Let's Do Something A friend of mine, I’ll call him John because that’s his name, decided to leave the consulting firm where he and I worked years ago, and on the day before his departure, an executive of the firm did one of those wonderful “exit interviews” with him. ...
Evangelization and Discipleship in the "Workplace" No, this short essay is not about bringing Jesus to the secular world, as crucial as that is. What I’m thinking about is the workplace that we call a parish. If parishes are ever going to teach people how to bring...
Something remarkably simple happened recently, and I want to share it with every parish in the world. I was at a convocation of priests recently where a handful of pastors who had attended The Amazing Parish conference presented to their peers many of the practices...
A friend of mine who works in a parish recently asked me to help him assess how well his parish was doing in regard to what it learned during the Amazing Parish Conference. I responded by asking him a series of questions which provides something of a self-assessment...
I was out of town a few weekends ago at one of those youth sports extravaganzas in Reno, Nevada. Between games, my son and I found a Catholic Church and went to Mass. Now, I like to go to parishes that I’ve never visited, or even heard of, because it gives me a sense...
In the process of helping pastors and their teams try to build amazing parishes, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a real problem in the Church that isn’t being properly addressed. It seems to be a somewhat sensitive issue, one that is easy to avoid, but it...
So many of the leaders I work with, whether they are pastors or corporate executives, have something of an obsession with retention, and a corresponding fear of attrition. For pastors, this is a fear of losing staff members, volunteers or parishioners, while CEOs fear...