Joseph F. Radosevich

Dave was a good friend that died of cancer last year. He was in an out of the hospital. When he was home, he was often too sick to attend church. He helped me, though. No matter where he was, he would listen to our Sunday morning sermon. He started listening back through the archive when he got really sick. He also went back and listened to our Sunday evening recordings as well. Whenever he thought that a sermon would bless others, Dave told me to save that sermon and use it again. I preach 100 times a year at our church. I occasionally preach in other places too such as a college group, chapel service, denominational meeting, etc. I don't have time to prepare an entirely new sermon on top of what I do for our church. Dave helped me be wise with my time. Dave also helped me because I don't know when a sermon is very good or helpful. I'm not a good judge of my sermons. My wife and kids are encouragements to me and don't need the burden of critiquing me. Dave helped me me...

I made up a church metric several years ago. It's very simple. It is church giving divided by average attendance.  I came up with it during a brag session by a megachurch pastor. I took their giving and attendance and realized immediately that they receive and spend twice as much per person as our church plant did.  As an example. I took the numbers from a leading Southern Baptist church with publicly available data. Their church efficiency number is $3541. That is they receive and spend $3541 for every person in their average attendance. Manchester Baptist, where I pastor, is very average both in giving and attendance. Our church efficiency number is $1934. The metric is mostly useful for church planting discussions. I care about two things: faithful churches and having a church in every community so that every person can hear. I grew up in large churches. I have pastored smaller churches. Faithful churches can come in all kinds of sizes. We should, however, be concerned if t...

I learned my first gardening lesson when I was around 12 or 13 years old.  My mom read a book on growing a no-work garden and sent my older brother and I out to to the back of our new 1-acre yard to start a no-work garden. Our long-time joke was that no-work garden just means have other people do it for you. We prepped the ground which was a mixture of sand and clay and planted squash, watermelon, and who-knows-what else. Then we mulched the whole garden with an extremely thick layer of straw. The garden was amazing. The plan really was ingenious because the mulch did keep weeds down and keep the soil moist. We didn't have to do much work after planting. We tried it again the next year and the garden struggled. Someone heard about our problem and said, "it's the soil. Your garden used up all the nutrients the first year. You've got to replace them." Those were my first and probably best lessons in the garden.  Protect the soil with mulch. Keep moisture in so you h...

When I was in seminary, I took a class on Francis Schaeffer and C.S Lewis. We read everything that each of them wrote. The only thing that I didn't finish was Lewis' Space Trilogy . I only read the first of that series. I included my kids in what I was learning at school so I read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to them that semester. The morning that I read them the chapter where *spoiler* Aslan dies, I read that chapter and then left my wife with crying kids to go to work. My wife was not happy. I let the kids stay up before bed that night to finish the book. I think they cried again. That was an amazing semester because I read and discussed so many great books and ideas. One lesson from that class was the value of reading everything that an author has written. That is a great goal for your reading. You don't have to read them all in a year. Read them all in 5 years. I've done that with favorite authors in fiction or history. I read everything I can by Daniel S...

Is God mad at you if your church doesn't grow right now? If church attendance doesn't climb or goes backward, how does God feel about you? If you have to reduce the number of kids classes because the children in your church are growing up and no one replaces them, what does God think? Is God's dream for you and your church growth or nothing? There are many reasons you could be in this situation. You might be compromising on doctrine. Or your community could be shrinking. You might be unfaithful to do evangelism and discipleship. Or there is a waiting period between your faithfulness and your fruitfulness. I don't know why your church is struggling. Here is one thing that I do know, God wants to do something in you and not just through you. Pastor, God is working on you and that is work that God thinks is worth doing. In a writing lecture Brandon Sanderson gave to a Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy college course, he explained that writing fiction is worth doing even ...