I recently finished an interesting book that I found really insightful. Change Your Church For Good by Brad Powell is a true story about a pastor who took over a dying, struggling church and with God’s help transformed it into one of the largest churches in Detroit. I had the priviliedge a few years ago of attending this church. They had several thousand people in attendance and it was only one of four weekend service times.

The book does a good job of extensively covering a lot of basic information about church life and where it is today. Some of it I had heard before, but there were a few really insightful chapters. One of the chapters I found insightful was titled “There Will Be Casualties.” In other words, anytime you step out on faith to dramatically change the way you do church, you can expect to have short-term losse before you reap the long-term gains. I believe that this is an important message for pastors to hear as many of them live in gridlook afraid to rock the boat and lose faithful tithers. Wether they realize it or not, the tithers begin to play more of an important role then what God says to do.

The other section of the book that I found to be insightful was the realization that good and spiritual people can disagree. Just becuase two people have differences in opinion does not mean that one is right and one is wrong. It doesn’t even mean that one is spiritual and one is not. Ultimately, the pastor as the shepherd is responsible. He needs to seek godly counsel, but also be in tune to what God has laid on his heart.