Essays on faith, theology, culture, and the Christian life. Discover articles filtered by topic, format, audience, and difficulty level.
182 articles
The statistical picture of the American church in the 2020s is, on most measures, genuinely alarming. Attendance declining. Church closures outpacing ...
The desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries were not thinking about smartphones when they withdrew from the cities of the Roman e...
Jazz is the most interesting musical form for thinking about leadership, because it is organized around a paradox that every good leader knows intimat...
The craft of literary fiction is, at its core, the craft of portraying human character with honesty and specificity — showing what people are actually...
The therapeutic tradition — specifically the research-based understanding of how human beings actually change — has insights that are directly applica...
The divide between the contemplative and the activist has shaped Christian spirituality from its earliest centuries. The tradition has produced extrao...
The hospice chaplain works in the place where the pretensions that organize most professional helping relationships fall away. There is no treatment t...
Anthropology — the study of human cultures and societies — is not a discipline that typically appears in pastoral reading lists. Yet anthropological r...
The great sports coaches — the ones who consistently develop athletes to levels that exceed what natural talent alone would predict — share a set of p...
The military and the church are very different institutions — different missions, different authorities, different contexts. The borrowing of military...
The gap between the academy and the local church is one of the more lamented features of contemporary Christian life, and it is genuinely real. The th...
The question of the right relationship between the church and culture is among the oldest and most debated in Christian social thought, from the early...
The history of the American church is, in significant ways, a history of building programs. The congregation outgrows the current facility, launches a...
Prediction is a notoriously unreliable enterprise, and the record of ecclesiastical futurists is no better than the general average. The church predic...
One of the most significant leadership failures of the contemporary American church is the consistent inability of most congregations to develop pasto...
The call to ministry that arrives at twenty-two is not always the same call that carries a person at forty-two. Not because the call was wrong at twen...
The most important money conversation in pastoral ministry is not the one with the elder board about the budget or the one with the congregation about...
The patterns of exclusion in congregational life are rarely dramatic. They are almost never deliberate. They are the accumulated effect of a hundred s...
The staff member in personal crisis — in the middle of a marital breakdown, dealing with a mental health emergency, struggling with addiction, process...
The scenario has become familiar enough that it is no longer rare: something happens in the church — a leadership decision, a disciplinary action, a s...
The large donor occupies a specific and often unacknowledged position of power in the life of many congregations, and the pastoral leadership challeng...
At some point in almost every pastor's tenure, it happens: a congregant announces they are considering leaving the church. Sometimes directly to the p...
The conflict between the senior pastor and one or more elders or board members is among the most common and most damaging recurring patterns in church...
The incoming pastor who inherits a congregation where the previous leader did genuine harm is in one of the most complex pastoral situations in minist...
The person who spreads division in a congregation is rarely the person who intends to. They often genuinely believe they are advocating for truth, pro...
Something happens at a table that does not happen anywhere else. The specific combination of shared food, physical proximity, unhurried time, and the ...
The rural church, the small-town church, the church in the post-industrial community where the factory closed and the grocery store followed and the s...
The smartphone has changed pastoral care in ways not adequately examined or articulated. On the positive side: the pastor can be reached instantly, co...
The long and complicated relationship between the Christian church and the arts is one of the most interesting stories in Western cultural history. Th...
The church's engagement with poverty is among the most complex dimensions of its community ministry, and the ways it most often goes wrong are by now ...
The intersection of faith and mental health is one of the most consequential and most contested spaces in contemporary ministry. On one side, a growin...
Most churches have a neighborhood. A physical location, streets and houses and businesses that surround the place where the congregation gathers. But ...
Walk into almost any established congregation in America and look at the range of people sitting in the pews. There is the retired teacher who has bee...
Most preachers are afraid of silence. The homiletical training they received was organized around movement — the careful forward progression from text...
The practice is simple, takes approximately fifteen minutes, and has the potential to change the way you preach more than almost any other single adju...
Every pastor carries, in some part of their preparation and prayer life, the sense of a sermon they have not preached. Not because they have not prepa...
Every congregation contains people who are actively grieving. Not grieving in the past tense — not the grief processed and resolved into testimony — b...
The sermon that is exegetically sound, theologically rich, well-illustrated, and compellingly delivered will fail if it arrives at the wrong moment in...
Walk into most evangelical churches on any given Sunday and you will hear a sermon built primarily on illustrations — stories, examples, analogies, cu...
There is a theory of preaching that treats the sermon primarily as delivery of content — biblical content, theological content, applicational content ...
Over the past decade personality typing systems have moved from the margins of pastoral life to something close to the center. The Enneagram has colon...
The beginning of a pastoral tenure receives enormous attention — the calling process, the first sermon, the early months of relationship-building. Boo...
There is a kind of preacher who has read primarily within the canonical texts of their tradition — the theological works, the commentaries, the pastor...
Approximately one third of the psalms are laments. Not thanksgiving psalms, not praise psalms — laments. The most common genre in Israel's prayer book...
Ask a pastor what they fear and they will usually give you a ministry answer: losing the congregation, facing a crisis without sufficient wisdom, fail...
There is an asymmetry built into the pastoral role that shapes the pastor's psychology over time in ways rarely examined: pastors give. They give coun...
The pastor who rests is making a statement. Not a passive statement — a specific and countercultural claim about the nature of reality, the source of ...
John of the Cross wrote about it in the sixteenth century. Mother Teresa, whose private letters revealed decades of spiritual darkness invisible to th...
Most pastors know accountability partners, mentors, coaches, and counselors. Fewer know spiritual directors — and those who do often carry a vague sen...
Most pastors are professional pray-ers. They open meetings in prayer, stand at bedsides praying, lead congregations in corporate prayer week after wee...
The erosion of institutional trust in American life is one of the most significant social trends of the past quarter century, and it has accelerated d...
It happens gradually, and then suddenly. The church that began with a genuine theological identity — a specific understanding of the gospel, a commitm...
The conversation about artificial intelligence and the church has moved remarkably quickly from "this is interesting to consider" to "this is somethin...
The "nones" — people who claim no religious affiliation when surveyed — are the fastest-growing religious demographic in the United States. They now r...
There was a time — not that long ago in historical terms — when the average congregation was not a cross-section of the political spectrum in quite th...
The first time a church sends someone from its own congregation into cross-cultural mission — not just giving money to a distant agency, but releasing...
The American church has developed a sophisticated relationship with comfort. Its buildings are climate controlled. Its services are crafted for maximu...
The word "missionary" has carried, for most of Western church history, a fairly consistent set of images: the Western European or North American belie...
When the church talks about unreached people groups, the conversation almost always faces outward and away — toward the ethnic and linguistic communit...
The short-term mission trip is one of the most common and most debated practices in contemporary evangelical church life. Millions of Americans partic...
Most congregations have heard more missionary presentations than they can count, and the impact of those presentations, on average, is disappointingly...
The statistic is stark enough that it bears repeating slowly: in the United States, churches are closing at three times the rate at which new churches...
I grew up in a church that was racially and culturally homogeneous — not by design, or at least not by conscious design, but by the accumulated effect...
Conversations about racial diversity in predominantly white churches have been happening with increasing frequency for a decade or more, and the quali...
There is a particular kind of pastoral excitement that accompanies the vision for a new ministry initiative. The need is clear, the gifting is present...
The conversation started at a pastors' lunch — three pastors from three different small churches in the same mid-sized city, meeting monthly as part o...
Every pastor makes referrals — to counselors, to other ministries, to specialists in areas outside their competence. The reality of pastoral ministry ...
There is a moment that most pastors who have experienced a genuine city-wide worship gathering can describe with unusual precision. The moment when th...
I want to be honest about how skeptical I was going in. Reformed theology and charismatic practice have been on opposite ends of a particular theologi...
Church splits are among the most painful experiences in ministry, and they are more common than the pastoral culture likes to acknowledge. The mytholo...
There is almost no pastoral challenge more fraught with relational risk in the current moment than the question of how the church should engage with p...
The past decade has been one of the most sobering in the modern history of the American church when it comes to leadership accountability. Scandal aft...
Something has been stirring. The data is becoming too consistent to dismiss as anecdotal: the spiritual curiosity of young adults is rising, church at...
They look like virtues from the outside. The pastor who prepares for Sunday with extraordinary care. The leader who cannot let a decision go until eve...
The narrative about Gen Z and the church has been predominantly pessimistic for the past decade. The most secular generation in American history. The ...
The cost of staff turnover in ministry is enormous and systematically underestimated. There is the obvious cost: the recruiting process, the onboardin...
No pastor goes into ministry hoping to fire people. The whole orientation of the calling is toward welcome, restoration, and the generous extension of...
When pastors think about the dangerous people on a church staff, they usually picture the obvious candidates: the person whose theology has drifted, t...
Most feedback conversations in ministry contexts are ineffective. This is not because pastors and church leaders do not care about the development of ...
Leading a declining church is one of the loneliest experiences in pastoral ministry. The conference speakers talk about growth. The books are about br...
The language of church revitalization has been one of the most discussed topics in pastoral circles for the past decade, and for good reason. The numb...
Thom Rainer has long argued that the metrics most churches track — primarily attendance and giving — are the least useful indicators of genuine church...
The contemporary church conversation is dominated by large churches. The conferences feature their pastors. The podcasts interview their leaders. The ...
The statistic from Tony Morgan and The Unstuck Group has become one of the most-cited in pastoral leadership conversations, and it has become that bec...
Carey Nieuwhof's 2025 church trend research surfaced a statistic that should stop every pastor cold: only one percent of pastors rate their church as ...
Preaching that genuinely forms disciples — that actually changes how people think, pray, love, and engage the world — is one of the hardest things in ...
There is a particular shame that accompanies the recognition that your preaching has gone stale. You are a minister of the Word — your whole vocation ...
Walk into almost any established congregation in America and look at the range of people sitting in the pews. There is the retired teacher who has bee...
Somewhere along the way, the attendance count became the pastoral report card. Not officially, perhaps — most churches do not formally evaluate their ...
The pastoral mind is, by vocation, a mind that carries other people. This is not a design flaw. It is intrinsic to the calling — the capacity to hold ...
I know the exact moment it started. Another church opened about two miles from ours, and within six months they were running twice our attendance. The...
Of all the things that are slowly changing in pastoral culture, the stigma around professional counseling may be the most stubbornly persistent. Despi...
Depression does not care about your theology. It does not make exceptions for people who have been called to preach the hope of the resurrection. It d...
Ask most pastors' kids what they remember most vividly about growing up in a ministry household, and you will hear a range of answers. Some remember t...
Ministry and marriage are both long-term commitments that require sustained, intentional investment to flourish. The problem is that ministry is publi...
This article is not written by a pastor. It is written on behalf of the people who live with them. The pastor's spouse occupies one of the most compl...
He stood at the pulpit last Sunday and preached about the peace of God that surpasses understanding. He made people laugh at the illustration in the s...
Every pastor reaches moments when they wonder if they should quit. This is not a sign of weak faith or insufficient calling. It is a sign of the genui...
There is a particular loneliness to standing on the other side of a ministry burnout. You have left, or been asked to leave, or simply stopped being a...
The word sabbatical carries different weight depending on who is in the room. For many pastors, it sounds like a luxury — something that megachurch le...
Nobody burns out on a Tuesday afternoon and decides they are done. That is not how it works. Burnout in ministry is not a moment — it is a process. A ...
Every pastor who cares about global mission has felt the tension: the Great Commission is clear, the need is staggering, and the budget is... not. The...
The concept sounds straightforward: an American church partners with a national pastor overseas to support their ministry. Funds transfer, prayers are...
For most of modern church history, the flow of missions has moved in one direction: from the West outward. Western churches raised funds, trained pers...
Everyone agrees that pastors need community. The surveys, the books, the conference talks — they all land in the same place: isolation is the enemy, c...
Drive through most American cities and you will find a church on nearly every corner — Baptist, Methodist, non-denominational, Pentecostal, Reformed, ...
His church practices infant baptism. Mine believes in believer's baptism. He uses a formal liturgy on Sunday mornings. I lead worship in a style he wo...
The bivocational pastor has often been treated as a second-tier calling — the person who couldn't quite make it as a "real" pastor, or who ministers i...
Every year, thousands of pastors walk away from ministry. Some leave quietly. Others burn out in public. A few disappear into ordinary jobs and never ...
The numbers can be misleading. A growing church can feel like a successful church. And in one sense, it is — people are gathering, the budget is healt...
Somewhere along the way, many pastors absorbed a theology of yes. Every need is a call. Every request is an opportunity for service. Every demand on y...
At some point in almost every pastor's tenure, a crisis arrives. It might be a moral failure — a staff member's sin exposed, a financial breach, a rel...
Nobody enters pastoral ministry planning to fail. Most new pastors arrive with genuine faith, genuine calling, and a genuine love for the people they ...
Every CEO of a significant company has a board. Not because they are incompetent, but because the decisions they make are too important to make alone....
I don't remember exactly when the shift happened — when ministry stopped being a calling and became a performance. It was gradual, the way most signif...
There is a theology of busyness that has taken root in too many pastorates. It goes something like this: if I am resting, I am failing. If I take a da...
From the outside, everything looks fine. Your church is growing. People are getting saved. The budget is healthy, the building is nearly paid off, and...
The Decision Point Every pastoral network, every peer group, every meaningful community starts with someone making a decision. A decision to reach out...
What PCN Offers PCN is built on four pillars: strengthening pastors and churches, building bridges across denominational divides, partnering for missi...
The Long Game Bivocational ministry is often described as a season — a stage before a congregation grows to the point of supporting a full-time pastor...
The Guilt of the Bivocational Pastor Bivocational pastors often carry a specific form of guilt: the sense that they are never doing enough ministry be...
The Math Is Hard Let's be honest about the math. A full-time job is 40-50 hours per week. A healthy pastoral ministry is another 40-50 hours, at minim...
The Spiritual Life of the Ministry Spouse The ministry spouse is often spiritually undernourished. They hear good preaching — usually from their partn...
Sometimes the Most Faithful Thing Is to Go Not every ministry is meant to last forever. Not every fit is permanent. Not every difficult situation is t...
The Goal The goal of raising children in pastoral ministry is not to produce children who love the church institution, who behave well in services, or...
The Specific Pressures on PKs Ministry children face several specific pressures that their peers do not. First, the expectation pressure: congregation...
Asking the Question Here is the most important practical suggestion in this ebook: ask your spouse what they need from you. Not what the congregation ...
The Congregation's Expectations and Your Spouse Most ministry spouses navigate a peculiar set of expectations: they are expected to be deeply involved...
The Availability Problem The pastor is never fully off. The phone rings on vacations. The text arrives on date nights. The emergency surfaces on the o...
Building a Different Future The goal of burnout recovery is not just to get back to where you were. Where you were was unsustainable — that is how you...
The Discernment Process Genuine discernment about a major ministry decision requires more than a moment of clarity. It requires a process — sustained,...
Not All Hard Is the Same Kind of Hard This is one of the most practically important distinctions in pastoral ministry: not all suffering is the same. ...
Not All Departures Are the Same There is a significant moral and pastoral difference between leaving ministry because you are in crisis and leaving mi...
There Is an Other Side The darkness will not last forever. This is not a platitude. It is a promise and a documented reality. The pastoral leaders who...
The Stigma Problem Pastoral culture has a mental health problem — not just in terms of the rate of mental health struggles among pastors, but in terms...
What the Mystics Knew John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish mystic and theologian, described a specific season of spiritual experience he called...
What Recovery Actually Requires Recovery from full pastoral burnout requires more than a week of vacation. It requires a genuine structural change in ...
Catching It Early The best time to address burnout is before it is full burnout — in the early warning stages, when the depletion is real but not yet ...
Stillness Is a Discipline "Be still and know that I am God" is not an emotion. It is a command. Stillness is something you do — or fail to do. And in ...
The Irreplaceable Value of Pastoral Peers Your spouse loves you. Your congregation appreciates you. Your family is proud of you. But none of them full...
The Anatomy of a Genuine Pastoral Friendship A genuine pastoral friendship is not a ministerial colleague relationship. It is not the network contact ...
Sabbath as Countercultural Resistance In the ancient world, Sabbath was countercultural. Israel's neighbors did not observe it. The rhythm of ceasing ...
Rest Is More Than the Absence of Work Sabbath is not merely not working. It is actively, intentionally doing the things that restore you. The differen...
The Unique Sabbath Problem of Ministry Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room: Sunday is the hardest possible day for a pastor to rest. It is his ...
You Don't Have to Fix Everything at Once Physical health change is most sustainable when it is built incrementally rather than launched dramatically. ...
From Intention to Structure Good intentions do not constitute soul care. Structure does. The pastor who says he will tend his soul someday, when thing...
The Paradox of Ministry and Spiritual Dryness One of the most disorienting experiences in pastoral ministry is serving God professionally while experi...
Sustainability Is Not Slacking The goal of soul care is not to make ministry comfortable. Ministry is hard. It will cost you, stretch you, and occasio...
Knowing What's Actually Happening Inside You One of the gifts of the contemplative tradition to modern pastors is the practice of the Examen — a daily...
Reading for Yourself, Not Just for Sunday There is a real danger in having Bible study be a professional activity rather than a personal one. When eve...
Why Pastors Stop Praying It is one of the great ironies of ministry: the people most responsible for calling others to prayer are often the ones who p...
The Moment of Surrender At some point, the calling requires an act of obedience that costs you something. Maybe it costs you safety — leaving a stable...
The Calling Requires a Response Calling is not a trophy. It is not something you receive, admire, and put on a shelf. It is an assignment — active, on...
Every Called Pastor Doubts Let's be honest about something most pastors don't say from the pulpit: there are days when you have no idea if you are sup...
You Cannot Call Yourself One of the clearest biblical tests of a genuine calling is the affirmation of the community. You do not walk into a room, ann...
The Inner Witness You Can't Ignore The inward call to ministry is not a feeling, exactly. It is more persistent than that. It is the thing that won't ...
It's Not What Most People Think Ask ten people what it means to be called to ministry, and you'll get ten different answers. Some will talk about a dr...
The consistent ethic of life is a phrase associated with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. He argued that a genuinely pro-life position would require opposition to abortion, capital punishment, unjust war, and poverty....
Not everyone who has had an abortion is at peace with it. Some women grieve the loss for years — in silence, largely alone, because the culture around them is divided into two camps....
You cannot make a compelling case for the value of a human life and then decline to fund what that life requires to survive. This is not rhetorical. It is logical....
She has been sitting in your congregation for years. And she has never told anyone — cannot tell anyone — because the culture of the church has made it clear what the response would be....
The Bible does not contain the word abortion. It also does not contain a direct prohibition of it. These two facts are used — badly — by people on both sides of the argument....
The labels arrived before most of the conversations did. And now they do most of the work — sorting people into camps, signaling which team you're on, ending discussions that never actually began....
A woman in a crisis pregnancy is not a political cause. She is a person in the middle of the hardest decision she may ever face, usually alone, often afraid....
The people who make abortion debates most uncomfortable are not the ideologues on either side. They are the women in the waiting rooms — the ones whose stories don't fit cleanly into anyone's framework....
The pro-life movement began with a conviction worth defending. What has happened to it is not. Opposition to abortion became the full expression of a pro-life ethic, rather than its starting point....
You have a template. You may not have named it, you may actively resist it — but it is there. Every person who grew up watching two people be married absorbed a working model....
The story we tell about failed marriages involves revelation. The more common story has no single moment. It has a slow, barely-perceptible drift that ends more marriages than dramatic betrayal....
It is possible to love someone deeply and look at them one morning and realize you do not know who this person is anymore. Not because they have been deceptive, but because time has passed....
Few words in the marriage conversation have been more weaponized than submission. The actual text of Ephesians 5 is more disruptive than either camp typically admits....
For a certain kind of marriage, the children were the project. The marriage organized itself around them. And then the kids are launched. And the two people look at each other and realize they have been living with a stranger....
One spouse usually does most of the emotional labor. In nearly all marriages, the spouse doing it is exhausted, and the spouse not doing it has no idea the work exists....
Most people cycle between escalation and suppression. Neither of these is conflict. Healthy conflict looks different from both, and it is worth describing carefully....
Fewer than ten times a year is the clinical threshold for a sexless marriage. The silence from the pulpit on this subject is near-total, which means couples experiencing it have nowhere to bring it....
There is a season in a marriage when you look at your spouse and the feeling you have is not warm. Not hostile — just neutral. The question is: Is a marriage without romance still worth keeping?...
Trust, once broken, does not rebuild on a timeline. Trust is not a decision. It is a conclusion the nervous system reaches based on accumulated evidence....
Resentment is not a character defect. It is an information system. It is telling you that something you needed was not given, something you gave was not acknowledged, something you agreed to has been violated....
A slow awareness that the conversations you are having with your spouse are not the conversations you are having anywhere else. This is one of the loneliest positions in a marriage....
Constantine did not merely tolerate Christianity. He favored it. He returned confiscated property to the churches. He exempted clergy from certain taxes and civic duties. He funded church construction. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 to resolve theological disputes---with imperial authority backing the proceedings. Within a generation, Christianity moved from the margins to the center of Roman life. By 380 AD, under Emperor Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. For many believers, this felt like vindication. After centuries of suffering, God had finally delivered His people. The prayers of the martyrs had been answered. The church had endured the furnace, and now it was being crowned....
Not because they were uniquely evil. Not because they lacked sincere faith. But because they were afraid. And fear, as we have seen throughout this book, makes the idol feel necessary. Fear makes the chariot look like the only option. Fear makes the strongman’s promises sound like the voice of God....
How Patriotism Became Our Practical Savior. A direct examination of how patriotism has replaced the kingdom of God as the practical savior in American Christianity....
Why Every Generation Gets the Bible Wrong, Why Yours Is No Different, and What to Do About It. An exploration of how each generation interprets Scripture through its own cultural lens....