We are just a few weeks away from Easter! This is one of those days in the calendar when people are willing to invite their family and friends to attend your church with them. This year we are adding some new components to our communication plan with our people. We're...

The language we use as church leaders has the potential to shape the culture of our church because it frames peoples thinking. Often the language we use when we launch a new ministry can set it on an unintended course simply through the way we've helped people understand it. Here...

Why does Jimmy Fallon sit behind a desk? Do we really believe that is his office and all these people are coming to see him? Why does he have that coffee cup and pens on the desk? Is he really drinking coffee and writing memos to his staff? For that matter...

Almost a year ago we started talking about doing a "40 Day Bible Challenge" as a leadership team. The big idea was to ask our people to read through the entire New Testament in the two months leading up to Easter 2013. Our goal was to have 3,000 people who...

A few times every year an invoice passes across my desk for t-shirts and I cringe a little bit. We spend a lot of money every year on t-shirts. We give them out to our first time guests, our volunteer teams, our community outreach participants, people who get baptized, our...

This week I've had the privilege of traveling to Nicaragua with Living Water International (LWI).  We've partnered with them in variety of clean water projects.  We were in Nicaragua seeing some project areas that we might end up serving in the coming  years. I was humbled again to interact with some of the...

Sunday comes every seven days.  It's relentless! Every week we have to find ways to communicate the message of Jesus in a fresh and relevant way.  Every seven days we have to find a new way to move people into community.  Every weekend we have to leverage the time and talent...

According to a recent Pew Study, 69% of internet users utilize social media on a regular basis.  The same reported showed that 92% of internet users aged 18-29 used social media regularly. The age of living our private lives in the public sphere is upon us. How are you leveraging social media...

The number of potential ways that church leaders can communicate with their people can be staggering at times. Email blasts, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your own website, billboards, flyers, postcards, smoke signals ... pony express ... list this goes on and on! In the midst of all those channels I'm still...

Have you ever been somewhere different for the first time?  In the past I've encouraged pastors to go play Bingo for an evening to give them a sense of what First Time Guests feel when they come to their church.  At Bingo there is a series of social norms, funny...