Thom S. Rainer

Thom S. Rainer

Op-ed Contributor

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  • 5 Surprising Discoveries About Growing Churches

    5 Surprising Discoveries About Growing Churches

    Let's take a few moments and look at the churches whose average worship attendance grew from 2013 to 2016. Here are five of the surprising discoveries from this research.

  • Is There a Church Death Spiral?

    Is There a Church Death Spiral?

    I am troubled by one major aspect of the research we just conducted. If your church has fewer than 100 in worship, it is likely to be a declining church.

  • Dispelling the 80 Percent Myth of Declining Churches

    Dispelling the 80 Percent Myth of Declining Churches

    Have you ever heard, "80 percent of churches are either plateaued or declining"? I have. It's wrong. Here are the results of our research.

  • 5 Terrible Reasons to Enter Vocational Ministry

    5 Terrible Reasons to Enter Vocational Ministry

    I've seen too many people in vocational ministry fail to launch. Perhaps "launch" is not the best term, because they may stay in ministry for many years. But they never seem to do well.

  • 5 Overcorrection Mistakes Churches Make

    5 Overcorrection Mistakes Churches Make

    The pendulum swings in churches. The congregation does not like a previous direction, so they overcompensate with the next move they make.

  • Top 10 Questions Pastors Ask Me

    Top 10 Questions Pastors Ask Me

    I developed Church Answers to create a safe place for church leaders to ask questions and interact with each other. It was also the best way to handle the volume of inquiries that come to me.

  • 20 Relics of Church Past

    20 Relics of Church Past

    "What did you have or do in your church ten years ago that you don't have or do today?" The top twenty responses were, for me at least, a fascinating mix of the expected and the surprises.

  • 6 Stages of a Dying Church

    6 Stages of a Dying Church

    It's not a pleasant topic. But if we don't talk about dying churches, we will act like there are no problems.

  • 7 Personality Types of Sick Churches

    7 Personality Types of Sick Churches

    Sick churches become dying churches. Dying churches become closed churches. In order to help create greater awareness, I have described illustratively seven personality types of sick churches.

  • 6 Attitudes That Kill Evangelism in the Church

    6 Attitudes That Kill Evangelism in the Church

    There are several dangerous and debilitating attitudes in churches that are killing evangelism. Here are six of them

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