“You’re the same today as you’ll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read.” – Charlie “Tremendous” Jones
How to Size Up a Book
I’m often asked by my coaching networks and alumni, “How many books do I read?” I typically read 5-7 books per week. That means I need to give myself an estimate of how long it will take me to read each book. So, when I get ready to read a book, I like it to size it up. Here are … Read More
Decide Now To Be a Reader!
The call to ministry is the call to prepare. Whether you have 40 years of ministry in front of you, or perhaps only 40 months, or even 4 years, whatever that might be. Make the decision to say, “I’m going to be a life long leader.” As long as you’re leading, as long as you have another hill to take, … Read More
How Pastors Can Read More
One of the questions I get asked all the time is, “How do you read so many books?” or “How do you read a book in a day?” Well, I think it’s worthwhile giving you a little history of how my passion to read developed. I was not much of a reader before I became a Christian. In fact, I had … Read More
Pastors’ Reading Habits: How Much Do You Read?
I recently read an article from The Barna Group called “Reading Habits of Today’s Pastors”. This article takes a look at one of the most reading professional groups– us pastors! Here are some interesting statistics the article touches on: Pastors buy 3.8 books per month per person—92% of whom buy at least one book per month—adding up to between 8 … Read More
Saturday Quote – The Test of a Preacher
“The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying not, ‘What a lovely sermon!’ but ‘I will do something.’” -Billy Graham
Reaching Unchurched People through Your Preaching
This week I am emphasizing the importance of planning your preaching. I want to encourage you to start looking at your preaching calendars and, if you haven’t done so already, start planning for your Fall Sermon Series. The Fall is typically one of the best times of the year to maximize your outreach to the unchurched. People are getting back … Read More
How do You Measure the Effectiveness of Your Preaching
How do you measure the success of your preaching? How do you know that your preaching is effective? And how do you measure it all? At the Journey we started thinking about how baseball teams measure the effectiveness of their offence by Runners Batted In. We started to think about preaching in terms of RBIs—how do we move people … Read More
The Purpose of Preaching
This week I am going to share with you tips on developing your preaching calendar. This has been a growing area for me at the Journey as we have innovated some ways to plan our preaching and to plan our preaching together as a teaching team. It is really an interesting thing that we do as pastors, because we … Read More
Strategy – A Saturday Quote
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” – Michael E. Porter