Articles for Topic: Congregational Life

How Do We Evaluate Performance?

By John Wimberly Almost everyone dreads the annual performance review that remains a ritual in most congregations. The employee wonders if it will be fair. If the pastor performs reviews of staff, she or he wonders if the results will be toxic for the relationship...

Devotional Thought

By Martin B. Copenhaver Rebekah called her younger son Jacob and said to him, “Your brother is consoling himself by planning to kill you… Flee at once to my brother Laban in Haran, and stay with him a while—until your brother’s anger against you turns...

Young adults challenging traditional church membership concepts

By Jeff Brumley The value and purpose of church membership is becoming an increasingly hot topic in Baptist and other congregations these days. And that’s “hot” as in controversial and heated, not popular. And it’s one that occasionally pits older and younger...

Welcome to the church of ‘holy chaos’

Alban Weekly, April 2015 On a cold, rainy day in early March, a 30-something man walked into the sanctuary at the Haywood Street Congregation for the Wednesday midday service with a shaggy mixed-breed dog on a leash. Dark-haired and bearded, dressed in a brown T-shirt...