By Ruben Swint, Ministry Partner with The Columbia Partnership
Voice: 404.314.7273, E-mail: RSwint@TheColumbiaPartnership.org, Web Site: www.TheColumbiaPartnership.org
How are you carrying out and paying for ministry these days? The financial world you live in makes that a tough assignment. You have a volatile stock market, historically high unemployment, tightened bank lending, a Gulf oil spill disaster, possible collapse of the European economic union, and many surveys that indicate church giving fell in 2008, in 2009, and is continuing to fall in 2010. In this article I revisit what I recommended in the Summer 2003 edition of the NACBA LEDGER, in response to similar conditions of 2001 and 2002.
Continue reading "Brilliant Ministry in a Struggling Economy" »
Perennial churches who have grown and stayed vital for at least 25-30 years are more about lasting than starting, God's kingdom than techniques or tricks-of-the-trade, magnetism than magnitude, leading than mimicking. [p. 2] --Robert Dale in Cultivating Perennial Churches with Chalice Press' TCP Leadership Series, 2008. [See book at 
"What happens when a person's values change? What happens when a person no longer values the things he once valued? What happens when a person finds meaning, fulfillment, purpose, and deep joy in other 'things,' such as seeing a person gain free access to and from his home for the first time in years because he now has a wheelchair ramp? Or hears a woman who has never had running water tell of her first indoor warm-water bath? Or sees fellow believers discover their ability to make a lasting different in the lives of strangers, yet neighbors, in their community? What happens then?." [p. 9] --David Crocker in The Samaritan Way with Chalice Press' TCP Leadership Series, 2008. [See book at 
"In a global world, the borderlands are actually the places where Christian faith, other faiths, and unfaith intersect." [p. 5] --Gary Nelson in Borderland Churches with Chalice Press' TCP Leadership Series, 2008. [See book at 
