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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…