John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, delivered a stinging indictment several years ago on televangelists and the tax perks of churches and non-profit ministries. While the show admittedly targeted the tiny minority of over-the-top financially abusive ministries (does a pastor really need a six-million-dollar home…uh, parsonage?), none of us are immune to the cancer of entitlement. Oliver even launched a tax-legit, legal, though short-lived, church to show how easy it is to

What Do You Think of When You See the Word “INTEGRITY”? Typically, we default to thinking about it at a personal individual level. But organizations must have integrity…in a similar fashion that architects and engineers think about the structural integrity of their buildings. In this model for churches—what we call the Organizational Integrity Triangle—we find three critical structural components: Personal, Missional and Systemic Integrity. The Personal Integrity point is s

Want To Hear My Best Worst Prediction? Way back in 2007 when I was working on my first book, The Outward Focused Life: Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World, I attempted a “prophetic” stab at the American evangelical church and wrote: “Here’s my Next Big Thing prediction: That churches in America will become less known for their styles, for their tribes, for their proselytizing methods, for their politics, for their clamoring over Christian “rights”, for the things they’re a

And Which Can Atrophy the Fastest...? Every church has a handful of core mission-critical behaviors…and they typically center around four: Worship, Evangelism, Community, and Spiritual Formation. Regardless how clever we rename, alliterate, or rhyme them, they’ll basically stay the same. In other words, our four most primary activities must be to (1) corporately worship Jesus, (2) reach those who are far from God, (3) live life deeply together, and (4) grow one another up in