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Showing posts from December, 2023

When God Seems Silent

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by Bart Denny In Psalm 13 (NIV), we read: 1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?     How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts     and day after day have sorrow in my heart?     How long will my enemy triumph over me? 3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.     Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, 4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”     and my foes will rejoice when I fall. 5 But I trust in your unfailing love;     my heart rejoices in your salvation. 6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,     for he has been good to me. There are seasons when life goes dark—and we don’t always know why. Sometimes the darkness comes from suffering we didn’t choose. A loss we didn’t see coming. Confusion we can’t explain. And if we’re honest, those seasons don’t just test our circumstances; they expose how we respond when God feels quiet. I know they do for me. How We Re...
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Leadership Development in Local Church Revitalization: A Review of the Literature and Suggestions for Further Research

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by Bart L. Denny This article identifies a gap in the existing literature concerning leadership development in the context of local church revitalization. The article further suggests how existing leadership and leadership development theories could be applied to church revitalization and proposes further investigation and research areas. Observers and practitioners in the field of church revitalization unequivocally make the case that for a local church to reverse its decline, the pastor must develop a new generation of leaders (Clifton, 2016; Davis, 2017; Henard, 2021; Rainer, 2020; Stetzer & Dodson, 2021). The extant literature links the decline of churches to a lack of leadership and identifies renewed leadership as a vital component of church revitalization. However, little has been written, theoretically or practically, about the process of leadership development as it applies to local church revitalization. Moreover, little empirical verification supports church revitalizat...
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