People are not on a truth quest; they are on a happiness quest. They will continue to attend your church - even if they don't share your beliefs - as long as they find the content engaging and helpful.
— Andy Stanley
There will be very few occasions when you are absolutely certain about anything. You will consistently be called upon to make decisions with limited information. That being the case, your goal should not be to eliminate uncertainty. Instead, you must develop the art of being clear in the face of uncertainty.
Preachers prepare with this fear: 'Am I going to be able to fill the time?' The audience never worries about that.
What people pray for will tell you more than anything else whether they are locked into the vision and priorities of the church.
The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.
You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.
A principle is a principle, and God created all the principles.
People pray in one direction but they walk in a different direction, and direction always determines where we end up.
God is a God of systems and predictability and order, and God honors planning.
Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.
When a plan or strategy fails, people are tempted to assume it was the wrong vision. Plans and strategies can always be changed and improved. But vision doesn't change. Visions are simply refined with time.
All Scripture is equally inspired, but not all Scripture is equally applicable or relevant to every stage of life.
Communicators need to figure out how well do they engage people, and they should not talk one word longer than people are engaged.
If you're a preacher's kid, you see the church differently.
Somehow, what's in our hearts, good or bad is eventually translated into words and deeds.
As a pastor, I've spent 30 years talking to people and heard every kind of story imaginable.
Leadership is all about taking people on a journey. The challenge is that most of the time, we are asking people to follow us to places we ourselves have never been.
Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.
Success means your options multiply. Size increases complexity, and complexity can confuse vision.
Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible - that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.
Preaching on Sunday mornings is such a simple thing, and by complicating it, I think we all do ourselves and the audience a disservice. It is very simple. Here is the model: Make people feel like they need an answer to a question.
The church wasn't an organization in the first century. They weren't writing checks or buying property. The church has matured and developed over the years. But for some reason, the last thing to change is the structure of leadership.
Greed is not a financial issue. It's a heart issue.
Most of us wake up every day and make decision that will make us happy, and generally decisions that will make us happy right then in the moment or that day. We are not really on a truth quest.
