Podcast (audioblog): Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS | [Subscribe today to unSeminary Audioblog]

Core to every approach to multisite church are campus pastors. There are thousands of these local pastoral leaders enabling churches to reach more people faster than any other approach to church growth today. They are my heroes! I’ve had the privilege to see dozens of them up close over the last dozen years or so. Here are some tools that I think every campus pastor could benefit from using in their ministry:

• An Elegant Way to Take Notes // Core to every campus pastor’s role is getting people connected to the church. If you are doing your job right, every weekend at your church you are having dozens of conversations with people that present opportunities for them to get plugged in. What do you do with all that information? How do you collect it in a way that’s actionable? You need to take notes quickly and elegantly. Smartphones are still lousy for taking notes because you can’t write that quickly in them, plus it looks like you are disengaging with people when you pull out your phone. The Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase is a great way to keep track of notes on a weekend … a writing surface and place to store notes all in one. With every conversation, you make a follow-up reminder note about how you can help that person take his or her next step.
• A Simple Way for People to Connect with You // You only have so many hours in the week. Your team needs to connect with you about what’s happening at the campus. You have guests who want to meet with you for a coffee. There is a couple in crisis who want to grab some time to talk about their marriage. Juggling all these requests for your time can be time consuming … most campus pastors don’t have a dedicated administrator to help with scheduling. Using a self-service calendaring tool like Time Trade can help people access your time and free you up from all the back and forth of finding a time that works. You define a series of “open slots” in your calendar and the tool looks and sees if you have availability during those times. People use a simple “self-serve” interface to find the time that works best for them. They can even reschedule if the time no longer works for you. Best of all, you can define multiple links … one for phone calls, another for coffee meetings, a third for Sunday morning time slots … each with its own presets. Using a tool like this puts people in the driver’s seat for finding a time that works best for them, but it gives you control over defining when it would work for you.
• Something to Deal with All the Email! // Let’s face it: you get a lot of emails. You have notes sent to you about the weekend services … people are looking for answers to questions … there never seems to be an end to it. Although it seems there are always tools on the horizon that will attempt to reduce our dependence on email, we’re all going to be using it as the core of what we do for communication for quite a while. Boomerang for Gmail is a handy tool that gives you the ability to remove an email from your inbox but have it return (or boomerang) at a time that works better for you. It also gives you the ability to return emails that no one has responded to … or time delay when you want an email to be sent. It’s a handy tool for pastors who are looking to stay on top of their email!

We’d love to hear from you! What tools are you using that other campus pastors absolutely have to put in their tool belt?