Author name: Charles Stone

Are your Sermons Falling Flat? Is this Why?

Every week in North America, pastors preach upwards of 400,000 sermons. That excludes Bible studies taught by hundreds of thousands of Sunday school teachers and small group leaders. I’ve delivered in excess of 1,500 sermons and bible studies myself. But what difference have they made in people’s lives? Do they mostly fall flat? I suppose I […]

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Six Ways to Encourage your Pastor

Being a pastor is a high calling, yet pastors often face loneliness and discouragement. Surprisingly, some surveys reveal that up to 80% of pastors face regular discouragement in ministry. If that statistic even remotely reflects reality, then your pastor probably needs your encouragement. Yet, it seems so rare. The influential writer Henry Nouwen even wrote

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What do Toilet Repairs and Leadership Composure have in Common?

I learned a lesson about leadership composure from an unlikely source. Several years ago I had scheduled a plumber to fix minor leaks in some toilets in our home as we prepared to sell our house. My wife was to meet the plumber in my absence and give him the instructions I had given her. At about

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Personal Identity: Three Probing Questions Pastors should Ask Themselves

Some time back I sat in a local McDonalds working on one of my books on a section on personal identity. I had set my iPhone to remind me to pause and be still each day at 10am and 3pm. I don’t always stop, but that day I did and read a portion of Pete Scazzaro’s book, Emotionally

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Critics: Stay Away or Draw Close to Them?

Criticism hurts, especially the non-constructive kind. We tend to stay away from such critics. But is that the wisest choice? Should we draw close to them instead of pulling away from them? In this post I explore the idea of not shunning your critics. Murray Bowen, the father of family systems, coined the phrase “non-anxious

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