Nashville : B & H

What marks most pastors who come to our ministry is their brokenness. In every case, pastors resigning from their church are broken, beaten, and discouraged. Pastorless churches are a paradoxical development in the United States. While plenty of clergy abound in the US, fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.

Turnaround And Beyond consist of eight chapters that are intended to provide the reader with practical insights and principles from men and women who have led their congregations through renewal. Crandall stresses the importance of leadership right from the start. It is implied that a successful renewal is dependent on how well a congregation is led throughout the process. He analyzes principles from the business world, the Bible, and Church

Between 1820 and 1860, Americans constructed 40,000 new churches compared to the 10,000 they constructed in the 40 years before 1820. At the end of the revival period, ”one-third of all Americans attended church regularly.”(P.400) Many of the early revival preachers embraced Christian evangelicalism, the established groups sought to take advantage of the popular enthusiasm to build their particular denominations. Methodists and the Baptists established themselves as leading American denominations as a result of the Second Great Awakening. The two faiths had a mutual sense of affinity with regard to doctrine, but the Baptists created a radically decentralized hierarchy that empowered local ministers and individual churches.

First Baptist of Pontotoc, Mississippi, is a hundred and forty-six year old church that is full of history. This paper will provide a brief background of the church history. Over the last four years, three immoral staff members of First Baptist Church of Pontotoc have been contributing factors to the church 's decline.

ii. African Methodist Episcopal Church went from 100,000 to 400,000 in the first decade after

A church whose pastor and others in leadership have failed to put in place a proactive plan for discipleship for Believers is usually a “growing” church — growing stagnant, growing cold, growing spiritually immature Christians, and eventually, many growing closed. Patte said, “There is much at stake in accepting or rejecting the challenge of discipleship…” When a pastor or a church makes a conscious decision to make discipleship of Believers a primary focus in their

This megachange, makes people desperately to look for a secure place to keep changes away; a kind of safe heavenly place where the past will dwell forever. Robert Dale put it in this way: “Change, often viewed as a threat to traditional forms of faith, causes some churches to sprint frantically back into the past in search of security”. . Unfortunately, more churches preferred to choose the path leading to stagnation and slow death rather than to rise up and to reconsider their unique function in the world.

In 1993 Pastor John Kilpatrick initiated prayer for revival for the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. Since its establishment in 1939, the church has had a reputation for integrity, a church where holiness has been preached, prayer has been central, and it has a heart for the nations. The prayer initiative with Pastor Kilpatrick leading resulted in the beginning of the Pensacola Outpouring or the Brownsville Revival on Father’s Day 1995. Steve Hill, a missionary-evangelist, preached about revival and gave an invitation for prayer. To everyone’s amazement the Holy Spirit gave a powerful deposit of God’s presence. As the news about the revival spread, people flocked from around the world. The church leadership was surprised but

In downtown Roanoke, on Church Avenue, an old church building still stands, having been erected over one hundred years earlier. For the same period of time, it has been occupied by a congregation, whose denominational origins lead back to a rural part of Kentucky in what was called the Restoration Movement, initiated by reformers who yearned for a primitive, apostolic form of Christianity, with “no creed but Christ.” Although “backcountry” in the denomination’s heritage, this particular congregation began in a boomtown. While striving to become a “first century” church, reminiscent of the apostles’ ministries and the church life from

The author discovered four major factors that church growth in the North American Division tremendously. First factor is empowering servant leadership. In this section, the leaders work hard and they are willing to make sacrifice in the purpose to see a growing church. The second one is passionate and authentic spirituality they believe that it is spirituality that is the source of passion of passion and power behind their effectiveness. The third point is about how their members are committed to get involved in different activity. Some churches they not growing because they expect their pastors to do all the duties of the church. The fourth factor about a growing church is God exalting worship. Worship is one of key factor for church growth.

According to Bill Hull, “While certain pockets of evangelicalism have grown, overall, the church is in a decline. Many congregations can attest to Hull’s assessment, in that, churches in America are indeed experiencing sharp declines in its numbers of baptisms and church attendance. Over

Stetzer and Dodson in their book Comeback Churches where they found out that a church grows exponentially at its beginning, it then enters a plateau stage and finally it begins to decline. It shows that there is an increasing trend of the un-churched people. The book Comeback Churches outlines the measures that the churches at a plateau stage should put in place so that they begin to grow again and never decline. The book identifies five important tools to rejuvenate the church, intentional evangelism, vibrant faith, leadership, lay ministry and celebrating but orderly worship (Stetzer and Mike

A sentiment common to almost any organization is that the one fact that remains constant is change. As society changes, and human understanding grows, any organization that maintains a static posture, assures its demise. Churches and Christian organizations are no exception. The gospel may remain the same, but the method for communicating it must speak to the audience to assure understanding. The Christian leader must be prepared to meet this challenge by incorporating an effective model for change into his theology of leadership in order to keep the ministry relevant and effective. Searching for such a change agent can prove to be challenging as well. To aid in this search, four

Pope Francis was encountered with a church experiencing loss of client involvement, reduction in attendance, and in some marketplaces adverse business development. There

A return to diversity clearly benefits the ex-churched mostly; however, even they tend to view the Church sentimentally as a old haunt. The ex-churched resist attending church on a weekly basis, yet do not desire meaningful liturgical reform for they consider the Church as the custodian of their earliest childhood memories of church life. Ultimately, the ex-churched share the same faulty religious conditioning as their well-churched cousins. Both constituencies thereby define modern renditions of Biblical Tradition as vulgar and crass, which in turn, inspires status quos inside dying parishes to claim further support from outside the Church.