Resources

Finally, A Definitive List Of Every Essential Element For An Effective Church

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There are only three essential elements for a church to be effective:

1. People who genuinely love Jesus

2. People who genuinely love each other

3. People who share that good news with others

Anything less isn’t church.

Anything more is personal preference.

It’s too easy to allow non-essential preferences to take over our lives, churches and ministries. The danger isn’t that we’ll fail, but that we’ll do the non-essentials so well that we’ll accept them as a substitute for successful, effective ministry.

Perhaps the #1 job of a church leader is not to let our guard down in the relentless battle to keep the non-essentials from crowding out the essentials.

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4 Ways Your Church Can Help People Simplify Christmas

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It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but Christmas is also the busiest.

A few years ago, our small church staff decided we weren’t going to compete with all the shopping, school plays, office parties and visits to Santa that were filling people’s calendars. We weren’t able to keep up, so we stopped trying.

Instead, we asked ourselves “what can we do that no one else is doing?” Specifically, instead of crowding their calendar even more, how can we help people simplify their Christmas season?

We experimented with several ideas. Over the years, we’ve landed on a few simple concepts that work for us.

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4 Ways Your Church Can Help People Simplify Christmas

/ 1 minute of reading

It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but Christmas is also the busiest.

A few years ago, our small church staff decided we weren’t going to compete with all the shopping, school plays, office parties and visits to Santa that were filling people’s calendars. We weren’t able to keep up, so we stopped trying.

Instead, we asked ourselves “what can we do that no one else is doing?” Specifically, instead of crowding their calendar even more, how can we help people simplify their Christmas season?

We experimented with several ideas. Over the years, we’ve landed on a few simple concepts that work for us.

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8 Ways To Manage Minor Church Leadership Issues Before They Become Big Problems

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“My pastor is so hard to please!”

I’ve had a lot of conversations with church staff members and volunteers. I’ve also had many conversations with small church pastors about how hard it is to get good staff and volunteers.

One coin. Two sides.

Today I want to talk to my fellow pastors. Here are a few simple steps that help our church to deal with petty issues before they become big.

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6 Ways To Leverage Your Church’s Limited Resources For Greater Ministry Impact

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No church can respond to all emergencies. So every church needs a plan that helps decide which needs they’ll respond to and which ones they won’t. This isn’t easy, but it’s important.

Sometimes a church’s priorities will be based on the severity of the need, but we also should make some of those decisions based on which needs we can make the biggest difference in.

By setting those priorities, a church is less likely to run out of resources on lesser needs (or needs they have less impact on) before coming across a need where they can have a huge impact.

It’s better to prioritize our resources to maximize our ministry influence than to have those decisions made for us by running out of funds.

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Yes, Pastor, You Can Deliver A Weekly Sermon That’s Better Than A TED Talk

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Pastors face a lot of pressure to perform. Some of it, admittedly, is self-imposed.

One of the main places this pressure is felt is in the demand to research, write and deliver a great sermon every week.

In fact, several times in the last few months, I’ve read blog posts that have suggested that every Sunday sermon should be like a TED Talk. Wow. Talk about adding a little extra pressure.

Pastors face enough challenges without being expected to deliver the near-equivalent of a Pulitzer-prize-winning talk every week.
In today’s post, I’d like to do two things for my fellow pastors that may seem impossible to accomplish simultaneously.

Relieve some of the performance pressure and challenge us all toward something better.

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Avoiding The Trap Of A Punch-The-Clock Mentality In Ministry

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Too many pastors suffer from PCM. Punch-the-clock mentality. And if you don’t, you may be struggling to work with church leaders who do.

PCM can develop in people who have spent their entire working lives in jobs where they get paid hourly. Every work day, they punch in and punch out. But it isn’t limited to them.

These people perform some of the most important jobs in our society. They keep our communities safe, clean and livable. Many great people live their entire work lives punching a clock to feed us, house us, clothe us, care for our kids and make the products we use.

So, there’s nothing wrong with a punch-the-clock job or the people who perform vital services through them. But there is a problem when we have a punch-the-clock mentality.

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3 Big Problems With Running A Church Like A Business

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The Bible uses many colorful words to describe the church. It’s a family, a body, a fellowship, a holy people, a flock, and more.

But not a business.

In my previous post, I wrote about Why It’s A Bad Idea To Run A Church Like A Business. In today’s post, I want to get more specific about why.

Using Business Without Becoming a Business

It’s not that there are no business aspects to leading a local church or denomination. Much like a family is better off when we manage our money and time more effectively, most pastors would serve Jesus, their church and their families better if we used good business principles to manage our time, energy and resources more efficiently, too.

But using wise business principles is not the same as running a church as though it was a business.

Here are three ways running a church like a business can become problematic.

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What Are You Improving At Your Church Right Now?

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What would you say if someone asked you the question in the title of this post?

“What are you improving at your church right now?”

Would you know what to say? It’s an important question.

In fact, if you can’t answer that question with at least one specific goal-oriented project, your church may be in trouble without even knowing it.

Always Get Better

Every church should constantly be improving. And not just in general terms. We should always be working on specific action plans to improve aspects of our church and its ministry. Improving anything that we’re not doing as well as we could or should.

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If You’re Going To Do Church That Way, Do It Well

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There are so many ways to do church.

As long as you’re honoring the Bible, worshiping Jesus and loving people, no method or structure is wrong.

But any method or structure can be done wrong.

Thankfully, it can also be done right.

Whatever program, asset or resource you think your church needs in order to become great, you can find a church somewhere that became great without it.

It’s not about what you have or don’t have. What you do or don’t do. It’s far more about doing it well, not matter what you have or don’t have.

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