A pastor who has served the same nondenominational church for 30 years has owned up to big mistakes he made when people told him they were leaving his church, and listed nine things leaders can do when someone informs them of such a decision.

Mark Altrogge, a non-vocational pastor who has served Saving Grace Church in Indiana, Pennsylvania, for three decades, shared in a post on The Blazing Center Tuesday that one of his worst failures years ago was when he tried to convince a construction worker to take a job at McDonald’s and stay at his church, rather than move his family to Houston where there were better job opportunities.

“How stupid was that?” Altrogge asked himself, noting that the man moved to Texas anyway.

A year later he met with him again and asked for “forgiveness for my arrogance,” but soon realized he has made numerous mistakes in his responses to similar situations.

The pastor said his experience has taught him a number of important lessons about how pastors should react to people leaving their church.

On top of his list was asking to meet with and listen to people who say they are leaving because they have been offended.

“Why are we so slow to do this? People have left our church because they were…

NASHVILLE — Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California said that revival in America will never happen unless the Church is willing to address and fight racial prejudice, which he referred to as the most “common sin” in the world.

There’s a theme in Scripture that the Church often ignores, Warren said during a sermon delivered Tuesday at the National Religious Broadcasters’ 75th annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and that is that God wants His children to get along.

“We’re not real good at that one,” he said. “Friends, we’re failing at unity. The Church is more divided, more polarized, there are more tribes, and more splattered, more fractured, than ever before.”

Warren shared how throughout his life and ministry, his “mentor,” evangelist Billy Graham, insisted there be unity.

“Not only did Billy Graham insist all of his crusades be integrated with every kind of ethnic background, he also sat everyone at the table. He took Catholics and Orthodox and fundamentals and evangelicals and Calvinists and charismatics, and he put them all on the stage,” Warren said. “God has…