Like most people of my generation I remain loyal to print journalism. Thanks to a wonderful English teacher named John Burns, I’ve been a New York Times subscriber since my junior year in high school. The paper now arrives on the front lawn at 5:30 every morning, along with the Boston Globe. For religion news I rely on The Christian Century and Christianity Today, which cover American Protestantism pretty well, the former from a center-left and the latter from a... Read more

In my travels as a speaker and consultant working with congregations and their leaders, I am often asked, “How can we reach 20- and 30-year-olds?” Probably most folks would like to say, “How can we get 20- and 30-year-olds?” — but “reach” sounds a bit less self-interested. My first general thought is that our enthusiasm for our church and confidence in the Christian faith needs to come through. That attitude is likely to make us more interesting and attractive to... Read more

“Our church is just like a family.” This is a common claim in many congregations, perhaps especially in smaller ones. Some go further, “This church is my family.” Sounds good, don’t you think? Not long ago, I worked with a congregation that had used the services of a national firm to do a “ministry audit” prior to our work together. The firm’s very first recommendation, in bold print, read, “The most important thing (Name of Church) will ever do is... Read more

A New Ministry Scorecard In his most recent book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries wanted to discover why some startup companies succeed and why others fail. His hunch was that most fail because they measure the wrong things. Startup companies focus on statistics about the millions of hits on their website or thousands of tweets per day. But as Ries points out, these are “vanity metrics,” useful in making us feel successful without actually saying anything about our overall impact... Read more

In 2008, the Broadway musical “Rent “closed after 5,123 performances as the eighth-longest running show in Broadway history. It is a show beloved by many, though the critics have not always been kind to Jonathan Larson, the show’s creator. After the show closed, “New York Times” critic Charles Isherwood wrote about his experience seeing the show when it opened and how its meaning changed for him in post-9/11 New York: One of the weaknesses of the show that bothered me... Read more