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Scott Thumma is Director of Hartford Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. He codirects the Insights into Religion Portal and is the coauthor of The Other 80 Percent: Turning Your Church’s Spectators into Active Participants (Jossey-Bass, 2011), available at Amazon and Jossey-Bass.
F. Douglas Powe, Jr., is director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership and holds the James C. Logan Chair in Evangelism (an E. Stanley Jones Professorship) at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. He is also co-editor with Jessica Anschutz of Healing Fractured Communities (Palmetto, 2024) and coauthor with Lovett H. Weems Jr. of Sustaining While Disrupting: The Challenge of Congregational Innovation (Fortress, 2022). His previous books include The Adept Church: Navigating Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Abingdon Press, 2020); Not Safe for Church: Ten Commandments for Reaching New Generations; New Wine, New Wineskins: How African American Congregations Can Reach New Generations; Transforming Evangelism: The Wesleyan Way of Sharing Faith; and Transforming Community: The Wesleyan Way to Missional Congregations.
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The average congregation is getting smaller with a median size of around 60 attenders, reports Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research.…
The story told in John 21:15-19 is almost too familiar. Three times Jesus asks if Peter loves him, three times Peter says yes, and each…
This article is reprinted by permission from Leading Ideas, a free e-newsletter from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary available at churchleadership.com.