Recent Articles

Every August the same stress lands in a pastor's inbox. The nursery is short. The parking team needs bodies. Someone has to run kids' check-in before the fall ministry campaign launch, and the list of empty slots is a lot longer than the list of people who've said yes.So we do what feels natural. We stand up and beg. We print the sign-up sheet, announce the gaps, and hope enough hands go up to keep the machine running one more season.I understand the instinct. But after years of leading a church, I became convinced that this is exactly the wrong place to start.Don't start with the empty slotMost churches recruit the same way. We look at the org chart, find the holes, and go hunting for warm bodies to fill them: We need more Sunday school workers, so go get some. We're down three greeters; who's available?I call that the institutional approach, and it treats people like interchangeable parts. The program comes first, and the person exists to keep it running.Here's the problem: When you start with the slot, you'll always be short, and the people you talk into serving rarely last. They said yes to plug a gap, not to answer a calling. By spring they're burned out, and you're back to begging.Start with the person insteadAt Saddleback we flipped the question. Instead of asking, "How do we fill this slot?" we asked, "How has God made this person?"We interviewed people for ministry based on what we called their SHAPE (spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality, and experiences). Paul put it this way: "Try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given you" (Romans 12:3 PHILLIPS).That was the step I got most excited about, because almost nobody was doing it. We weren't there to plug a program; we were there to help a person discover what God had already built them to do.Make that one shift, and everything about recruiting changes. Now you're looking at a room full of ministers who simply need help finding where they fit.A gift is never for the one who holds itWhen you help people find their SHAPE, you're not just solving a staffing problem; you're handing them a purpose."Each one, as a good manager of God's different gifts, must use for the good of others the special gift he has received from God" (1 Peter 4:10 GNT). Notice who the gift is for. It isn't for you; it's for the other person.That's why someone serving in their SHAPE almost never burns out the way a slot-filler does. Doing the very thing God wired you to do fills you up even as it pours out to everyone around you.The ministries you'd never have plannedThere's a payoff I didn't expect. Give people room to serve out of their SHAPE, and they'll start ministries you never would have dreamed up.I'll tell you the truth: I didn't start most of Saddleback's ministries. They were launched by people in our church who felt called by God to meet a need they saw. My job, and my staff's job, was to help those leaders succeed.If I had only recruited people into the slots I could see, we would have missed most of what God wanted to do. Your church is no different. The person you're about to guilt into the nursery may be carrying a ministry you can't even picture yet.Keep the real goal in front of youIn a busy season it's easy to forget why we do any of this. The point was never to keep the programs staffed. The goal is to develop disciples, and the programs are just tools that help us do it.So before you print the sign-up sheet this fall, ask a different question. Don’t ask, “Who can fill this?” Instead, ask, “Who has God already shaped for this, and how do I help them find it?” Fill your slots with people who were made for them, and you won't just survive the fall. You'll build something that outlasts the season.

“Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice.” (Proverbs 12:15 (GNT)Every week you help people see what they can’t see on their own. From the pulpit, in a counseling appointment, over coffee, in a hospital hallway, you name the blind spots other people miss. It’s part of your calling. But here’s a quiet question worth sitting with this morning: Who does that for you?We all have blind spots. There are things in each of us that need correcting, and we just can’t see them. Sometimes we don’t look closely enough. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we’d rather not look at all. We settle into habits that feel comfortable, and comfortable is usually where growth quietly stalls. That’s true for the people in your church. It’s true for you and me too.God never meant for us to grow alone. He puts people around us who care enough to be honest with us. For a pastor, though, those people can be hard to come by. You’re the one everyone else leans on, so it starts to feel easier, even safer, to keep a little distance. Trouble is, distance is right where blind spots like to hide.So let me just ask: Is there anyone who will level with you? Not someone who just says what you want to hear, but a friend who thinks enough of you to say the hard thing kindly. If nobody has that kind of access to you, chances are you’re carrying mistakes you can’t even see yet.Pride is what makes this so hard. It puts us on the defensive and quietly talks us into believing we’ve got nothing left to learn. It builds walls, holds people at arm’s length, and then leaves us wondering why God feels distant, when part of how he speaks is through the very people we’re keeping out. Humility goes the other way. It leaves the door open and says, “Go ahead. Tell me the truth. I can take it.”God wants to speak through you. He also wants to speak to you. One of those takes courage. The other takes humility. You need both to go the distance in ministry.Maybe a face already came to mind while you were reading. A friend, a fellow pastor, your spouse, someone who’s earned the right to be honest with you. This week, give that person the opportunity to speak truth to you. Ask them, “What do you see in me that I might be missing?” And then, as hard as it is, just listen.When you’re willing to ask and humble enough to really hear it, God can use those words to breathe life back into you, the same way he’s used yours for so many other people.

A lot of pastors treat the weekend service like it's the whole ballgame. You pour 40 hours into 35 minutes. You stand up and give it everything you've got, and when it's over, you feel like the week's ministry is basically done.But it isn't, and the sooner you feel that in your bones, the better. The weekend is the mouth of the church. But the heartbeat of the church is the small groups.Here's the picture I want you to keep in your head: The weekend service is the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of what actually changes people is unseen. It's under the water. And it happens in small groups during the week.That's how they did it in the New Testament too. "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts" (Acts 2:46 NIV). Large-group worship in the temple courts. Small-group fellowship house to house. They needed both. The weekend gathering was never meant to carry the whole load by itself.The weekend is the mouth, not the heartbeatLet me give you the numbers that reordered my thinking. In my years at Saddleback, on a typical weekend we'd have around 20,000 people at our services. During the week we'd have 30,000 or more in small groups. That is not a typo. There were about 10,000 more people in our homes than in our services.That changed how I saw my own preaching. The heartbeat of our church was never the Sunday morning service. It was the small-group fellowship. That's where the strength was. That's where the relationships were. The weekend is loud and visible and important, but it's the mouth. The life happens in the body.So the sermon matters, but not the way a lot of us secretly think it does. It's the funnel, not the finish line.A funnel is for pouring people somewhereNobody admires a funnel. A funnel has one job: to take what you pour into it and move it into something that can actually hold it. That's what a weekend message is for.So the real question after you preach isn't, "Was that a good sermon?" The question is, "Where is this sermon sending people next?" If your preaching ends when the service ends, you've built a funnel that pours onto the floor. The truth lands, people nod, and then it runs off before it ever gets caught in a relationship where it can grow.That's why, at Saddleback, I always preached with the next step in mind. I wasn't just trying to deliver information on Sunday. I was trying to move people from "come and see" to "come and die." You don't get there in a crowd. You get there in a circle.Don't build a church of looky-loosI'll be honest with you about a truth that kept me humble. I used to tell our people that if I dropped dead, we'd lose maybe 1,000 of what I called the looky-loos, the folks who showed up on the weekend mostly to hear me. But the church would keep right on growing, because its heartbeat was never my sermon. It was the small groups.Ask yourself which church you're building. A church gathered around your preaching is only as strong as your next weekend, and only as durable as you are. A church gathered into groups keeps growing whether you're in the pulpit or in the hospital.That should take pressure off you, not add it. You don't have to be brilliant every weekend. You have to point people somewhere deeper than the seat they're sitting in.The Word does its deepest work in a circleHere's why the group matters so much for what you preach. People apply God's Word better in a small group, because in a group they can ask questions. They can say, "I don't understand this," or "I tried this and it didn't work," or "Pray for me; this is hard." You can't do that in a row of chairs facing the same direction. You can only do it in a circle where people face each other.Groups are also how you close the back door. People who are known in a group rarely slip out unnoticed. The person who only ever hears you preach can disappear next week and nobody calls. The person in a group gets missed by name.So when you preach, you're the one who starts the work and hands it off, not the one who finishes it. The sermon opens the truth. The group is where people wrestle it into their actual lives.Preach them toward each otherSo preach your heart out this weekend, Pastor. Prepare hard and say it clearly. But hold it with an open hand, because the sermon was never the whole church.Before you preach, ask one more question you may have been skipping: “Where does this land after the service?” Give people a next step that gets them off the row and into a circle. Point them toward a group, a place where they can be known and can put the truth to work.Your best sermon this weekend isn't the one that earns the most compliments at the door. It's the one that funnels someone into a group by Tuesday, where the Word can finally do what it came to do.

“Use every part of your body to give glory back to God.” 1 Corinthians 6:20 (TLB)Pastor, you spend your life serving.You serve when you're tired. You serve people who may never thank you. You pour yourself into a sermon, a hospital visit, a hard conversation, and most of it nobody ever hears about.So it's worth asking: What is all that serving actually for?Here's something easy to lose in the weekly grind: Your time on earth is practice. The work you do now (the shepherding, the small faithfulness no one sees) is getting you ready for something that lasts far beyond this life.There's a strange picture of heaven floating around, even among Christians: robes and clouds and an endless vacation. But that's not in the Bible. God has real work for us there, good and joyful work in his service. And the serving you do now is how you get ready for it.That reframes the whole week. The building, the budget, the calendar full of programs: Those things matter. You steward them because they serve real people, and that work is worth doing well. But none of it is finally yours. One day you'll hand it all to whoever comes next, and the church will go on without you. What you carry into the next season, and into eternity, is the person you've become. The character God is forming in you. The way you've learned to shepherd and love his people.So don't pour your one life into only what stays behind.Pour it into what goes with you. You're becoming more like Jesus. You're learning to serve the way he serves. That visit no one applauded is shaping your character. That quiet act of faithfulness is building something you'll use forever.Right now is your chance to get ready for the real thing.So this week, keep serving. But serve like it's practice for forever. Give yourself to the two things you actually get to keep: a character that's coming to look like Jesus, and a heart that loves people the way he does. That work is never wasted, and it won’t stay behind.