TWENTY YEARS OF DOING THIS

I am coming up on the twentieth anniversary of my first church consultation.  It was St. Jude Episcopal Church of Valparaiso, Florida.  I charged them $500 for the whole thing.  After several meetings, I recommended that they sell their facility and relocate to an adjacent town.  (This is not something that Episcopal churches are known to do easily.)   My relative ignorance of how rare such a move was for an Episcopal congregation enabled me to take such a bold stance with them.   Amazingly, they decided to go for it.  They bought a plot of land near Niceville High School, built a first unit, and tripled their worship attendance.  And through this experience, I got hooked.  I discovered the power of partnering an interventionist with a prayerful congregation to make strategic ministry decisions and to leap forward in ministry effectiveness.

THE STORY WE CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS

This past month, I had an interesting conversation with one of the United Methodist bishops on the subject of theology and the church, specifically the thriving church - of which there are few within most mainline denominations.  Apparently it is possible from a casual read of this blog to conclude that I don't think theology matters much to the future of the church.  I want to correct that notion.  Theology matters and, just as in the first century, it is rooted in people's encounters with the Living Christ.

WHAT DOES COMMUNITY ORGANIZING HAVE TO DO WITH CHURCH DEVELOPMENT?

Everything!

If I were to boil church planting down to a few base ingredients, they would be these: 1. Prayer, 2. Clarity of Vision, 3. Understanding the focus population, 4. Networking and 5. Team building.  (And all these ingredients also go into revitalizing existing churches, as they get re-rooted in their communities.)  The more interwoven a church planting team is with their community, the easier it is to plant a new church.   In the old church planter boot camps they used to teach us that a planter should be making 25 fresh contacts a week.  This little admonition often came on the third day, when we were running behind in the agenda - and after a few minutes of suggestions about places to make said contacts, the agenda moved on.  I have personally trained almost 200 people in LaunchPad planter training in the last three years, and we seldom have time to really teach people how to make effective contacts and build a community of friends and allies within their neighborhood.  We just tell them "You had better do this, or you will be sorry."  

ELEVEN WAYS TO CONNECT WITH THE GROUPS MEETING IN YOUR CHURCH BUILDING

Recently, in a coaching call with a group of church leaders on Long Island, the questions arose, “How can our church begin to build relationships with the people who meet in our space during the week?  We have lots of people in and out our doors, but we don’t know them, and none of them come to worship on Sunday.”

WHAT CAN HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY OFFER TO A CARNIVAL AGE

Recently I stepped out of my familiar comfort zone twice within a week’s time: to attend a non-denominational conference (spelled P-E-N-T-E-C-O-S-T-A-L) and then from there, to go on a Carnival cruise.  Oh my goodness!  I did not speak in tongues at the church thing, nor was there any onboard disaster with the cruise ship.  In other words, I survived.   Moreover, I heard some really, really good music in both places!  But these two experiences brought home some pretty significant realities to me:

RE-THINKING STEWARDSHIP AND CHURCH FUND-RAISING

It's the season of two or three hundred thousand stewardship campaigns in churches across the USA.   We do very expensive church in the USA, and fall is the usual season where we rally the saints to foot the bills for another year.  Here are seven key thoughts for those of us who lead judicatories and long to see financially sustainable ministries within our denominational tribe:

THE ART OF GETTING AND UTILIZING CONTACT INFORMATION ON WORSHIP ATTENDEES

A dependable follow up system is one of the most critical elements in developing and sustaining a high retention of first time worship attendees.  Worship service content quality, onsite hospitality, quality of facility and quality of children's ministry are four other very important elements.  But nothing is more important than follow up.  And follow up is impossible without a dependable conduit of information about our visitors flowing into the hands of the leadership team.