By Joe Mckeever on Jan 22, 2021
based on 2 ratings
| 6,404 views
It was December 1961, the Christmas season. Margaret Henderson and I would be married five months later and then spend 52 years together serving the Lord. We had no idea all the Lord had in store for us, of course. The one thing we knew and wanted with all our hearts was that God was leading us and would use us.
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By Lance Witt on May 11, 2024
based on 3 ratings
| 26,666 views
"When it comes to our preaching, we live in the constant tension between pastor and prophet. On one hand, as pastors we want to encourage and care for the sheep. So, in our preaching we want to be uplifting and hopeful. On the other hand, as prophets we must sometimes say the hard things that the sheep don’t want to hear."
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By Joe Mckeever on Jun 7, 2023
based on 3 ratings
| 14,267 views
Show me a Christian who can please God better alone than with other believers and I’ll show you a one-of-a-kind, something never before seen on planet Earth. The Lord thought you and I would be needing each other, so placed us in a church fellowship when He saved us.
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By Josh Reich on Jun 20, 2022
based on 1 rating
| 13,706 views
Let’s face it, when someone hurts us, we can brush it off and often move on. We can be tough, ignore it, deal with it or get even (although that rarely helps), but something changes when it is our spouse, kids, a close friend or a family member who is hurt. We feel powerless in that moment.
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By Carey Nieuwhof on May 18, 2024
based on 1 rating
| 20,992 views
"If you’ve been in ministry for any length of time, you know the challenge of trying to move the mission forward and handle the pastoral needs of a congregation at the same time. One of the most perplexing problems pastors and church leaders face is how to handle ‘pastoral emergencies’—the crises that come up in the lives of people that they look to you to help solve."
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By Ron Edmondson on Jun 4, 2024
"I try to never appoint or release a team to do work until we make sure a leader is chosen. They can choose their own leader, we can appoint one for them, or they may even have co-leadership, but there needs to be someone who has the assigned task of steering, motivating and leading the team to accomplish it’s mission."
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By Josh Reich on Nov 23, 2022
based on 2 ratings
| 15,702 views
"The number one complaint I hear from people is, “I don’t have time. I don’t have time for hobbies, sleep, my marriage, relationships, kids, reading my Bible.” You do, you just gave that time away. You give your time to the things that matter most."
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By Randy Alcorn on Dec 9, 2022
based on 3 ratings
| 11,811 views
The God of providence weaves millions of details into our lives and into all the lives around us. Maybe He doesn’t have one big reason for bringing a certain person or success or failure or disease or accident into our lives; in fact, He may have hundreds of little reasons. In order to understand God’s explanations, we would have to be God.
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By Lisa Eifert on May 16, 2024
Getting kids to VBS is big step. It’s a great way to help kids during the vulnerable summer months and introduce new families to your church. Communication and promotion are key steps to ensuring your church reaches as many kids as possible. There’s a lot that can be done to promote it so remember to call on your teens and a powerful group message service like One Call Now.
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By Joe Thorn on Jul 12, 2022
based on 3 ratings
| 17,324 views
One danger is emotionalism, in which we allow our feelings to interpret our circumstances and form our thoughts about God. This is putting feelings before faith. The other danger is a kind of stoicism, where faith is rooted in theology but void of affection. This tendency removes feelings from faith altogether. While it is true that our emotions should not lead our theology, it is vital to our faith that theology lead to a deep experience of our triune God.
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By Charles Stone on Nov 29, 2023
Quitters never win and winners never quit was drilled into my mind at an early age. I believed it. I practiced it. I lived it. I only quit one thing in my life before age 18, my high school football team. I quit because I sat on the bench 99.976% of the time. Since, then, however, I’ve questioned the veracity of that phrase, as catchy as it may sound.
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By Lance Witt on Jun 17, 2024
A couple of years ago I had the chance to sit down with a former staff member that had served on my team more than a decade ago. We really hadn’t kept in touch very much. At one point during our lunch the conversation turned more serious. And in a moment of candor he said to me “You know, you weren’t very easy to work for.” The truth is, he was right.
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By Lance Witt on Jun 26, 2023
based on 2 ratings
| 14,657 views
Culture is one of things that is hard to define but easy to feel. You certainly feel it when you visit a foreign country and you bump up against different customs and ways of doing things, but you also feel it when you enter a business or a church. There is a certain style or personality of an organization that is an expression of culture. I sometimes think of culture as the organization’s “way” of doing what they do. There is a Ritz Carlton “way” of doing customer service. There is a Starbucks “way” of doing business. There is a Crossroads Church “way” of doing ministry.
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By Lance Witt on Jul 6, 2023
based on 1 rating
| 16,143 views
Respect is a big deal to me. I am so blessed to have a wife who has always affirmed her respect for me. I can’t begin to tell you how life-giving that has been. Through the years as a pastor, the most consistent message I have given to wives is this…”Your husband can do without a lot of things, but the ONE thing he cannot do without is RESPECT.” It’s not just true in marriage, it is also true in leadership.
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By Ron Edmondson on Aug 1, 2022
based on 2 ratings
| 15,635 views
One of the hardest things I do in ministry is interact with those who are no longer in ministry, but wish they were. They’ve been derailed. They messed up and either they got caught or the guilt got the best of them and they confessed. Watching this process over the years there appear to be some common reasons failure occurs. It doesn’t start at the failure. It starts months – and, perhaps years – prior. My hope is if we expose some of them we can catch a few people before it is too late.
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