The Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life has ranked each state according to how religious it is. While they recognize the difficulty in defining the term “religious,” they have provided four separate measures for the ranking system—the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer, and absolute certainty of belief in God. Who’s number one? Mississippi (in every category). Second place goes to Alabama (for importance of religion). Read more [...]

Researcher George Barna recently offered a synthesis of his research in which he reveals four major themes of 2009. The first theme is not a surprise: Increasingly, Americans are more interested in faith and spirituality than in Christianity. People say they have faith, but they are detached from Christianity. What’s surprising are Barna’s reasons for this detachment. Barna sees two major reasons why Christianity is no longer attractive. First, mass media has “unfavorably caricatured” Read more [...]

Perhaps you’ve heard a version of the saying “a camel is a horse designed by church committee.” The statement is a bit unfair, but also quite humorous. It’s humorous because there’s an element of truth to it. But it’s unfair because any group of people—not just committees—can lose sight of the original goal. What creates a camel out of a horse? There’s a lurking danger in every team brainstorming session and every committee meeting. It’s consensus. Most probably think of consensus Read more [...]

One of the blessings of leading a church is equipping the saints and watching God work through them. One of the challenges of leading a church is knowing when to redirect a passionate church member’s ideas. Some ideas are easy to recognize as flops—like the time I heard from someone who wanted to buy a multi-million dollar golf course for sports ministry. It just wasn’t for us. Most of the time, however, discernment is more difficult when passionate church members have bold and grand plans Read more [...]