Our articles encourage, educate, and equip church leaders as they serve Christ at their churches.
Nov 19, 2022Watermark Resources
How To Be An Excellent Manager
3 keys for managers We talk a lot about church leadership, but not enough about management. Sure, there’s a lot of overlap between the two, but there are also some key distinctions. Leaders can rally people with big visions, but they wouldn’t get very far without managers to execute them. A manager’s job boils down to three things:
Church Leadership
Nov 11, 2022Watermark Resources
Finding Your Voice: How God Has Wired You to Lead and Communicate
Guidelines for finding your voice Inspiring leaders—the ones whose words stay with you—tend to have a good sense of their own communication styles. Whether they’re preaching a sermon, leading a prayer, or just chatting with a colleague, they lean into the ways God has gifted them, and the result is powerful.
Church Leadership
Nov 2, 2022Watermark Resources
How To Help Marriages In Your Church
You Don’t Need a PhD to Help Marriages in Your Church As believers, we know that healing belongs to the Lord. Yet often we focus on our part as his instruments, leading to feelings of inadequacy. God’s people have struggled with these feelings throughout recorded history, as we see in Exodus 3 and 4 when Moses protests that he isn’t the best man for the job God has commanded him to do.
Marriage
Church Leadership
Oct 26, 2022Watermark Resources
How To Counsel Couples Who Have Filed For Divorce
Divorce is heartbreakingly common in the church Since marriage depicts Christ’s union with the church, divorce is one of the most visceral illustrations of sin’s destruction. There’s a reason divorce is widely considered one of the most stressful and painful life events; Christianity is built on God’s unbreakable covenant to us, a love beautifully pictured in the covenant relationship of marriage. Severing a covenant union is never God’s best, and the consequences are always devastating.
Marriage
Care & Recovery
Oct 6, 2022Watermark Resources
The First Steps To Starting A Marriage Ministry
What we've learned the past 14 years Church marriage ministries offer on-ramps into your church for people who might never otherwise come. They establish an authentic and healthy foundation for families and relationships in your body, and they address an obvious and heartbreaking need, as couples within the church continue to separate and divorce at rates comparable to those outside it. But deciding to serve married couples is the easy part; figuring out how to start a marriage ministry is much more complicated. You don’t need any special credentials to do this work--God equips the people he calls--but it does take wisdom and planning. Based on what we’ve learned over the past 14 years running our own marriage ministry, Re|engage, here are the steps you shouldn’t skip:
Marriage
Church Leadership
Jun 13, 2021Watermark Resources
Sharing The Pastoral Load
You don't have to do it alone One of the privileges of church leadership is that the lost sheep often come to you. You don’t always have to seek out the broken person on the side of the road in order to be a good Samaritan. You get to show God’s love to them.
Discipleship
Church Leadership
May 10, 2021Watermark Resources
Why Budgeting Isn’t About The Numbers
Budgeting that honors God
Church Leadership
Mar 29, 2021Watermark Resources
The Hard Work Of Hiring
A high-stakes game This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership, including how we handle church membership, why we don’t pass an offering plate, and why we have boring annual reviews.
Church Leadership
Mar 15, 2021Watermark Resources
Why We Have Boring Annual Reviews
A different perspective on reviews *This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership, including how we handle church membership and why we don’t pass an offering plate.
Church Leadership
Jan 25, 2021Watermark Resources
Why Church Membership Matters
Membership should mean something This is part of a series that provides examples of how you can manage different details of church leadership. You can read about why we don’t pass an offering plate here.
Discipleship
Church Leadership
Dec 20, 2020Watermark Resources
How God Used Re:generation To Change My Church
Follow in Jesus’ footsteps A few years ago, the church I helped to start, and pastor for twenty-one years, was full of people struggling to keep themselves together. I was no exception. All of us were scraping by, feeling defeated, drowning in discouragement, and seemingly broken beyond repair. Many of us had shattered our lives and thrown away our dreams. Our church was messy, confused, and in desperate need of restoration. Thankfully, the Lord was not done with us.
Care & Recovery
Discipleship
Dec 14, 2020Watermark Resources
More Than Fetching Coffee
Reinvent the internship For most people, the word internship conjures up images of fetching coffee, sorting through filing cabinets, or inputting data into spreadsheets. Even in church circles, internships often amount to nothing more than busy work and the occasional planning meeting. Interns typically fill the role of “doing whatever the full-time staff don’t want to do themselves.” And sadly, opportunities like this often leave both interns and the churches they serve at wanting for more.
Discipleship
Church Leadership
Dec 3, 2020Watermark Resources
Draw A Circle Around Yourself
You can only change yourself When conflict arises, is it ever your fault? It’s easy to see the mistakes of others or recognize their flaws. After all, the problem is literally staring you in the face. Your spouse is the reason your marriage is in shambles. Your friend is the one who started the argument. Your child is rebelling against your authority. That church Member is being unreasonable. And so on. It’s always somebody else’s fault; someone else is always the source of the problem.
Discipleship
Spiritual Formation
