Last month we talked about several best practices for growing churches in the 2020s. Today we drill down on one of them: building relationships with worship guests.
All over the world, amazing work yields amazing worship experiences, really practical preaching and inspirational music. And yet, more often than not, these excellent worship services are not growing!
As a young(er) church consultant around the turn of this century, one of the throw-away lines that I used to hear was that the days of long-range planning were over. The world was moving too fast, we were told. All of us had seen the long-range planning reports and posters of imagined facility development hidden away in old file cabinets and church closets - plans that never came to fruition. It was assumed that future-oriented planning was, therefore, no longer a valid enterprise. About that time, the congregation which I now belong to was creating future plans based on its recent past, assuming ever new generations of families with young children were its future. Now, we look at the renderings of the giant, 1000-seat sanctuary envisioned for the street corner and we thank God that that thing never got built.
I don’t know what the vegetable was at your house growing up that your mother told you to eat before you could leave the dinner table. For our son, I remember the stickler being green English peas. We created a system in which he had to eat at least as many as his accumulated years on earth. So in fourth grade (age 9), he had to eat nine peas before being dismissed from the dinner table. I recall one night where he sat and pushed those nine little peas round and round for an hour after dinner was done. The dishwasher was running and he was still staring at the peas. In retrospect we probably should have negotiated a substitute veggie if they offended him that much.
Manchester, England lays claim to being the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It is also the birthplace of fully-inclusive democracy, workers’ unionization, and with those movements, the emergence of middle-class prosperity globally. Manchester was an early hotbed for activism for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and more recently, the rights of migrants and the battle against global warming.
Coaching conversations across many miles and time zones often happen in my life before and after the local 9-5 work window. Many days I am ready to go at 6 am Pacific Time, especially if a client is in Glasgow, where it is already 2! I had a 4:30 am session one day this week as I shifted my body clock to work across the Atlantic for a bit. Then, once I am in London, there’s this Pennsylvania church that needs to meet one evening after work. Start time: 11:30 pm British Time.
Kids are back in school this week in a lot of American communities. Do you recall the little essay at the beginning of the school year, when we were nine years old: What did you do this summer? You remember that one? Just a little kick start to get us writing again.
So for my Fourth Grade Teacher, Barbara Matulich, wherever she is in this world or the next: here goes (my 2025 summer essay):
