While society moves toward secularization, Jesus can still save people disengaged from Christianity and transform those barely hanging on.
Many Americans are moving away from congregations, but not necessarily from religion – movies, plays, art and social media fill the gap
To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.
Reasons Your Gut Feeling is a Dangerous Growth Strategy
Most church leaders trust their gut more than they realize, and that instinct can quietly steer a congregation in the wrong direction. In this episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, Scott and A.J. walk through the most common pitfalls of gut-driven decision making, explain why anecdotal information is not the same as real data, and offer practical questions leaders can ask to start making better, more informed choices for their churches.
5 Barriers That Stall Church Growth (and How to Break Them)
Before you touch any of the five barriers below, get the underlying question right.
3 Signs Your Church's Vision Has Expired
Is your church's vision still guiding decisions and inspiring people, or has it quietly expired without anyone noticing? In this episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu walk through three clear signs that a church's vision has gone stale, and they offer practical next steps for auditing and renewing it before it does more damage.
Also See: Church Vision Strategy: 4 Steps to Clarity, Growth, and Alignment -The Church Revitalization PodcastA Brief Theology of Property Stewardship
Why do churches own properties?
A Good and Faithful Servant: Saint Andrew, North Burlingham, Norfolk
East Anglia was a very prosperous part of England in the later Middle Ages. The inhabitants of even the humblest villages took pride in their parish churches and strove to extend and beautify them. North Burlingham is, even today, a small village about 10 miles east of Norwich. They had a stone church by the 12th century, and extended the building in the 14th century, but during the 15th century they improved it again. We know quite a bit about when this happened, as several wills of North Burlingham inhabitants remain from then; most of the funds, however, would have come from the living.
Seely Suffolk, Holy Suffolk, the county of East Anglia where l spent a part of my childhood, is also known for its numerous churches. I lived in the small rural village of Ilketshall St. Andrews, eighteen miles as the crow flies from Norwich and Norwich Cathedral in the neighboring county of Norfolk.God Comforts Us, So We Can Comfort Others
Paul’s time in Ephesus was both extraordinarily fruitful and extraordinarily challenging—indeed, life-threatening! It is important to know this when reading the passage this article is about.
What Destroys Leaders: Eric Geiger on Preaching to Your Own Sins and Disappointing Your Staff
Eric Geiger, senior pastor of Mariners Church, joins me to talk about what actually brings leaders down, the personal and systemic reasons for moral failure, and why a lot of us end up preaching to our own sin.
Plus, we discuss how to disappoint the staff you used to work directly with without losing them as your church grows. If you lead people, listen in.
The church has a Cambridge problem
Christians can criticize affirmative action and DEI hires all they want, but the continued employment of disqualified pastors in the pulpit is the church’s own form of an employment program.
Firing a Pastor Can Wound More Than the Person Behind the Pulpit
Before leaders force a pastor from the pulpit, they need to understand what their decision could set in motion.
The vestry of a church that I helped to plant and pioneer unwisely tried to force the resignation of the church's rector, causing a church split and halting the remarkable growth of the church. The church never recovered from this loss of momentum in its growth.8 Things a Pastor Should Never Say From the Pulpit
Trust is difficult to build and remarkably easy to lose.
Barna’s 2026 research found that people place more confidence in local, familiar Christian leaders than in distant or celebrity figures. That makes every sermon an opportunity to strengthen trust or quietly weaken it.
Bill Gates fears world leaders are unprepared for 3 major AI risks: 'Stunted' child development, emboldened criminals, and vanishing jobs for Gen Z
Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft turned billionaire philanthropist, is a self-professed optimist when it comes to artificial intelligence. He’s had a front-row seat to its greatest advancements and believes it will help cure diseases and address inequality.
But in a new essay published today, Gates strikes a decidedly more cautious tone: “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he writes in the essay, shared with Fortune ahead of publication. “The challenge is monumental.”
Also See: Trump EPA aims to exempt datacenters from disclosing air pollution, advocates warnMost religious youth say media's portrayal of faith, spirituality is inaccurate: study
While a majority of religious youth admit to consuming religious content online and using it to explore their faith, most still list local faith leaders and their parents as the sources they trust most to handle questions about spirituality, according to a new study published by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA.
In The Future of Faith: Young People, Media, & Spirituality, researchers led by Yalda T. Uhls, who is an adjunct professor in UCLA’s Department of Psychology, found that a majority of religious youth in Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, and Generation Alpha, those born in the early 2010s to mid-2020s, said portrayals of their faith and spirituality in media were not accurate.
Signs Your Church Is Trapped in the Consumerism Cycle
Is your church full of attendees but short on disciples? In episode 350 of the Church Revitalization Podcast, Scott and A.J. dig into one of the most common and quietly damaging patterns in church life: the consumerism cycle. They walk through three concrete red flags that signal your congregation may be consuming church rather than contributing to it, and then offer a practical framework for shifting the culture toward ownership and discipleship.
When Reading Declines, Discipleship Suffers
In 2024, Rose Horowitch observed that college students at elite universities struggle to read books. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” she wrote. “It’s that they don’t know how.” That will affect how well members of our churches can read and comprehend their Bibles.
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