Surprise! It’s one of the missing ingredients in today’s church. Most church worship services and programs have become so predictable, so varnished, so rehearsed, and so scripted that any awe of God has been squeezed out. It seems there’s no time set aside for him to act. I’m all for good planning and preparation. But [...]

Is the church in a cool crisis? For the past several years many churches and their leaders have tried to out-cool one another. But, increasingly, we’re seeing signs that the cool thing may not be working.  We’ve seen the cool craze manifest itself in pastoral costuming (dirty jeans, untucked shirts, trendy facial hair), glitzy stage [...]

Was God there—or not? It depends on whom you ask. We love to ask that question. Every week we see regular people walk in off the street to engage in the stories and conversation at Lifetree Café locations across the country. The topics dig in to popular life issues—from loneliness to UFOs. The conversation always [...]

What do the non-churched and the de-churched want? We’ve been listening to a bunch of them. In the past few weeks we’ve met with agnostics, atheists, a Muslim, a former Wiccan high priestess, gang members, and people who have been hurt by the church. Want to know want they yearn for—that they have not found [...]

A powerful ministry tool lies dormant in most churches. It’s waiting for you to activate it. It’s hospitality. Most think they do it well. Very few do. This week I met a pastor who’s committed to transforming his church with a palpable embrace of hospitality. Knowing that Jesus exemplified hospitality in his ministry, Henry Brinton [...]

The people in our church don’t get it,” says the pastor. “They sit here on Sunday morning. I tell them to go out and share their faith. But they just sit there and do nothing.” The pastor is right. Most pew-sitters don’t talk about God during the week. It’s one of the reasons the church [...]

Rhonda is not a Christ-follower. After hearing her story I now know a bit more about her aversion to the church—and what we need to do to engage the millions like her. Last night Rhonda joined everyone else—believers and not-yet-believers—at our Loveland Lifetree Café location. The topic was “Conspiracies,” which attracted a very interesting assortment [...]

What if we started over? What if we erased everything we know about the organized church and its activities? What if we started simply with the scriptures—the Old and New Testaments—and our understanding of people and our present times? What might ministry look like? A few years ago, several of us did just that. After [...]