Five Recommendations From A Veteran Church Camp Speaker
Start thinking now about these helpful tips if you’re involved in organizing or speaking at a church camp.
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Resources
Small Church Finances: 4 Budgeting Lessons I Learned The Hard Way
Money isn’t the goal of ministry. But it is a tool – and an important one. When we manage our money well, we can do better ministry with it.
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The Best Welcome for Easter Guests? Ask Them To Serve With You
(If you’re a NewSmallChurch.com subscriber and the title of this post feels like deja vu, here’s why. The original version of this post disappeared. Woosh, into the emptiness of the internet, never to be retrieved. Thankfully, I always save a copy, so here it is again.)
In a few weeks, my church is doing our twice-yearly Share Day. (Click here for a video of how we do that.)
On that Sunday, we will gather for church in the morning, then divide into groups to go throughout our community helping people. This Spring, the events include repairing & beautifying two rescue homes for abused women and children, and ministering to residents at a home for the mentally disabled.
This week, on Easter Sunday, we’ll encourage people to sign up for these events, and/or sponsor them financially.
Yes, that’s right. We’re going to spend several precious minutes of prime Easter service time asking everyone, including all the Easter-only people, to step up and serve with us.
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Pioneers, Settlers & Mavericks: How to Lead Them Well For a Healthier Church
here are three kinds of people in every church. Pioneers, Settlers and Mavericks.
Depending on which point of its life cycle your church is in, these three will interact in different ways that can either benefit your church or threaten to tear it apart.
One of the primary tasks of a church leader (usually the pastor) is to utilize the gifts of all three, while keeping them in balance.
First, some definitions:
Pioneers are those who want to go where no one has gone before. These are the church planters and ministry starters.
Settlers are the people who keep a healthy church humming along. They form your tithing base, your teaching core and your administrative backbone.
Mavericks often feel like Pioneers, but they differ in one significant respect. They don’t start new things, they change old things. While Settlers comfort the disturbed, Mavericks disturb the comfortable.
A healthy church needs all three types of people. But each serves in a different way at different stages of your church’s life. Depending on what stage your church is in, different types of people will predominate in leading, supporting, or being at risk of leaving.
Strong leaders learn to distinguish between these stages so they can guide and utilize everyone and their gifts properly at each stage.
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Preaching Better – Let Process Flow From Content
Most preachers are process junkies.
We obsess over sermon length and structure, whether-or-not to use PowerPoint, if we should preach in a series, etc.
Most of the discussions I have with other preachers about preaching concern these issues. And that’s fine. These are the tools of of the trade, after all, and we want to use them well.
I’ve participated in these discussions. I’ve written about how to preach better and I’m currently working on a blog post on the process I use to prepare sermon series’.
But I’ve discovered that there’s a set of principles underneath all the talk of process that we often forget.
Process should follow content, not the other way around.
I think there are two defining rules every communicator needs to follow:
1. Decide what you need to say
2. Say it in the best way possible
That’s it.
Everything else should follow after that. From sermon length, to series length, to use of illustrations, video clips, Q & A, etc.
Use the process that best communicates what needs to be said and let everything else go.
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A Simple 5-Step Discipleship Process for Any Small Church (That Won’t Wear Out the Pastor)
For many Small Churches, discipleship just becomes one more item on a pastor’s already full agenda. Few Small Church pastors are happy with the way discipleship is being done in their church – if it’s being done at all.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
If you pastor a Small Church without a discipleship program, or with one that’s not working well, I have some good news. You don’t need an expensive, staff-heavy discipleship program to do great discipleship. And it doesn’t need to kill your already-over-busy schedule either.
After a few hit-and-miss attempts, our church has discovered a simple 5-step process that can work for any Small Church. And it looks suspiciously similar to what Jesus, Paul and many other early church leaders did.
Our Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size – Now What?
If some churches have a shoe size, what do you do when your church reaches yours?
Sit back and take it easy? The temptation to do that is one of the main reasons many people (and by “people”, I mean me) feel very uncomfortable with the idea that a church can have a shoe size at all.
But a church doesn’t have to settle for less just because they’ve found themselves at a numerical size that works well for the kind of ministry God has given them – at least for a season. Maybe for longer than that.
And by the way, shoe size isn’t limited to Small Churches. In fact I’ve noticed that a lot of people who bristle at the idea of a shoe size for a church of 25, 50 or 100, are just fine with the church that’s stayed at 2,000 for a decade or more. Some churches have a bigger shoe size, is all.
In my last post I gave you 5 Clues Your Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size. In today’s post we’ll follow up with the three foundational principles that have helped the church I pastor make sure we’ll never use our current shoe size as an excuse for settling, laziness or compromise.
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5 Clues Your Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size
What happens when a church is healthy, yet the numbers stay in a holding pattern?
There are a lot of books, blog posts and seminars about how to assess and remove obstacles that hinder healthy growth. My church and I have been helped by many of them.
But is it ever possible that a church may have reached its optimal size? Is there a point at which pushing for greater numbers might be counterproductive to the life, health and effectiveness of a church?
And, if there is, how would we know that?
I struggled with that challenge for years. My story is detailed in The Grasshopper Myth, so I won’t go into it again, but one result of that struggle was that we realized our church is better, healthier and more effective at around 200 than we were at around 400.
200 is our optimal size (let’s call it our shoe size). For now anyway.
It’s not that we aimed for this size or plan to stay at this size. It’s just that this is where we seem to do our best work for now. And it may be that way for a long time.
But how does a church know what their shoe size is? And, if we have in fact reached that place, do we just sit and settle? What about growth?
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The Church Stewardship Prime Directive: Don’t Spend More Than You Bring In
Today’s post isn’t long, because today’s point is very simple.
When it comes to the issue of Money & the Small Church, (or money & big churches, money & family finances, money & business, etc) there is one principle that stands high above all the others.
It’s so basic, I almost feel silly having to write it.
I call it the Church Stewardship Prime Directive, because I believe there is no financial principle more important for a church to observe than this.
Don’t spend more money than you bring in.
That’s it.
Maybe it’s because this principle is so basic and commonsense, that it’s often taken for granted, and therefore ignored. And it’s always a problem when we do.
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My 6 Best Tools for Overcoming Preacher’s Block
I’ve been preaching for thirty years.
Thirty years of creating new content every week for 45-50 weeks of the year. For the first fifteen years I was preaching or teaching three times a week – on Sunday morning, Sunday night and a mid-week bible study.
It all adds up to over 3,000 preaching/teaching events in thirty years. An average of two per week.
At some point I have to run out of things to say, don’t I? Actually, at hundreds of points I have run out of things to say.
If you’re the preaching/teaching pastor of a local church, you know the feeling. The Saturday night dread. The “what am I going to say this week that they haven’t all heard 100 times before?” panic.
It still happens to me. I guess I’m a slow learner.
The good news is, it doesn’t happen to me nearly as much as it used to, because over the last three decades I’ve learned a few tricks – what computer geeks would call hacks, but we’ll just call tools – that reduce the pressure and make Preacher’s Block a little less frequent.
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