My practice is to track several streams of thought regarding the health and growth of the church. One of those streams is the Easum and Bandy Associates organization. Maybe its just the name that attracts me to their organization, but I do enjoy their ideas on growing churches. It is out-of-the-box stuff for us Baptists but I think well worth the exploration and gleaning for useful ideas.

One of the features of the Easum-Bandy Community is a weekly online coaching seminar in which either Bandy or Easum will put out some thought on church growth and then respond to the questions and comments that come from the online community. I don't always follow the seminar, but the topic this week caught my attention - "Only Four Things Grow a Church." So I checked it out. Bill Easum expresses some ideas I think are worth sharing and pondering. The complete discussion is too lengthy to include here so it will available for download from the web site for those who might be interested. The link is - http://www.tcmba.org/4things.pdf .

Easum began with these words which laid the foundation for the seminar: "Sometimes I think we make pastoring a church seem to be far more difficult than it really is. When I survey the great Christian leaders of today I notice one thing that stands out above all others – they focus on a few things and never many. So I've distilled those few things into four key focus points. If a church focuses its time, energy, and money on the following four things their church will grow in numbers and their people will grow in spiritual stature. Every exploding church I work with concentrates on prayer and inviting, worship, small groups, and Children and youth - in that order."

As one who is often a victim of the tyranny of the urgent, I know how easily one can become distracted by urgent matters that are not necessarily important to the purpose we are about as church leaders. Agree or disagree, Easum gives us an important focus to consider for our own efforts in leading churches to be more effective as Great Commission churches.

Wayne