February 2018 » GProCommission

February 20, 2018

How to Get Your Church Growing Again

Guest Post from Aaron Buer. Reposted with kind permission from Breeze. From time to time, we all get stuck. Our churches get stuck. We get stuck in our personal lives and we get stuck in leadership. It just happens. It’s normal. Often, stuck doesn’t mean that things are terrible. It just means that things are comfortable. It means we are coasting. I realized a while back that our ministry was coasting. We were stuck in the land of “good enough.” Thankfully, in this season, our church leadership was beginning to take dramatic steps away from “good enough” and toward “excellent.” […]

February 15, 2018

TOWARD A STRONG AND THRIVING MARRIAGE

A preacher once said, “No marriage is perfect. In fact, even if marriage is made up in heaven, so are thunder and lightning.” Did you know that there are roughly around 200,000 books on Amazon.com on the topic “how to build strong marriages”? Yet even with all these resources, you still wonder why some marriages click and why some tick away like a time bomb. We all just want our marriages to last, to finish strong. We all want a marriage that is growing and vigorous! The percentage of those who marry with the goal of seeing their marriage […]

February 15, 2018

Letter to a Leader Wanting to Level Up

Dear Growing Leader, I have been thinking about our conversation regarding your desire to take your church to the next level and the matter of developing a leadership culture in your church. You are right in connecting these two issues, a fact that is usually overlooked, but is now more and more proving to be a matter of vital concern. I happen to agree with John Maxwell who said “that it all rises and falls on leadership.” Some years ago Rick Warren studied a large number of successful churches from a variety of denominations and found one consistent characteristic that […]

February 13, 2018

Do you care about the Quality or Health of your Church?

Assessing the most important thing your church needs right now for greater fruitfulness requires a certain attitude of heart: Jesus said: “I will build my church.” (Mt. 16:18). Pastors are called to be God’s Co-Workers in that project (1 Cor 3:9). That means: Jesus gave you responsibility over his church, so your role is ‘stewardship’. As good ‘stewards’, we need to re-evaluate what Church is about, according to Jesus’ modeling and instructions to his disciples. Will you agree that it is about… Worshipping our God, Edifying our believers, Caring for and relieving people’s pains and problems, Proclaiming the Good News? […]

February 9, 2018

LUCENT UNIVERSITY INTERVIEW: Formal training made possible regardless of location

As the GProCommunity, we aim to share developments and new initiatives in both formal and non-formal training of pastors. With this goal in mind, for this month, we highlight the Lucent University, “a Higher Education Institution focused on preparing God’s people for the ministry by offering affordable online training in all the world’s major languages.” As you may be aware, even if pastoral leaders can afford the financial costs, many often face the tremendous decision to abandon their congregations and leave their families in order to receive training so they may then better serve the very churches they had to […]

February 8, 2018

Honoring God With Our Decisions

It’s often said that life is nothing more than a series of choices. We make decisions every day and every moment of our lives. Some are trivial but others can turn out to be quite significant. We are where we are today because of the choices we have made in the past. They may be choices about what college to go to, what career to pursue, what job to take, who to marry, or where to live. All of these decision have led us to the place we are today, whether right or wrong. And some decisions are irrevocable. In […]

February 5, 2018

In Honor of Rev. Dr. D. John Richard

Dear praying friends, My hero, my dad, D. John Richard, just entered heaven to receive his eternal reward for a full life and fruitful labors (Saturday, February 3, 2018), just 17 days shy of his 95th birthday. It happened very fast. He fell last Sunday, and five times since then. We’re grateful and sad. I’m headed to Syracuse…just arrived in Dallas last night after 16 nights away. I wrote memories of him on my 15+ hour flight home, having just talked the exact streets and places of youthful life with him. Please pray for all of us. We have our Christ’s […]

February 1, 2018

The LEADERREACH Initiative with Dr. Ramesh Richard

Watch the video below to see Dr. Richard share firsthand the background behind the LEADERREACH video initiative, which seeks to address the heart needs of leaders who reach leaders. Further below is the GProCommunity interview with Dr. Richard regarding LEADERREACH. Below are links to videos on topics vital to healthy leadership that Dr. Richard has already addressed. We invite you to subscribe here for future video sessions in the current series! How Can You Spiritually Examine Your Heart As A Leader? How Can We Pursue Long-term Sustainability In Our Role As Leaders? Where Am I Failing As A Leader? […]

February 1, 2018

There But For the Grace… Pastors Escaping the Power-trip Pitfalls

We could call them the ‘pastor’s power pitfalls.’ There are many. Too many. It’s actually scary how much power a pastor wields – for good… and ill. It’s one of the key issues that has preoccupied me a lot about in the last few years while writing my culture of suspicion book (out VERY soon at all GOOD bookshops!). And I’ve witnessed (and struggled) under power-trip pastors. The worst thing, though, is how blissfully unaware they are of it. As one friend said of a church boss he struggled under for several years, “he’s like a drunk driver who never looks in the rear-view mirror.” So what […]