Category Church Growth

Dec 4 2009

Sure-fire Ways to Help Your Congregation Grow (whether you’re a minister there or not!)

10.  Be involved in at least one thing/ministry outside of normal scheduled worship/class times.

9.  Talk about your congregation in a positive way to your friends, co-workers, family, and anyone else who may not be a part of the congregation

8.  Pray for the Shepherd’s, the Ministry Staff, the administrative staff, the Deacons, and anyone else who serves in a leadership position.

7.  Stop being concerned about the actual numbers who are not there, but focus more energy on loving and serving those who are there.  It will be contagious.

6.  Live the Christian life wherever you go.  You never know when someone may notice and want to talk about it.

5.  Encourage as many members as you can to participate in a Small Group (if you have them), or form a discussion/small group outside of service times where you can meet together away from the building.

4.  Don’t reject any idea the first time you hear it, unless it is truly unscriptural.

3.  Be positive, no matter what.  If someone is negative to you, return the attitude with positivity

2.  Support as many mission efforts as possible.  These can be foreign or local.  Put God’s money to work.  Don’t be the 1 talent church.

1.  Get out of the way, and let God work.

Nov 19 2009

Churches “Clinging to a Bad Location”

I know many churches that have been blessed with a wonderful location.  Churches that are in a good location are easy to get to, easy to see, and have an aesthetic appeal to them.  People may drive by them and think “there’s a church I’d like to visit” just because they see it in a good location.

However, some churches are in a terrible spot.  When you have to make 7 left turns and one right turn by the log that looks like a spatula right past the “holler”, you’re in a bad spot.

I think about our church right now in West University.  Theoretically, we’re in a wonderful location.  We’re literally a stone’s throw away from one of the largest churches in the world, Joel Osteen Ministries Lakewood Church.  Tens of thousands of people gather to worship there each Sunday.  However, he also meets in a former NBA arena, and it is a high profile spot.

Our church sits along a busy Bissonnet Street almost in the heart of Houston, TX.  Hundreds of cars pass by our place each and every day.  However, we are located in a spot of town that at the heart of rush hour, people avoid like the plague.  We are near the Highway 59/Interstate 610 loop interchange.  We’re also near the Galleria.  While these may be places that a lot of people are located, they are very transient areas.  These are areas that people are going away from, not an area people are coming to.

So on Wednesday nights, our 6:30 service is very low in attendance.  Its not because people don’t want to come, but after people leave work at 6, they want to be able to go home.  If they wanted to come back to service, they would have to get back out in the terrible traffic, that sometimes can add up to an hour on your commute home, and they would be right in the thick of it.  We’ve had teachers that have called and said they can’t make it due to traffic, that by the time they got here, the service would only have 15 minutes left.

But, on Sunday mornings, there is no traffic.  You can breeze in on any interstate or major highway, 288, I-45, 59, 610, 10…you name it, no traffic.  It actually takes you less time to come from a long distance on the interstate than from 5 miles away in the city, due to all the redlights.

So at times, we have a good location, and at times we don’t.

But at some point, a church has to realize that they may be in a bad location.  Sure you want to minister to everyone around, but you have to understand that if you building is located in a less than desirable area, people may not come, no matter how positive the message is.

If your church is located next to a prison area, it may scare people off.  If you church is in a high crime area, people will be reluctant to park their cars there.  If the building is hard to get to, then people won’t come.  There are many reasons why you church may be in a “bad location”.  If you’re in a bigger city, and you haven’t experienced much growth in a while, you may need to consider that you’re no longer in a fertile area.  This chapter dealt heavily on these things.

 

Nov 8 2009

10 Stupid Things That Keep Churches From Growing — Chapter 1 — Trying To Do It All

As we begin this review, we start with the first chapter entitled “Trying To Do It All”.   I think the funny thing about this chapter is the inevitable fact that all ministers in churches that are small understand exactly what this means.  Let’s just look at it from the example of the church I work for now.  My title is Associate and Worship.  However, I am in charge of Life Groups, finding teachers for our Teen group, preparing all the slides for our worship service, running and maintaining the website (www.westuchurch.com), working with our families, occasional bulletin editor, in house technical guru, class teacher, and many other things.

Our minister is the same way.  Not only is he the preaching minister, but he’s the office manager, bulletin editor, class teacher, sounding board for disgruntled members, and many more things as well.  When you work with a small church, you have this dilemma because there are much fewer workers in the church.

The author Geoff Surratt makes 4 points about “How to Give Away Your Job in 4 Simple Steps”.  His ideas are:

1.  Connect the Dots –

“Your people want to be part of a big mission.  Simply teaching a class, sweeping a floor, or printing a bulletin is not a big mission.  people will grudgingly do theses types of menial tasks until they can find a way out.  On the other hand, when they can see theses tasks connected to a bigger vision of changing their family, their community, and their world, they will arrange their lives around making sure the work is done.”

2.  Make the Big Ask –

“Don’t expect the right people to come forward on their own accord.  Often the people who step up initially are the least qualified for the task.”

3.  Show Them the Ropes –

“The biggest mistake we make as pastors in this area is that we don’t had off ministry; we abandon ship.  Once we find a willing volunteer, we hand her the teacher’s guide adn the class roster and run like heck before she changes her mind.”

4.  Quit –

“Realize that you are currently doing some tasks that you should pass on to someone else, while you are doing other tasks that nobody should be doing.  Pastors who are overwhelmed by ministry often pastor churches with too much ministry.”

I think the hardest part of this is the idea of asking, because many ministers have the attitude of “If I want it done right I’ll just have to do it myself”.  Even if we do realize that its okay to give up something, we too often do exactly what is step #3.  We rush it, and then the ministry fails completely because the person we’ve handed it over to has no clue what they’re doing, and it dies a slow death.

I like the last part of the quote in the 4th step of quitting is amazing, and hard to swallow.  “Pastors who are overwhelmed by ministry often pastor church with too much ministry.”  With churches that are smaller, we really do overwhelm ourselves with too much.  Maybe, the idea of this chapter could not just be pointed towards the leadership, but towards the whole church.

We have 150 members at our congregation.  We’re lucky to have about 40-60 for class on Sunday mornings.  Out of those, about 20 are involved with Sunday School for children.  We then have a Ladies Class, an Auditorium Class, and usually one other adult class.  For the fall quarter, we tried to add a fourth Sunday School class, and it was met with tough times.  We’re not ready for a fourth adult class, and we have realized it.  We are going back to only three in the Winter quarter.

What things are you doing at your church that you are overwhelmed by?  Quit trying to do things that only a larger church can do.  Make sure you are not overwhelming your staff, your elders, your ministers, or your members.  When we burn out on something, its hard to regain passion for it again.

Chapter 2 to come tomorrow.

Nov 7 2009

Book Review: 10 Stupid Things That Keep Churches From Growing by Geoff Surratt

To be honest, I saw this book in a catalog from Group, and thought it was a humorous title, and picked it up thinking it may be more of a comical book than serious.  While the book tends to bring a gentle sense of humor with it,  the 10 chapters of this book are spot on.

Over the next few days, I think I would like to review each particular chapter in this book, and add my thoughts to the author’s thoughts.  This book was written from the perspective of a Pastor in a multi-site congregation in Charleston, South Carolina.  What I really liked about it was that it was not just from his perspective, but at the end of each chapter he asked a different Pastor/Minister to give his thoughts about that particular point.

Pastor’s contributing include Craig Groeschel, Pastor of LifeChurch.tv, Mark Batterson of National Community Church in Washington D.C., and Perry Noble of New Spring Church in South Carolina, who you can link to on the right.  There are 7 others in the book as well, a different one for each chapter.

I’ll start the reviews of each chapter next week, but I thought I’d go ahead and give the chapter names so you could be thinking about them.  In order, they are:

1.  Trying to Do It All
2.  Establishing the Wrong Role for the Pastor’s Family
3.  Providing a Second-Rate Worship Experience
4.  Settling for Low Quality in Children’s Ministry
5.  Promoting Talent over Integrity
6.  Clinging to a Bad Location
7.  Copying Another Successful Church
8.  Favoring Discipline over Reconciliation
9.  Mixing Ministry and Business
10.  Letting Committees Steer the Ship

I’ll try to begin this review Sunday afternoon or Monday.  Till then, Roll Tide.