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Hey. I'm Chad Brooks.

I steward Productive Pastor, a podcast and community of ministry leaders focused on how productivity and strategic ministry in the average church. I write about practical approaches to ministry productivity. I also write emails about church stability/development and my own theological musics in our current social moment.

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Four Kinds of Congregations | Church Size with Chad Brooks

I’ve spent the last six months doing a deep dive on John Wesley’s class systems. The history and the recovery. The bonus side to this is I’ve been able to read some great books and learned about more than just class meetings. Today, I want to share one of those pieces of learning with you. It’s from Steven Manskar’s book Disciples Making Disciples. It was a fantastic read, and honestly, I would recommend it to everyone. Early on, Manskar writes about the purpose and mission of the local...

I find myself talking about evangelism around 50% of the time in my work as a Congregational Developer. I work with over 250 churches, and many of my conversations involve churches seeking vitality. Evangelism always comes up. I want to let you in on a key theory I like to start with. Evangelism isn’t uniform. Let’s talk about this from a single, specific research point. Ryan Burge, the current G.O.A.T. in religious engagement research, published findings from a study he is currently doing...

Hey Friends - I hope your new ministry year is kicking off with a bang! It is always an exciting time, and the cycle of a New Year always invigorates me. One of the things I love about a New Year is starting the planning done in November/December. Today, I want to talk a bit about these plans and how we can better approach them. Goals Drive Plans You can work hard on some amazing plans, but unless there are goals attached to them, those plans will just linger on a whiteboard, note, or in a...

This is part 2 of a larger series on the Biblical Theme of “Calling on the Name of the Lord.” - You can read Part 1 here. In my short introduction, I wrote about this fascination I have with a repeating theme across Scripture. "Calling", in some variety, is this action of humanity directed towards God. It is all over Scripture, and fleshes itself out in the Old Testament. I have a working theory that this act, first found in Genesis 4, is the fundamental posture humans are to take with God....

Last week, because of YouTube, this email list grew by 30%. I realized this might be the best time to kick off a new series based on one of my 2025 Bible lists. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you can watch the video here. Earlier this year, I started tracking a tiny piece of Genesis I’ve been aware of for many years. Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time, men began to call on the name of the LORD. Gen 4:26 If you are familiar with Genesis, chapter 4 is quite the wild...

At the time of this writing, I’ve spent 6 years using the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and Daily Office as my primary devotional tool. Over the past couple of months, the New Testament readings have been jumping around in Revelation. It continued past Ordinary Time and into Advent. While this is a fantastic Advent reading, it is also comforting to me. I spent most of my 20’s absolutely obsessed with Revelation. I wrote a Master’s Thesis on preaching the Year C Easter texts from Revelation. As I...

Hey Friends, Thanksgiving through New Year's is the tax season for people who work in churches. If I’m honest, there are years when I start to feel a deep sense of dread right about now. I know exactly what's coming: The church calendar is already over-scheduled. Year-end giving matters, and the budget isn't caught up. The family has big travel plans, and you feel pressured to make it happen, even though it's the worst time of the year for a trip. Have you ever felt like this before? 🙋♂️ I...

When a productivity system fails, it feels like a personal failure. For over 20 years in ministry, I’ve battled that feeling. It’s demoralizing. Work and motivation grind to a halt. What I've learned is that it’s not often your motivation failing—it’s your system failing you. The system breaks, and then you find yourself struggling just to keep up. Over the past few years, I’ve refined my own approach to managing my day, keeping up with projects, and handling the constant demands of ministry....

I love Acts 1:8. In those last words before Jesus’ ascension, we get a cascading approach to the mission of the church. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” As “witnesses, we are called to give testimony not just of the gospel of Jesus, but our personal knowledge and experience of it. Then we get this spiral of geographic and sociological markers of how this...

Hey Friend - Pursuing holiness with a busy schedule can feel complicated. I travel for work. Often. As the list in the back of my Bible tells me (yes, I keep track of these sorts of things in a weird way), I’ve spent 91 nights this year in a hotel. My job as a congregational developer in the UMC has me covering an entire state. Many days, I am by myself, I wrap up meetings in the evening, and then return to a hotel room. When I was in my 20s and getting serious about Christianity, I was...