish Council, Financial Council, Cooperators and some of our ministry leaders. The group was truly outstanding in terms of talent and commitment. We meet to begin looking ahead. Why now? Well, this month we are finishing […]
I have a friend who is Pastor of a big Church. He says it “sleeps” 700. This is a sadly common description of many Catholic congregations: asleep. I know that description fit this Church was not so long ago. Churches that need waking up have prevailing cultures of detachment and shallow commitment which almost always […]
In this weekend’s message we reflected on John 6 where Jesus lays out some pretty heavy teaching and then watches as many of the people following him grumble and complain and eventually leave. They quit being his disciples. Guess what? It hurt, it felt bad, Jesus hurt and felt bad. Just like we do when […]
From Michael Memorial Day is the traditional start to the summer season. It usually represents the slowest season for many retail operations, including churches. Summertime usually means empty pews, weak collections, loss of energy, loss of focus…stuff like that. Nothing could be further from the truth here. I am really looking forward to this summer […]
From Tom This past week we had a strategic planning meeting. We have a great team of people who are helping us look to the future of the Church. At the meeting, one of the members of the team was talking about Pepsi and their strategic planning. He said their simple mission statement is this, […]
From Michael We had a really great weekend to close out the current message series as well as the season of Lent. Last week we topped 4100 in attendance but this weekend it was over 4200. Incredible. This was also our annual “First Serve” weekend where we challenged every member to become a minister. At […]
From Michael I am currently reading a book called “The Emotionally Healthy Church.” In the many ways that I have studied and even talked about Church, I had never seen this designation before. Big/small, old/new, vibrant/boring, traditional/contemporary, rich/ poor, well maintained/falling apart, Catholic/Protestant…are all designations that are usually made of Churches; but how about emotionally […]
From Michael Fear is something we have been talking about this Lent. The Bible says “fear no evil.” And yet we live in fear all the time. And we work in fear. Fear is a danger I face, especially in leading this Church. I know I am operating in fear when I don’t do the […]
From Tom I read a few articles over the last few days about the numbers of professed Christians shrinking in our country, down from 86 percent to 75 percent. The temptation for religious people and professionals is to begin blaming the people, that they just aren’t committed to God anymore. Or we can easily become […]
