Over the past several weeks, Bart and I have been writing about what working with over 1,000 churches taught us. Alignment comes before strategy.

Every church I've worked with has a list of challenges they can name. Budget. Facility. Staffing. Volunteer fatigue. Cultural headwinds. These are real and they're worth addressing.

I once sat with a church leadership team that had spent thirty days in prayer trying to decide whether they were going to be a discipleship church or an evangelistic church.

For some reason, we've convinced ourselves that buildings, programs, and events advance the gospel.

I'll be honest — when Bart and I started Intentional Churches, we thought the problem was strategy.

Looking back, one of the biggest mistakes I made as a leader was believing I needed to be right before I could move.

Church leadership can be isolating. Brian shares why one road trip with another church changed the way he leads—and why he'd tell every pastor to get in the van.

Before I became Lead Pastor, our church met in a small industrial office park. We had run out of space and were renting offices in an adjacent building.

In 2011, I was five years into being the Lead Pastor at a church in Guilderland, New York. The dynamic growth I had anticipated when I took on the role had not come.

The phrase "far from God" is everywhere in the contemporary church. It is so embedded in how church leaders talk about people that most of us do not even notice that we are saying it.

My parents had a fully wooden piece of furniture that was a record player when I was a kid. If you are a certain age, you know exactly what I am describing. If not, Google it. You will be amazed at what we used to play music on.

I’m an Ohio State Buckeyes football fan. For most games, I don’t sit. I stand. I’m usually pretty low-key, but during those three hours, something shifts. I’m yelling. I’m clapping. I’m pacing the room. My wife would say I become a different person entirely.

It has been about four years since I left full-time pastoral ministry. The distance has given me perspective I could not get in the week-to-week of leading a church.

When you hire talented, committed people and pour everything into them, the congregation slowly learns, without anyone ever saying it out loud, that the mission belongs to the professionals.

I entered ministry in 1995 and spent more than twenty-five years serving as both an Associate and Lead Pastor. If you had asked me during those years what church growth looked like, I would have described something visible and measurable.

When a church gets out of alignment, every part of it starts fighting against every other part. Your teaching moves people in one direction. Your small groups are focused on something else. Your kids' ministry has a different aim. Your events stand alone. Everything is fighting everyone else.

When you ask an AI a question, any question, it doesn't flinch. It doesn't say, "You shouldn't ask that." There's no side eye, no weird face, no sermon about why you should already know the answer.

Albany, NY, at one point supposedly had the most bowling lanes per capita in the United States. I tried to verify that claim, but I couldn’t find a reliable source.

The holiday season is one of the best and hardest times to be a church leader. You're celebrating Jesus' birth with your church while also shepherding people in a polarized world, balancing a budget, preparing special services and year-end giving campaigns, and trying to be present with your own family and friends.

If you’re a church leader about to make the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas run, I want to leave you with three questions before the season begins.