According to the "Enneagram," I am an Enthusiast. Here are some quotes from the website: The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Acquisitive, and Scattered Easily become accomplished achievers, generalists who do many different things well: multi-talented. Practical, productive, …
Pastor Hacking?
I don't know if you have this problem, but I am a procrastinating distracted creative learning computer geek I generally have between 10 and 20 projects going on all at the same time, but I almost never finish any of them because I get new ideas and set to work on the new ones forgetting about …
We’re not competing with other churches.
One of the truths about church planting is this: We aren't competing with other churches. We are competing with all the unspiritual ways people spend their time. But sometimes it's hard to really believe it. This last weekend, Jen and I found on our door a flyer that seems to be for a new church …
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How to Offer Constructive Criticism
Here's something I learned from my recent meeting with a church consultant---nothing that he taught me, but some things that I perceived in the way he handled the meeting with me. One of the most important things a person in leadership can learn is how to offer constructive criticism to an employee …
Free Demographics
I just came across a wonderful set of resources for free demographic information. One of the coolest sites I've seen in a while is run by USAToday: http://www.usatoday.com/news/bythenumbers/front.htm But, for many resources all packed together, check out this …
Resistance to change: A mark of sin?
I have thought about this a number of times, and each time I do, I remain convinced that resistance to change is more than just the key reason churches are declining in America. I believe resistance to change is a mark of a sinful attitude. …
Churches and Marketing
As a result of reading a couple of blogs on a regular basis, I'm getting increasingly interested in marketing. As a church planter, marketing is something that I will soon have to be dealing with directly, but I'm amazed to see the key points of crossover between the world of marketing today and the …
Consecrate Yourselves
Here's another short post (not having Internet at the home and not having an internet enabled office has really slowed down my blogging). Jen and I are in Peoria, Illinois at the Midwest Baptist Conference's Leadership Retreat. This is my second year to come to the retreat, and I'm really excited …
Ministry Resources
Here is a link to the website of Don Whitney, author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. This link takes you to his ministry resources page. http://www.spiritualdisciplines.org/ministry.html …
Make the Right Things Easy
I read this article recently where the author is talking about how to make users of your product or service happy. The basic premise of the article is that you should make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. A great illustration of this is a three pronged electrical plug. There is only …
Creating and Sustaining Momentum
Tony Morgan on his blog shares from his experience at the recent "Catalyst" conference, and records some comments made by Andy Stanley on how to create and sustain momentum in any endeavor. It's probably not right to quote his entire blog post, so I'll just copy the core few key points. Stanley …
Why shouldn’t everyone plant a church?
Well, this is an interesting take on the whole church planting thing. According to this article, everyone should plant a church. Bob Hyatt claims that there are two schools of thought on church planting. In my words, they are these: It's only for the elite and super-gifted because it's really …
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Jack Hayford doesn’t set goals.
Christianity Today has an interesting article on its website about setting goals. Particularly, it is Jack Hayford's own perspective on goal setting-he doesn't do it! Here's the link to the article: Why I Don't Set Goals Here's a quote from the article: What are your primary goals for the …
10 Guiding Financial Principles
I saw this over at kluth.org: The following 10 church policies and principles were developed by Brian Kluth and the church elders for use at Harvest Community Church: Preamble At the church leadership meeting on January 6th, the following written financial policies and principles were …
CECL Session #5 Day 5
Last Full Day Today was the last full day of our CECL session. We will have a morning session tomorrow, but that's it. What made today kinda special was that we had very little in the way of official stuff to do. We didn't have any sessions until 11AM, so we used the extra morning time to review …
CECL Session #5 Day 4
Today's sessions were based on a really interesting concept. The goal was to model for us a tool for increasing the effectiveness of sermons and a method for increasing the effectiveness of worship services and then to have a worship service tonight based on those things. Pre-Sermon Dialogue …