Geoff Surratt
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What’s the Right Price for Preacher’s Sneakers?
The guilty pleasure the past few weeks has been the Instagram account @preachersnsneakers which posts pictures of popular pastors wearing expensive shoes (and other designer items) along with price tags. In less than a month the account has attached over 130,000 followers. Its so hot even the Wall Street Journal did an article about it. For…
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Kicking Camels on the Monday Before Easter
It’s the Monday before Easter, Super Bowl week for the local church. This weekend you will likely see more new faces at church than you’ve seen all year. You and the other leaders at your church are focused on creating the best experience possible for your guests, and praying that at least some will consider…
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Is your event a cul-de-sac or a roundabout?
We love living on a cul-de-sac. We know many of our neighbors, the grandkids can play in the street without a lot of concern and we never have cars speeding through the neighborhood. (If they did they’d wind up in our neighbors front yard.) Cul-de-sacs make a great destination, but a lousy thoroughfare. The opposite…
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The Power of Partial Credit
In America the quest is for the gold, the ring, the trophy. We want to stand on the podium and show the world what we’ve accomplished, to humbly receive the accolades, to thank everyone who helped us get here while knowing it we were really the ones who made it happen. There is no denying…
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Is This the Best a Man Can Get?
There has been a great deal of controversy around Gillette’s commercial in which they address “toxic masculinity” played out in a “boys will be boys” mindset, bullying and objectification of women. Whether you agree or disagree with the viewpoint of the commercial, I think it raises an important question for church leadership, “Is this the…
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The Roundabout Way
For a long time I had a model for the ideal journey of leader as a straight path from point A to point B. When I am in God’s will I am making steady progress down this clearly marked road, but when I find myself wandering it is a sign I’ve stepped outside his plan.…
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You can’t measure Gospel impact
For my pastor friends: I wonder how the speaker felt at the end of the service that night. She and a friend had been so moved by an encounter with the Holy Spirit they decided to travel from town to town in western Oklahoma, sharing the Gospel with whoever showed up. They didn’t own a…
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Should you start, fix or just trash that ministry, event or idea?
Two the hardest questions in leading in ministry are Should we start doing this new thing? Should we stop doing this old thing? The reason these are challenging questions is the answers are almost always subjective, based on the emotions of the people involved. We start a new ministry because something someone has a passion…
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Four Opportunity Killing Mistakes Young (and old) Leaders Make
I love investing in younger leaders, and as I get older almost every leader I meet with is a younger leader. Younger leaders are the ones who change the culture, change the trajectory and change the world. They are less afraid to fail and more likely to try things that seem impossible. Younger leaders don’t…
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How to Handle a Moral Failure (Part 3)
In case of emergency, don’t panic My goal in writing this series of posts is to help churches with a situation I hope they never face, the moral failure of a key leader. Unfortunately few churches are adequately prepared for this type of emergency and in a state of near panic make devastating decisions. I…