People are leaving the Catholic Church in droves. It’s an exodus that’s beginning to look like a stampede. You already know this from your circle of family and friends, I do from mine. But more than our antidotal experience a simple staggering fact tells the story. Currently one in three Catholics have walked away from […]
Category: Stewardship
We wrapped up our second message series of the season today. It is always a little sad to come to the end of a series, and close the chapter. We called this series ‘Counterfeit gods” because we’ve been arguing that pagan worship is alive and well in our culture. Over the course of the series […]
Every year on the weekend before Thanksgiving we celebrate what we call “Stewardship Weekend.” It’s the one weekend of the year when we talk about giving here to this local church community. We talk about money all the time, because Jesus did. But we only talk about giving to Nativity once a year. We don’t […]
We are in the 4th week of our series all about priorities. Priorities always come down to time and money. How we use our time and how we use our money tell the story about what our priorities are. The past three weeks we’ve been talking about time, and giving some of our time to […]
Some days are just more interesting than others. Yesterday was one of those days for me. Our Missions Director, Brian Crook, and the co-Chair of our Strategic Planning Team, Jim Hayden, spent the day touring Catholic Charities programs and services in and around Baltimore. Our guide was Nativity Parishioner Bill McCarthy, who is the […]
Some more thoughts on our congregation and the positive signs of health and strength and maturity that I am witnessing. Here are five more: #6 Service This spring more people than ever stepped forward to get involved in “First Serve” (our program for people who want to get into a ministry). We have a strong […]
Communication | Discipleship | Evangelization | Leadership | Making Church Matter | Stewardship | Team Building
I was thinking today about how healthy and mature our congregation is becoming. I know, I know, that sounds self-congratulatory and prideful. But I think on Father’s Day its OK to be a little proud of the family. No kidding, this is the most mature and healthy Church community I have ever been part of […]
Here’s the rest of my list: Mistake #6: Trying to Fix Problems…rather than Process. Unfortunately, there have been too many times when I have found myself reacting to a problem rather than addressing the process that led to the situation in the first place. It takes a lot of discipline to rise above the […]
One more post inspired by Tony Morgan’s book (see below). Morgan lists the top 10 leadership mistakes he’s made over the years. I resonated with most, but not all of his list. I also easily thought of a few that didn’t make his list that rank high on mine. The order of my list is […]
Most all of us want to be generous. Even if you don’t want it, you want to want it. You want to be a generous person. That word, “generous” means to act with nobility. We’d all like that, we’d all like to act with nobility. And that’s what God would like from us too. […]
