Living things grow. If something isn’t growing, it’s dying. This is why a church that is not growing is a cause for concern. A church should be alive and one way to know if a church is alive is to look at the numbers.

Numbers aren’t everything, but numbers represent people and each person has a story and every story matters to God (I didn’t come up with that, but I love it).

Every church leader should be intentional about positioning their church for growth.

This is why I’ve pulled together my list of the best five books on church growth.

Each one of these books will give you strategies and actionable best-practices to help grow your church.

This week I attended the Exponential Conference in Orlando, FL. This is one of the largest church leadership conferences in the world with over 5,000 pastors and church leaders in attendance.

I observed some trends in the capital 'C' church that I found to be incredibly encouraging.

In this episode, I'm going to share those three observations with you and what we, as church leaders, can learn from them and apply to our own contexts.

Every church I've served has had multiple services, but no one ever took the time to explain best practices for maintaining energy levels while preaching all of them.

Maybe they thought everyone was born knowing this stuff?

Well, I am going to share so that there will be something in the world regarding this topic. ;)

In this episode, I'm going to share my 7-step survival guide to preaching multiple services.

Being a pastor is unlike just about any other profession. Because of the holistic nature of the work, we tend to take on “pastor” as an identity and not just a profession.

Add to that the spiritual component that we are not just providing a service to people, but showing them how life is supposed to be lived for God’s glory (no pressure).

Most people don’t quite know what to do with us because we seem like non-persons to them. They don’t understand us, but we really wish they did. We don’t feel any different than anyone else, and sometimes we feel like explaining ourselves, but most of the time we just live with it.

Pastor, I want to speak on your behalf today. I want to help you put into words what you might be feeling and wish people understood about you.

In this episode, I’m sharing from my thoughts and experiences of being a pastor for fifteen years and working with thousands of pastors here at Preaching Donkey. You may not relate to...

If you're in ministry leadership, I don't have to tell you ministry is hard.

You know it, you live it.

There are unique challenges to church and ministry work.

But, often we make ministry harder on ourselves than it needs to be.

In this episode, I'm going to discuss a Carey Nieuwhof article where he shares five ways pastors make ministry harder than it needs to be.

In this we'll discover ways we can avoid making ministry unnecessarily difficult for ourselves.

So many pastors get burned out and fatigued because they lack balance.

They are giving 100% of themselves 100% of the time.

This is not sustainable and will lead to an inevitable crash landing. But there are two simple things you can do to keep yourself from burnout: Take a real day off; and have a real vacation.

In this episode, we'll explore why it's so vital to guard your time off as a pastor, and even more importantly, we'll discover how to do it.

In our effort to become better preachers we often learn from the best preachers in our generation. We watch our heroes and take notes gleaning all we can from them.

This, by the way, is a good thing. While you should never seek to copy someone else or become them, you can always learn a great deal from studying best-practices.

But we have a lot to learn not only from our contemporaries, but also from those who have gone before. One leader and preacher who we can learn a great deal from is Paul.

Paul, the Apostle, was not only a top notch theologian who wrote a huge part of the New Testament. He was also a missionary, pastor, church-planter and movement leader. We can gain a lot from watching his life and ministry. In this episode, we'll discover five practical things preachers can learn from Paul.

Churches rely on the generosity of their members to fund the church's ministries.

It stands to reason that pastors would want to avoid doing things that end up reducing their members' giving.

But many pastors and church leaders are unknowingly hindering their church's giving. This is according to an article on Carey Nieuwhof's site which we're diving into in this episode.

Fortunately, every one of the five generosity killers is reversible and can be fixed. But you have to know what they are first. Let's dive into it in this episode.

The environment in which we preach is not always friendly towards pastors.

The trust that a person in ministry might have had three or four decades ago has been eroded.

Rather than implicit trust, we are more likely to be met with distrust, doubt and skepticism when people find out we're in ministry.

But we still are called to preach the gospel with confidence. How do we do this?

In this episode, we'll be diving into an article by Ed Stetzer in which he lays out some ways to communicate with confidence in this climate.

A new report by Christianity Today's Kate Shellnutt details the results of an investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention's handling of abuse survivors within its churches.

From the report: "Investigation: SBC Executive Committee staff saw advocates’ cries for help as a distraction from evangelism and a legal liability, stonewalling their reports and resisting calls for reform."

It's a heartbreaking report that shows abuses and cover-ups going back decades within the SBC and its Executive Committee.

In this video, we'll dive into the report and draw out some lessons we can learn as church leaders and pastors.