Our articles encourage, educate, and equip church leaders as they serve Christ at their churches.
May 1, 2024Watermark Resources
Life Is Short
Number your days Memento Mori: “Remember you will die.” While it might seem morbid, it’s also profoundly biblical, and it has the potential to change everything about how we live and how we lead. Moses, a man who literally buried a nation, said in Psalm 90:12, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Encounters with death remind us that life is short, and remembering that life is short helps us to live wisely. These are a few things that will change when you truly take this understanding to heart:
Spiritual Formation
Church Leadership
Jan 23, 2024Watermark Resources
Show Your Wounds To Share Your Savior
Leading with your failures When we meet someone new, we tend to put our best foot forward, emphasizing our life’s highlights and accomplishments: I’m an engineer. I went to UT. I’m married with three kids. Most of us don’t lead out with our all-time lowest moments or biggest failures. But what if we did?
Care & Recovery
Discipleship
Apr 14, 2023John McGee
How To Lead Through Crisis
What would a great leader do? A crisis is the perfect time to ask, “What would a great leader do?” It would be nice to always lead in a predictable environment where things go the way that they’re supposed to. But that’s not how things work. Life is full of storms, and in many ways, the way you respond to them defines you as a leader. Remember, leaders only exist because problems exist that need fixing!
Church Leadership
Dec 9, 2022Watermark Resources
How To Measure Success
4 Questions to Measure Ministry Success Christ doesn’t just call his followers to live differently than the rest of the world, but also to measure success differently. This has serious implications for anyone in vocational ministry.
Discipleship
Church Leadership
Dec 9, 2022Watermark Resources
Top 12 2023 Church Leadership Recommended Books
Top recommended books from our staff Friends, are you ready for 2023? We’ve been reflecting on 2022 and gearing up for the year to come. Below are 12 of the top recommended books from our staff. The topics range from theology, to spiritual formation, leadership, and even sociological. We hope these resources will help you as you prepare for another faithful year in ministry!
Spiritual Formation
Church Leadership
Dec 5, 2022Watermark Resources
4 Ways To Care For And Enrich Marriages In Your Church
How to serve marriages in your church It would be impossible to list all the books, retreats, programs, and ministries that exist to serve married couples in the church. It’s appropriate and good that we emphasize this area of care. But the sheer number of options can become overwhelming, and choosing how to best help marriages in each situation takes wisdom and discernment.
Marriage
Church Leadership
Nov 22, 2022Watermark Resources
Marriages Are Your Greatest Discipleship Opportunity
Your biggest discipleship opportunity As church leaders, we know the importance of serving married couples. God has established the importance of marriage, and from a practical perspective, married couples comprise the majority of most congregations. But when serving marriages, we tend to set our sights far too low. Marriage ministry often gets relegated to its own bubble, separate from the overall spiritual shepherding of the church. If this is your church's reality, you are missing out on what is likely your biggest discipleship opportunity.
Marriage
Discipleship
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
Dec 20, 2021John McGee
10 Marriage Ministry Mistakes
Mistakes we've observed When I first started working in marriage ministry nearly 20 years ago, I admittedly did not know what I was doing. I was a young guy at a young church that didn’t even have a marriage ministry before I got there. Experience is a great teacher, and I’ve since learned a lot from mistakes—both mistakes I’ve made myself, and lessons learned from other marriage ministers who have shared their stories with me.
Marriage
Church Leadership
