Articles
News and commentary for the work in Iowa
What we’re reading, writing, and passing along — church planting news, ministry resources, and the occasional original piece, all with Iowa in view.
August 22, 2026 · via NewChurches.com
The Difference Between a Critical Eye and a Critical Spirit
Ten years into a plant on Chicago's West Side, Jon Kelly writes about the five places a planter has to preach grace to himself. The sharpest of them is how to hear criticism.
Read more →August 21, 2026 · via Send Network
A Free Hour on October 1 for the Pastor Whose Week Keeps Disappearing
Send Network is running a free webinar on October 1 built around Walker Armstrong's new book on pastoral productivity. It costs an hour, which for a bivocational replanter is the whole point.
Read more →August 20, 2026 · via Send Network
The First Two Steps in a Church Conflict Both Point at You
Mark Clifton and Mark Hallock take the first two of Ron Edmondson's seven points on conflict. Both of them land on the pastor before they get anywhere near the antagonist.
Read more →August 19, 2026 · via Graphs About Religion
Retention Is the Metric
Ryan Burge runs the Pew numbers on where religious adults come from. About 77% of those raised religious stay, and only 26% of those raised with no faith ever pick one up.
Read more →August 18, 2026 · via Send Network
Eight Reasons a Pastor Isn't Ready to Lead a Revitalization
Mark Clifton, Mark Hallock and Dan Hurst work through a Chuck Lawless list of eight. Every item on it is spiritual, which makes the episode a self-assessment before it is a strategy.
Read more →August 17, 2026 · via Lifeway Research
Most Baptisms Are Now Adults
The 2025 Annual Church Profile shows adults 30 and over are now the largest baptism group in Southern Baptist churches. A generation ago, two thirds of those baptized were minors.
Read more →August 16, 2026 · via Exponential
Stay Where God Plants You
Josh Crans argues the church has over-celebrated multiplication and relocation while underselling the faithfulness of staying. In small-town Iowa, tenure is the whole ballgame.
Read more →August 15, 2026 · via Send Network
Five Encouragements for Small Church Pastors
Mark Clifton and Mark Hallock, recording at the SBC annual meeting, on the pastor of a normative-size church — and Clifton's claim that "small church" is a category the church growth movement invented.
Read more →
August 14, 2026 · via NAMB
Twenty Steps From the Front Door
Members of a Florida church plant led their nearest neighbors to Christ and then built a ministry around it. The method costs nothing and works the same on a gravel road.
Read more →August 13, 2026 · via Lifeway Research
One in Six Churchgoers, Fewer Than One in a Hundred Churches
Megachurches are under 1% of American Protestant congregations and hold 17% of the churchgoers. The median congregation runs about 70 people a week, which describes almost every church in Iowa.
Read more →August 12, 2026 · via Send Network
A Declining Church Became a Sending Church
Golden Avenue Church was in decline by 2019. Send Network tells how renewal around missional outreach led to 46 baptisms in a year and, this Easter, a church plant in a rural Missouri county.
Read more →August 12, 2026
New Statewide Demographics Report: The Need in Iowa by the Numbers
A new NAMB demographics report for Send Network Iowa shows 55% of Iowans — more than 1.7 million people — have no religious affiliation. Here is what the numbers say about the mission field we call home.
Read more →August 11, 2026 · via NewChurches.com
Four Challenges New Churches Face, and Why the Order Matters
Noah Oldham surveyed more than 700 church planters and found four challenges behind nearly two-thirds of their struggles. The takeaway for Iowa: get the sequence right before you spend.
Read more →August 7, 2026 · via NAMB
A Town of 1,300, a Full Church, and a Family That Showed Up
Carl Wimmer pastors a full church in a Utah town of 1,300, and this year has been the hardest of his life. What happened next is a picture of what cooperative Southern Baptist giving actually does.
Read more →August 6, 2026 · via NewChurches.com
The Wrong Reasons to Go Covocational
Phil Thompson names six wrong reasons to become a covocational pastor. In Iowa, where the planting math almost always runs covocational, the motives matter.
Read more →August 4, 2026 · via Baptist Convention of Iowa
Three Benefits Every Iowa Minister Should Know About
Joel Rister of GuideStone on retirement housing allowance, free BCI-provided benefits at $50 a month, and minister-specific financial tools. The rare piece that is literally about Iowa.
Read more →June 16, 2026 · via NAMB
The Normal-Sized Church
Seventy percent of Southern Baptist churches run fewer than 100 people. Mark Clifton calls them normal-sized churches, and nearly every church in Iowa is one.
Read more →
