Archive for the ‘church’ Category

@maurilio:

26

How to Screw Up Christmas 5 Different Ways

Christmas Eve is a great opportunity to reach those outside the church that often goes unused. I’m usually arguing with several pastors during this time of the year. Seems like every year I have to convince a Senior Pastor that Christmas Eve is a powerful and great opportunity for outreach. Catholic churches have known this for centuries. Evangelicals are just now waking up to it. Here are the top 5 mistakes churches can make when planning their Christmas services. Give the staff Christmas Eve off. That’s a critical mistake that a lot of churches make. Christmas Eve is a great opportunity to reach out to people who want to connect with God and their families and who are looking for an opportunity to do so. Done well, your Christmas Eve service could be one of the best attended service of the entire year. If you are in ministry, working on…

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14

Churches and the Dangers of Line Extension

Churches cannot grow  strong using a side-door strategy. Side doors are everything else a church does besides teaching the gospel and helping  people grow in their faith. Somehow along the way, church leaders have decided that music concerts, recreation programs, cafeterias, schools, bookstores and even quilting groups were church-worthy pursuits and a proliferation of side-door ministries began to show up in large churches. At the end of the day, none of them, I’m convinced, can grow and keep a church healthy. If the world of marketing, we call this problem, line extension, or the adding of products and services to a brand until it’s diluted and ineffective. A while back I visited a church that reminded me of the dangers of line extension. What started as an outreach ministry of the church years ago, suddenly began to take a life of its own and became a huge resource and energy…

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14

My Bad Parking Lot Experience: Why First Impressions Matter

It’s hard to overcome a negative first impression. Your first gut reaction about a church, a business or even a person,  will determine how you feel about that institution or individual for a long time.  A while back I visited a well-known, fast growing congregation in Florida. I was not doing a secret shopper visit or a communication audit (some might find it shocking that I attend church without getting paid for), but I felt compelled to share with a staff member some of my impressions, specifically my run in with a parking lot attendant. I was cutting it close to get to the church by 8:30 for their first Sunday morning service. As I tried to follow the serpentine of cones that led me around the back of the property and again back to the front, I realized that the cones were not there for the sake of the…

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28

Bad Advice from Church Board Members

I’ve been in a lot of church board meetings. A LOT. For the first 15 years of my professional career, I was on the staff side of the table. Since I valued my job and wanted to keep it, most of the time, I often just sat there quietly as people disguised bad advice in spiritual terms. Well, mostly quietly anyway. For those of you who know me, you understand that I don’t do “quiet” very well. There are a lot of great business men and women of faith in church boards that have inspired and mentored me throughout my career. And there are some who should never have been there in the first place. I’ve heard a lot of bad advice and theology dispensed by volunteer leaders cloaked in the guise of concern and spirituality. Here’s a short list of stuff I’ve heard through the years that have stuck…

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16

Don’t Spiritualize Your Management Problems, Fix Them

A lot of bad decisions get blamed on God. In my years of consulting, I have run into poorly managed organizations with broken systems, ineffective workers, and bad strategies. All of them can be fixed. Well almost. There’s the spiritual trump card that stops any effort cold: “I feel God wants me to do it this way,” or “God has not released me to do that.” While I understand that sometimes God calls us to do the impossible, to pursue goals and dreams that most people will never understand, I believe that God gets blamed for people’s fears, insecurities, and downright incompetence. Really. Borrowing more money than you should, hiring the wrong person for the job, mismanaging people, failing to do due diligence on a deal, are not spiritual issues. They are management and leadership problems. We don’t need to pray about firing an employee who has stolen from the…

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12

Church Branding or Marketing? What’s the Difference?

If “marketing” was the church’s buzzword for the ‘90s, “branding” is definitely the new, upstart concept when it comes to communications these days. So what makes the new millennium’s branding better than last century’s marketing strategy? A lot, if we understand the differences between them. Branding and marketing both aim at communicating a product, an institution, even a person to a particular audience. This whole process happens solely in the mind. In this case, perception is reality—for good or bad. Most of what marketing does is build a brand—create a favorable reality in the minds of our target audience. A marketing campaign’s effectiveness is measured in months, but a brand’s strength is calculated in years, even decades. Each marketing effort should help define, position, and strengthen the brand. Recently, the Old Spice campaign featuring Isaiah Mustafa has sold a lot of deodorant to men who want to be more Isaiah…

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10

A Miraculous Easter Sunday

I think it was Bill Hybels who said that “The Church is still the hope of the world”–not in a means unto itself, but as the messenger and conduit in which God uses it to reach out to those outside the faith and bring them into communion with Himself and with His people. Late Saturday my friend and client, Sal Sberna sent me a picture of his Easter service rehearsal. He gave me a challenge: why not text some of your clients and ask them to send you phone pics of their Easter services and share them with your team on Monday? As the pictures and reports of what God had done in many of these services came through my phone on Sunday, I felt compelled to share them not only with my team but with you as well. These pictures reflect literally hundreds of thousands of people who attended…

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12

It’s Time to Rethink the Welcome Center Experience

Welcome centers are at heart of the experience in most service-oriented businesses and churches. The idea is a good one: create a focal point that allows newcomers to find the information they need in order to have the best experience possible. But I think we have missed the point on implementation, specially churches. Somehow we have bought into the idea that a counter-service type of approach is the optimum way to welcome someone. It isn’t. The problem with most welcome centers is the foundational assumption it creates by the virtue of its design: a counter fortress where staff or volunteers stand  behind waiting for those seeking help to engage them. Some are quite elaborate constructions in the middle to atriums and concourses with computers and flat screens.  To me that’s not a welcome station; it’s a help desk. It puts the entire ownership of the process on the new person.…

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8

Is Your Church Hard to Get In?

The natural tendency of things is to go from simple to complex. It happens in businesses and it certainly happens in churches. Size, resources, both financial as well a people, dictate a lot of what a church can do in its infancy. But growing organizations, by nature of growth, become increasingly sophisticated and, thus more complex. Unwittingly, churches develop their own language and culture and a set of assumptions about their organization. One of the most dangerous of these assumptions is that the church’s internal culture is a mirror of its community, and, therefore, easy for newcomers to understand. I can think of so many examples, but one that comes to mind is the way churches have creative names for every age-group ministry: Fuse, Stretch, MainStreet, The Loft, to name a few. Familiarity causes staff to drop the most important of denominators, the age descriptor. What started out as Fuse…

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15

How to Attract More Professionals to Your Church

In a bad economy, Pastor Steve Robinson knows how to get things done. He leads Church of the King, a fast-growing dynamic church in New Orleans that despite Hurricane Katrina,  the stock market crash, is managing to build a beautiful new building with cash. Church of the King is starting 3 new campuses this year as well. If you ask him how he has managed to attract generous business people who give liberally to the ministry his answer is simple: turn down the volume and turn up the light. Could it be that easy? Steve is a great communicator and leader with a strong team guiding the church always looking for new ways to help people in their community to connect with God. But I also know a lot of other pastors like him all over the country who share the same gifts. As a matter of fact, Church of…

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