What Mega-Pastors Think

Leadership Network recently conducted a survey of 232 pastors of churches with an average weekend worship attendance of at least 2,000. Here's what they said:

They think of themselves more as teachers and directional leaders than as pastors.
Preaching tops the list of things they do best.
They haven't always worked in churches.
Being an extrovert isn't mandatory.
Family stays at the top of mind when it comes to prayers.
They usually like the people they work with.
They believe their top gift is leadership.
They are actively involved in sports.
They find worship at their church helpful for personal spiritual growth.
They're not thinking about quitting.

HT Ed Stetzer

More Mistakes

A good article by another American mega-church leader I have never heard of!

The top 3 leadership mistakes made by Stovall Weems:

Mistake #1: Allowing Ministry “Business” to Affect My Personal Time with God
Mistake #2: Not Being Me
Mistake #3: Over Committing

Click here to read the rest.

Mission

The latest edition of the 9 Marks ejournal is available here - all about mission.

From the editors note:

A country can only export what it manufactures. That's a pretty basic principle. But now apply that principle to the topic of missions: if generations of American churches have been characterized by pragmatic church growth principles, what would you expect to see characterizing their overseas missions endeavors?

Okay, so maybe American missions work is driven by the same kind of pragmatism that characterizes so many American churches. Is that really such a big deal? Well, stop and consider the differences between planting pragmatically-driven churches in America versus planting them in most Majority World contexts. Such churches in America have the luxury of building themselves upon the foundations of a culture imbued with several hundred years of Christian influence and ethical norms. Fill a room with nominal Christians, as pragmatically-driven churches do, and you still have a dame that looks half way
decent. She'll dress up alright.

Now build that same church with those same pragmatic principles, yielding once again a room filled with nominal Christians, but do it in a country with strong traditions in polygamy, or animal sacrifice, or ancestor worship, or Islamic chauvinism, or Hindu castes, or nepotistic social structures, or so on. Build it on the shoulders of leaders who didn't grow up in Sunday School and were not groomed in seminary classrooms with tall genealogical trees, where orthodoxy, even if it's doubted, has been defended in book after book after book. What should we expect of this church? I've been around the Majority World block enough times to suspect something very different, indeed.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 15. Jesus before ministry

‘I want to know Christ…’ (Phil. 3:10)
One day our ministries will be over. We may lose our health or even our husband or wife. What will we have then? Don’t live for your ministry – live for Jesus – that I might know him.

And so we come to the last of my reflections on my fathers reflections on 40 years in ministry – and it must end with this, that it really is all about Jesus.

Much of what sells itself as the gospel these days seems barely to give a nod to the author of that gospel. It is all health and wealth and wacky experiences and sorting out your self-image. Too much of it is about sticking a band-aid on the obvious problems of humanity rather than performing the radical heart surgery that is really required, but not always so obvious.

All of us can be drawn astray from a focus on the Savior to a focus on our ministry, and how well we are scoring compared to our peers. Too many of us get our sense of identity from what we do rather than from who we are.

Faithful under-shepherds of Christ do not fall into these errors. They preach Christ and follow Christ and keep their focus on Christ. They know that the measure that counts is not so much how we are measured by popular opinion in this life, but how we are measured by Christ in eternity.

We will be measured by what we treasure, so let us treasure Christ over all.