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How to Inspire and Equip the Members of Your Church to Love and Serve Their Community
Every pastor wants to impact their local community.
But pastors make up a small subset of the entire church, and many find themselves stretched too thin — especially now.
More than four out of five pastors tell Barna they prefer lay initiatives to new church programs, but fewer than one in 10 pastors is confident that their church is good at developing new leaders.
If you’re looking for ways to inspire and equip the people in your church to share God’s love with your community, we’d be honored to help.
Together with our partners at Lutheran Hour Ministries, we’ve set out to answer questions such as:
- What possibilities exist in the gifts of church members?
- What motivates Christians to make a hopeful difference in their neighborhoods?
- What’s the most fruitful way of connecting individual Christians with a heart for their neighbors to their community?
- How do you build trust in communities where Christians and the Church don’t have a great reputation?
- What’s the role of congregations and ministry leaders in this effort?
We’ve combined careful research with insights from ministry leaders and packaged them all in a report called:
Better Together: How Christians Can Be a Welcome Influence in Their Neighborhoods.
You can raise up leaders in your congregation who will make a positive difference in the community.
It’s challenging work, but the results can be life changing — because in life and in ministry, we really are better together.
A new, deeper look into the lives and minds of today’s young people.
In 2016, Barna and Impact 360 Institute joined forces to conduct the first major national study of Gen Z—the generation born between 1999 and 2015.
At that time, even the oldest members of Gen Z were barely 17, and the youngest had just been born.
That’s why Barna and Impact 360 Institute have teamed up once again—to check back in with this developing generation and to drill down on three new areas:
1. Gen Z's emotional lives
2. Their relationship with technology
3. How they feel about faith and practice it
If you work with 13 to 21 year olds in any capacity…
If you have members of Gen Z in your family...
If you want to know how this generation could reshape the world and the church...
We strongly encourage you to read this report.
Inside, you’ll get to know this driven, informed, hopeful-but-skeptical, spiritually open, highly connected, anxious generation.
Plus you’ll learn strategies for loving and leading this often misunderstood group of young people.
Now a New York Times Bestseller!
As a college student he spent 16 days in the Pacific Ocean with five guys and a crate of canned meat. As a father he took his kids on a world tour to eat ice cream with heads of state. He made friends in Uganda, and they liked him so much he became the Ugandan consul. He pursued his wife for three years before she agreed to date him. His grades weren't good enough to get into law school, so he sat on a bench outside the Dean's office for seven days until they finally let him enroll.
Bob Goff has become something of a legend, and his friends consider him the world's best-kept secret. Those same friends have long insisted he write a book. What follows are paradigm shifts, musings, and stories from one of the world's most delightfully engaging and winsome people. What fuels his impact? Love. But it's not the kind of love that stops at thoughts and feelings. Bob's love takes action. Bob believes Love Does.
When Love Does, life gets interesting. Each day turns into a hilarious, whimsical, meaningful chance that makes faith simple and real. Each chapter is a story that forms a book, a life. And this is one life you don't want to miss.
Light and fun, unique and profound, the lessons drawn from Bob's life and attitude just might inspire you to be secretly incredible, too.
Endorsements:
"If this book does not make your heart beat faster, book the next flight to Mayo Clinic!" --Bill Hybels, Senior Pastor, Willow Creek Community Church, Chairman, Willow Creek Association
"Bob Goff is a one-man tsunami of grace, a hurricane of love. He doesn't just talk about change, he really is change, as Love Does chronicles in such a vivid way. Yet, Love Does doesn't leave you feeling like you want to celebrate its author, it awakens a sense deep within that you, too, have an outrageous role to play in God's unfolding story or rescue and repair." --Louie Giglio, Passion Conferences/Passion City Church
"An interesting and compelling story (with Young Life roots) that ends with a practical challenge and punch: 'love does' and God can use you to do it!" --Denny Rydberg, President, Young Life
"Every once in a while someone like Bob Goff shows up to remind us that some things matter a lot more than others. Love Does has a kind of 'north star' effect that will push you to refocus your life and energy on what is most significant. It doesn't just invite you to respond with your God-given potential, it invites you to become a part of what God can do beyond your potential." --Reggie Joiner, Founder and CEO of Orange
"We liked the book a lot. Mostly, the balloons on the cover. The rest was pretty good too. Lots of stories about how God helps us." --Aedan, Asher and Skye Peterson ages 13, 12 and 9
"This may look like a book. It's not. It is an invitation to enter into the greatest adventure you have ever known-your life as it was meant to be lived. Hang on!" --Michael Hyatt, Author, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, MichaelHyatt.com
"Bob's ability to love people brings contagious hope and inspiration wherever he goes. The power of love showcased in this book will surely touch the hearts and souls of many people. Read Love Does and find a friend in one the world's best hidden secrets, a person who shows how love can create connection and make a difference-even across oceans." --George Tsereteli, Deputy Chairman of the Parliament of Georgia (former Russian Republic)
During the Civil Rights movement, American churches confronted issues of racism that they had previously ignored. No church experienced this confrontation more sharply than the Methodist Church. When Methodists reunited their northern and southern halves in 1939, their new church constitution created a segregated church structure that posed significant issues for Methodists during the Civil Rights movement.
Of the six jurisdictional conferences that made up the Methodist Church, only one was not based on a geographic region: the Central Jurisdiction, a separate conference for "all Negro annual conferences." This Jim Crow arrangement humiliated African American Methodists and embarrassed their liberal white allies within the church. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision awakened many white Methodists from their complacent belief that the church could conform to the norms of the South without consequences among its national membership.
Murray places the struggle of the Methodist Church within the broader context of the history of race relations in the United States. He shows how the effort to destroy the barriers in the church were mirrored in the work being done by society to end segregation. Immensely readable and free of jargon, Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930-1975, will be of interest to a broad audience, including those interested in the Civil Rights movement and American church history.
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?
Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books--Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.