Resources

Loosen the Lid: Let Your Small Church Thrive, Using Bubble-Up Leadership

/ 4 minutes of reading

What’s your leadership style? Top-down? Or bottom-up?

I’ve always believed bottom-up should be the go-to for pastoral leadership, but a good leader needs to be ready to use both, depending on the circumstance.

The problem is, I’m becoming uncomfortable with each of those terms. The congregation is not the bottom of the church and the pastor is not the top. The only top-down leadership I’m interested in is from Jesus (the only head of the church) to all of us.

So I propose a new idea. Let’s start using Bubble-Up Leadership. (That’ll catch on …riiight?)

Just as bubbles rush to break the surface of a carbonated drink, great ideas are trying to break the surface of our churches. We need more pastors who have the courage to loosen the lid and let them breathe.

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Metrics That Matter: The Missing Element In Assessing Small Church Health

/ 5 minutes of reading

Small Church pastors are often told that if our church isn’t growing it’s because we’re not paying enough attention to the numbers.

That’s not true. Small Church pastors are very aware of the numbers – sometimes painfully so.

I’ll admit that Small Churches don’t use metrics the way bigger churches do. But it‘s not because the numbers don’t matter to us. And it certainly isn’t because we don’t want our churches to grow. It’s because of something no one ever talks about.

Metrics designed by and for megachurches don’t work in Small Churches. We need metrics to measure health that don’t presuppose numerical increase.

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Building a Strong Leadership Team in a Small Church (Video)

/ 3 minutes of reading

Today’s video, from the October 2013, Small Church Pastors’ Workshop, is a tag-team talk with me and my Youth Pastor, Gary Garcia.

Gary and I have spent 21 years together in ministry at our church. In an era where the average stay of a pastor is 7 months and the average stay of a lead pastor isn’t much better, we both feel very blessed. But it didn’t come easy. Gary and I are very different in almost every way.

In this 34-minute video, Gary and I talk candidly about our differences, our common ground and how we’ve used that relationship to teach and train volunteers, leaders and other church workers.

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Thinking Like a Great Small Church (Video)

/ 3 minutes of reading

A Small Church can be a great church. But how?

In October of 2013, NewSmallChurch.com held a Small Church Pastors Workshop to start addressing that issue. Today, the first teaching video from that Workshop is finally here!

This 32-minute video is the opening talk at the workshop. In it, Karl Vaters introduces the first step in becoming a great Small Church – starting to think like one. Then, he walks through a handful of starter ideas that virtually any church can implement to start making that happen.

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Unhealthy Churches Should Not Act Like Healthy Churches – Until They Are

/ 7 minutes of reading

There are a lot of books and articles about how a healthy church should behave. That’s appropriate. We should always have a picture of our desired future in our hearts and minds. But what does a pastor do with an unhealthy church? I’m going to propose a radical idea that shouldn’t be considered radical at

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Space Is Limited at the Small Church Pastors’ Workshop – Register Now

/ 3 minutes of reading

UPDATE: We did it! A bunch of Small Church pastors got together, heard from great speakers, worshiped, then left inspired and better prepared to fulfill our calling. All by ourselves, without grown-up supervision. Thank you to all the speakers, to everyone who helped put it together, to those who attended in person and to everyone who

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Congregations Are Fact-Checking Our Preaching – Here Are 4 Ways to Take Advantage of It

/ 8 minutes of reading

Have you noticed that fewer people are bringing their bibles to church, but are using a smartphone bible app instead? That’s not the only thing they’re reading in church. As it turns out, up to 38% of churchgoing Millennials will do an online search to verify what their pastor has said. And many of them

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The Small Church Pastors’ One Day Workshop Is Coming!

/ 4 minutes of reading

UPDATE: We did it! A bunch of Small Church pastors got together, heard from great speakers, worshiped, then left inspired and better prepared to fulfill our calling. All by ourselves, without grown-up supervision. Thank you to all the speakers, to everyone who helped put it together, to those who attended in person and to everyone who

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Why I Don’t Trust Sermon Notes that Rhyme – And What I Do Instead

/ 5 minutes of reading

If I was only allowed to give one piece of advice to pastors about how to make their Sunday messages more appealing to a younger audience, it would be this. Stop making your sermon notes rhyme. For generations, rhymes and alliterations were expected from public speakers. It made them seem credible, authoritative and prepared. And

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