Our church uses LinkTree for our online bulletin because it’s so easy for anyone to set up, and just as easy for church members to navigate. In this video I show you how to set up and use LinkTree, by actually creating an account with a live screen-capture.
How To Create A Zoom Video Conference Account Read More »
Whether-or-not you start a new ministry, leverage the infrastructure of an existing ministry, or create a hybrid of the two, what matters is that we use everything God has given us to meet people’s needs.
Why This May Be The Perfect Time To Plant A Church Or Reimagine Your Current Ministry Read More »
Discipleship is possible in any size of church by using the most proven, time-tested, successful discipling process of all. The process Jesus, Paul and the early church used. A process called mentoring.
Simple Steps For Discipling Believers In A Thriving Small Church Read More »
Could mentoring be part of the answer to the current wave of people – especially younger people – leaving the church in record numbers? The possibility is worth considering.
The Best Method For Discipling Believers In A Thriving Small Church Read More »
When people are justifiably concerned about being in the same room together, we need to meet and exceed their expectations. Online and in-person both matter. We can’t neglect one for the other.
Scarcity Creates Value: Why In-Person Church Is Becoming More Important Read More »
Church health is not about making our current ministries better, it’s about doing better ministry.
Quit Trying To Fix Your Church’s Ministries – Until You Do This First Read More »
When healthy small churches grow, they become healthy big churches. When unhealthy small churches grow, they become unhealthy big churches. So instead of telling struggling churches to get bigger, let’s help them become healthy.
Bigger Fixes Nothing (What Reality TV Taught Me About Healthy Churches) Read More »
What do all these quotes have in common?
“People have stopped singing in church. We need to use hymnbooks again.”
“No one wants solid bible teaching anymore.”
“People used to have respect for God’s house. Now they show up late with a coffee in their hand, like they just rolled out of bed.”
“The church started collapsing when we stopped holding Sunday evening evangelistic services.”
“Pastors in this day and age aren’t preachers, they’re entertainers.”
All those quotes have two things in common. Three, actually.
First, they were all said or written by fellow ministers recently.
Second, they’re all backwards-looking.
Third, none of them are true!
The False Idol of “The Way It Used To Be”
Sure, the church of today has problems. But that’s nothing new. The church has always had problems. Half the books in the New Testament were written to address problems in the first century church – a church we’re guilty of over-idealizing to the point of idolatry, sometimes.
It’s a myth that the church was ever an ideal place of pure worship and fellowship. Not in the first century. Not when we were kids.
It’s also a myth that the way to fix the problems in today’s church – both real and imagined – is to go back to the way we used to do things.
Of course we need to constantly re-establish our faith in Jesus, our teaching of the bible and our obedience to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
But none of those things are old or backwards-looking. They are the most forward-looking, paradigm-shifting, inertia-busting principles the world has ever known.
Every car needs a rear-view mirror. So does every church. But you can’t move forward by staring into it.
The past is gone. The future is coming – fast.
7 Reasons to Stop Staring In Your Church’s Rear-View Mirror Read More »
Change is healthy. Change is good. Change is normal.
All living things change. Or they die.
The church is no exception to that.
No, we don’t change the essential doctrines. They are our foundation. Messing around with the foundation doesn’t bring change, it causes collapse.
As I outlined recently in Kill Your Church Traditions Before They Kill Your Church, everything but our biblical essentials must be subject to change.
Just as churches that change the essentials will collapse, a church that isn’t willing to change on non-essentials will die.
But how do we implement change in a church that has always resisted it? That is one of the great challenges of pastoring.
One key element in that is what I call the ABCS of change – Always Be Changing Something.
Here’s an example.
The ABCS of Church Change (Always Be Changing Something) Read More »
If your church is blessed to own a building, everything you do with it – and especially outside of it – tells people something about your church’s priorities.
For example, last week I was at Starbucks with a church member when he introduced me to a friend. The friend asked me, “so what church do you pastor?”
Me: Cornerstone.
Him: Where is that?
Me: Just around the cor-
Random guy coming up behind him: The one with the skateboard ramps.
Yep, that happened.
If your church is blessed to own a building, everything you do with it – and especially outside of it – tells people something about your church’s priorities.
Our Church Is Too Small
Why is our church known as the one with the skateboard ramps? Because ministering to the youth of our community is a high priority for us. There are a lot of skateboarders around us, but no other skateboard parks in town.
Your see, our church building is too small to hold all the ministry the Lord wants us to do.
Every church building is. But it’s especially true in churches with a small building. Or no building.
If you were to visit our church and sit in the last row, there would be no more than five rows ahead of you – with all the chairs set up. It’s a small room.
For years, I butted my head against a wall (sometimes literally – ouch!) trying to trying to get a bigger building for our church to worship in.
But we live in an expensive city. If we sold our current church property of less than one acre, we could get an easy $3 million for it. But it would cost us an extra $3 million to buy a property double this size, $6 million to triple our size. And we’d still have less than three acres. If we could find three acres – and that’s a big if.
So we started asking ourselves a few questions. If we could find such a facility and if our middle-class church of 200 could somehow raise the extra $6 million, would that be the best use of all that time, energy and money? We decided it would not be.
Do Ministry FROM the Church, Not Just IN the Church Read More »
