Tuesday's Catch: 'The Invitation Gap: Why Your Members Aren’t Inviting Others' And More

The Invitation Gap: Why Your Members Aren’t Inviting Others
In this episode, Jess and Thom address one of the most overlooked challenges in the church today: the gap between belief and action when it comes to inviting others. Most church members love their church—but they rarely invite anyone to attend. Jess and Thom explore why this gap exists, what holds people back, and how leaders can create a culture where invitations become natural, consistent, and effective.

This is a serious problem in too many churches.

Your Church Doesn’t Have a Vision Problem—It Has a Follow-Up Problem
In this episode, Jess and Thom challenge a common assumption in church leadership: that struggling churches need a better vision. In reality, many churches already have a clear vision—but they lack the systems to follow up with the people God is already sending their way. Jess and Thom walk through how ineffective or inconsistent follow-up is one of the biggest reasons churches fail to retain guests, and they offer simple, practical steps to close that gap immediately.

When I visited a local Episcopal church, no one asked me for my name, address, and phone number, the kind of contact information necessary for follow up.

Evangelical group condemns Trump policy change impacting immigrants who entered lawfully
An Evangelical humanitarian organization has condemned a Trump administration policy memo that could require many immigrants who entered the United States lawfully to leave the country while seeking lawful permanent residence.

World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization that is authorized to resettle refugees in the U.S., said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ policy would affect people who entered lawfully with visas, humanitarian parole or tourist status and later became eligible for a green card, often through a U.S. citizen spouse, parent or adult child.

Should Christians Flip Tables Like Jesus?
Scripture tells us to be like Jesus. Does that mean we should call hypocritical leaders “blind fools” and a “brood of vipers” like Jesus does in Matthew 23?

Does imitating Jesus mean we should make a whip of cords, curse a fig tree, and flip a table in a temple? Should we make it our goal to do the same? And if not, why not?

Also See: Jesus Raged? The Righteous Anger of God Incarnate

Avoiding The Trap Of A Punch-The-Clock Mentality In Ministry
It’s too easy to define our ministry by how many hours we put in. Then it's very easy to slip into the trap of defining our value by those hours.

Pastors Need Worship, Not Just Work
One way God keeps pastors going is through corporate worship. Worship is for God, always. And God uses gathered worship to do something in us we can’t manufacture on our own: He renews our faith and restores our joy.

And pastors experience this in a unique way. You’re not only coming to worship; you’re helping others come. You’re carrying the room. You’re praying ahead, noticing who’s drifting, making a dozen decisions, and still trying to be present before the Lord. It’s possible to lead worship and still feel like you never actually worshiped.

Corporate worship is not just another weekly responsibility. It’s one of the few places you can stand among your people as a fellow disciple and let the songs, the Scripture, the prayers, and the ordinary faith of the church do their steady work on you.

The lectionary doesn't flinch
The liturgical season of Ordinary Time runs from Pentecost to Advent, roughly twenty-six Sundays of green banners and counted weeks. The name comes from the Latin "ordinalis," meaning numbered, not mundane. But the distinction has been mostly lost. Ordinary Time has become, in popular imagination, the season of placeholder Sundays. The time between the dramatic seasons when the real work of Christian life is supposedly happening elsewhere.

This is exactly wrong. And a preacher who lived through a world coming apart once said so, loudly, from one of the most prominent pulpits in America.

Worship in Silence
As a priest in a liturgical tradition, I know quite well the value of wordy worship. And this tradition far predates Christianity, as the Hebrew Scriptures attest. Still, I am unable to shake the idea that something is profoundly lost when our wordiness is not balanced with silence. There really is something to the idea that God speaks to all his people, not only through the words and actions of the liturgy, and not only through the preaching and teaching of the clergy. Silence can be a means of fellowship with God.