When you are sending out a mass email from your church or even just an email appeal to a small group think about who the email is coming from because who the email is sent from is more critical than what is said in the subject line when it comes to...

The most recent study shows that 67% of adults use social media regularly. If 2/3rds of your church showed up to a meeting every week would you want to use that meeting to communicate with them? If that percentage of folks in your community came to an event in your...

The late (and great) Howard Hendricks once asked his seminary class "How much ministry does $100 buy?" He paused and his class considered the question.  He went on to answer "About $100 worth!" As church leaders we need to be thinking about the funding of the mission that God has...

Easter is right around the corner ... the time to plan out your "last week" strategy is right now! There will be a large percentage of your first-time guests that won't make a decision to attend your church until the days before Easter. So you need a plan that encourages...

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...