by | Sep 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
The pandemic revealed spiritual immaturity, simmering polarization, and unexpected resiliency.
The pandemic was a crucible that revealed underlying political and personal anxieties, as well as congregational strengths and weaknesses in many churches. COVID-19 stripped away the familiar and became The Great Revealer for church leaders.
Consequently, it enabled leaders to learn important lessons about their churches, themselves, and their ministries. While this theme only appeared in three responses to our initial quantitative survey, it repeatedly surfaced again and again in our qualitative work in focus groups, in interviews, in community case studies.
Ultimately, in the eyes of many pastoral leaders the pandemic did not manufacture new problems out of thin air. Instead, like a massive weight placed on a structurally unsound building or bridge, COVID revealed already existing cracks and flaws in American churches. Examinations of engineering disasters—collapsed buildings or bridges—usually uncover a series of mistakes and errors, compounded by decades of neglect, and a system of underlying problems that were repeatedly overlooked or explained away. The same is true in many American churches.
Based on Chapter 3 of the report, in this episode host Aaron Hill (editor of ChurchSalary) sits down with two researchers from the Arbor Research Group, S. Michael Greene and Terry Linhart, to talk about the common experience of COVID-19 as a Great Revealer. Featuring two in-depth interviews with Dr. Lorenzo Neal and Benjamin Marsh, pastors who experienced firsthand revelations about both themselves and their churches during the pandemic.
Hosted by Aaron Hill, editor of ChurchSalary
“COVID and the Church” is produced in conjunction with the Arbor Research Group and funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., through …
Continue reading…
by | Sep 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
To survive COVID-19, leaders were forced to adapt at a relentless and unpredictable pace.
The declaration of a worldwide pandemic in March 2020 and the cascade of health policies that followed forced pastors and congregations to rapidly respond. Because no churches wrote “close our doors” in their three-year goals, everyone had to learn quickly and make adjustments simply to survive.
In his article on power, privilege, and adaptive leadership in 2020, Todd Bolsinger framed the crisis in two phases: “First is the acute phase where you’re just trying to survive.” Second, is “the adaptive phase, where you actually use the energy of the crisis to address underlying issues.”
What’s clear in our research is that almost all churches faced acute changes because state and local restrictions, building arrangements and church demographics are different, the changes that everyone made were different as well.
What’s less clear is whether churches actually adapted to how people live post-pandemic, and whether those changes will last.
Based on Chapter 2 of the report, in this episode host Aaron Hill (editor of ChurchSalary) sits down with two researchers from the Arbor Research Group, Ebonie Davis and Jon Swanson, to talk about the common experience of adapting in order to survive. Featuring an in-depth interview with Eric Blauer, a local pastor leading a church in the Pacific Northwest, about his experience of rapid adaptation during the pandemic.
Hosted by Aaron Hill, Editor of ChurchSalary
“COVID and the Church” is produced in conjunction with the Arbor Research Group and funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., through a grant from the Economic Challenges Facing Pastoral Leaders (ECFPL) initiative.
Executive produced by Aaron Hill, Terry Linhart, and Matt Stevens
Director for CT …
Continue reading…
by | Sep 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
Even by the standards of other missionaries, the Irish woman’s ministry to sexually exploited children was intrepid.
Kneeling bedside, three-year-old Amy Carmichael begged God to make her eyes blue. Sadly, for the toddler, the prayer didn’t spark a miracle.
But decades later as a grown woman, after she had left Ireland to make her home in the then-British occupied India, she remembered her prayer as a child. With her fair skin, she would never truly blend in with the locals. But her brown eyes matched those of the people she lived among—and that was one less distraction when trying to build relationships as a missionary.
Carmichael moved to India at the age of 27 and never left. Much of her ministry was marked by disrupting cultural norms on temple prostitution. Her prayer life, a constant of her ministry and well-documented in her books and personal writings, revealed her boldness, stubbornness, and grit in circumstances that deeply challenged her—characteristics she needed in her efforts to share the love of Christ with hundreds of women and children over her lifetime.
“Go ye”
The oldest of seven children, Amy Carmichael (1867–1951) was raised in a well-to-do Christian family in Millisle, Northern Ireland. She came to faith in Christ as a teenager while attending a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school in Yorkshire, England. But her time at school was cut short when she was forced to return home due to her family’s financial difficulties.
The family moved to Belfast for business, where her father died of pneumonia. Carmichael threw herself into serving others, beginning with her siblings—a pattern of self-sacrifice that would carry through to her dying day. Such hardships caused Carmichael to cling to the Word and cry out to God in prayer, not only for comfort but for practical help.
Continue reading…
by | Sep 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
God will be faithful to our children, and we can trust him no matter where they go to school.
I never intended to homeschool our kids. When we started, it wasn’t for religious reasons. Well, maybe a little. In our rural district, my kindergartner had an hourlong bus ride to school, which meant she was gone from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days a week. It was a good school, and she had a great teacher. But she was so tired when she got home that there was little room for the family discipleship I envisioned I would do.
We decided to try homeschooling—just her and just for a year. But as we prepped our second child for kindergarten, some red flags flew up around his health and learning needs, and we decided that it might be easier to homeschool both that school year. After that, the rhythm of homeschooling just fit with our family. My husband ’s job has seasons of intense hours as well as seasons of more time at home, and we were able to customize our family life around that fluctuation.
People often asked us if we would always homeschool. I’d say we were going “kid by kid, year by year.” Homeschooling felt like a big curve ball God threw our way. I didn’t dare presume I knew what God had for us next.
That’s not to say I came easily to a posture of trust and humility around schooling decisions. I went through my arrogant phase, my exasperated phase, and a phase where I hit my stride. But in education discussions with fellow parents and others in our community, I found that it was often Christians—sometimes even myself—who showed little grace, no matter which side they were defending. I was an arrogant public-school mom, turned an arrogant homeschool mom, turned a humbled let-the-Lord-lead mom. That final phase was hard won, and it’s one I hope to help other …
Continue reading…
by | Sep 29, 2023 | Uncategorized
New position on ordination and titles pushed some “beyond where their convictions would allow them to go.”
Eight congregations have broken away from the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) over the denomination’s decision to ordain women and allow them to carry the title of “pastor.”
The change was approved by a majority of delegates at the Alliance’s general council in June, after several years of discussion. According to an internal study, it is supported by more than 60 percent of the denomination of about 414,000 people.
Women in the Alliance could previously be “consecrated” to ministry and serve as “Consecrated Women of God,” even preaching and teaching in Sunday services, at the discretion of local churches. The Alliance has a history of encouraging women to preach and sending them to plant churches while still placing restrictions on their “ecclesial authority.” The updated polity maintains this distinction and does not allow women to serve as elders or senior pastors in CMA churches. The consecration process will now result in ordination.
“We take a rather unique centrist position in our polity on this issue,” CMA vice president Terry Smith told CT. “For some, this stretched beyond where their convictions would allow them to go.”
The elders at Alliance Bible Fellowship in Boone, North Carolina, voted unanimously to separate in July.
“This decision was not easy. In fact, it grieves us,” senior pastor Scott Andrews said. “Our hearts are grieved to see the direction that we believe the CMA is taking that we just cannot follow.”
Andrews called the change “a significant step toward egalitarianism, which eliminates any gender distinction in the roles of men and women in the church.”
The church is one of the …
Continue reading…
