Revitalize Your Church

Insightful article at Building Church Leaders: 3 Signs That Volunteers are Losing Steam . When pastors are losing steam, they display the same symptoms.

A very insightful article by my good friend, Phil Stevenson, in Expanding Wave: In a January 2009 lecture given at Talbot Seminary, Charles Van Engen observed that of the 168 hours (24x7) in any given week active church members will give five of those hours to the church. That low number shocked me. In the 1980’s, I had heard that active church members would invest up to twenty hours a week. Prior to Van Engen’s remark I had understood it had slipped to ten. Regardless of the number, it appears that the time those most committed are willing to invest in the local church is eroding. My question: What are we encouraging people to do with the other 163? I understand a segment of those hours will be for food and sleep, but there is a huge chunk of hours we need to leverage. How these hours are leveraged would appear to be built on two potential philosophical foundations: Retrieval: This is getting those hours back for the church. We pull, prod and plead to have them show up for, serve at ...