In over 35 years of pastoral ministry, I've known and worked alongside hundreds of pastors. I've met thousands. I can count the dishonest ones – the wolves in sheep's clothing – on one hand. With fingers left over. But there are some lies that even the 99+ percent of honest pastors have a hard time resisting. Here are five of them:

Here are 8 unfortunate hallmarks of the attractional church, followed by 8 hallmarks of the gospel-centered church.

The American pastime of church shopping finally has some solid stats: how many Christians do it (and how often), why they left their last church, and why they picked their current one. The Pew Research Center's new study, which categorizes respondents according to their denomination, also looked at who is attending church more often and whether their reasons are more theological or practical.

What we need are fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. That’s my dream for the church—a multitude of faithful, risktaking plodders. The best churches are full of gospel-saturated people holding tenaciously to a vision of godly obedience and God’s glory, and pursuing that godliness and glory with relentless, often unnoticed, plodding consistency.

When I was a young pastor, I was eager to find and replicate worthy ministry models. I was attracted to the church growth movement. I admired the soul-winning zeal of practioners who counseled young pastors like me to fashion their Sunday services so the “seeker” wouldn’t trip over man-made obstacles on his way to finding Jesus. While I absorbed many of its lessons—clear communication, ministry excellence, community outreach—I began to have some questions about an approach that shapes the Sunday gathering exclusively around the unbeliever.

Every generation has had a few popular preachers, but today there is a whole celebrity class within American evangelicalism. How did this happen, and why do these celebrity pastors often have catastrophic falls? Skye Jethani answers a viewer’s question by comparing modern evangelicalism to the “military industrial complex” President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.

Paul Martin shares how churches can serve families with special needs children. Paul is the senior pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario.

Church bullies are common in many churches. They wreak havoc and create dissension. They typically must have an “enemy” in the church, because they aren’t happy unless they are fighting a battle. They tend to maneuver to get an official leadership position in the church, such as chairman of the elders or deacons or treasurer. But they may have bully power without any official position.

On Sunday, at a Roman Catholic canonization service in Vatican City, Pope Francis will declare Mother Teresa a saint.* Here are nine things you should know about the Nobel-prize winning nun who became renowned for serving the poor and dying:

If you are a member of a homogenous church, you’re actually more likely to be racist, because being around people who don’t challenge your personal preferences and cultural norms actually entrenches your biased worldviews. That’s why I’m committed to the multiethnic church: sitting on the same row are a bunch of people who see it differently. Now how can we work that out in love and not try to clone each other into our own image?