Why Your Church Is Stuck

If you’re church is stuck, YOU are the problem.

 

Let that sink in.  Does that statement fit?  Can you honestly, without explanation, claim responsibility for your church being stuck?

Taking responsibility is critical to getting your church Unstuck.  Because, along with being the problem:

You’re also the solution 

In my role as a church building consultant, I’m in a lot of churches.  Many of them think that facilities are the only barrier to growth.  They couldn’t be more wrong.  Your church is the size it is because it’s a product of the systems and process you have installed or inherited.  If  God’s vision is a faded memory, now is the time to take a look at the real reasons your stuck.

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Pastors: How Much Time Should You Spend Fundraising?

A few weeks back I listened to a podcast on This American Life that explored the subject of political fund raising.  Specifically they focused on how much time Senators and Congressmen spend on fund raising.  It is a shocking amount of time!

Donor development, and actual fundraising events, are a regular part of a normal day for the men and women leading our country.  Some estimate as much as 80% of their job is related to raising funds.  It’s crazy to think that 4 out of every 5 minutes of their day they spend raising money to keep their job where 4 out of 5 minutes of every day is spent raising money .

While I think there’s a better way for politicians to spend their time, I would agree that a portion of their time has to be spent raising money.  That got me thinking, what percentage of a lead pastor’s time is spent on donor development?  What should it be?

In most churches I don’t think it’s on the radar at all, at least not until it’s time for a capital campaign for new church buildings or to reduce debt.

Is that the best we can do with and action that is critical to high impact ministry?

How many times do you think a high capacity donor has lunch with a pastor before the big ask comes?  I bet the average is close Continue Reading…

10 Things Every Church Planter Should Know About Church Buildings

1.  Plan For Facilities From Day 1 – If you just planted, in 5-7 years you’ll need a building or a new job!

2.  Build A Long Runway –   “Church Building -  How long does it take…really?

3.  Track Everything – Good financials and attendance numbers put the bank’s bean counters at ease.

4.  Define “Healthy” Early -  If you aim at nothing you’ll hit it every time.  Understand what the metrics of healthy are for your church.

5.  Measure “Healthy”-  What gets measured gets done.

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Cash Is A Vision Maker Or A Vision Breaker

In the last few weeks I’ve met with a couple of pastors who’ve managed to dig their church out of, what seemed like, certain financial ruin. These men made me realize how closely tied vision and money are in building the church as well as church building. Think about it. How many organizations have you seen kill it who stunk at managing their cash-flow and balance sheet?

Bottom line: If your church is going to change the world, YOU have to be a next level money manager. At church and at home.

5 Ways To Build A Strong Church With New Facilities

What makes your church stronger?   How do you measure it?  Is it being bigger?  Growing faster?  Giving more?  Baptizing more people?

All of these are metrics churches use to measure strength.  Your church probably has a few of these along with other, better, metrics to help you track progress.  With those metrics in mind answer this, can your church grow stronger through disruption? Should it?  Disruption can take on many forms in a church, however, there are few things we willing do that cause disruption like adding ministry space.

Here are 5 ways to leverage church construction for a stronger church:

1.  Hire pros like you hire staff -  I always encourage churches to hire people to partner with during construction using the same methods they use to hire staff.  The people  leading your project will fill a critical ministry leadership role for 2 to 4 years, which is longer than the average tenure of most church staff.  If you wouldn’t hire someone to be on staff,  don’t hire them to lead your project. Continue Reading…

3 Critical Elements To Accomplish Anything

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. That’s why banks rely heavily on a credit scores.  Its also why obtaining those often elusive goals is so dang hard.  So how can you create change? Here’s the 3 Critical Elements To Accomplish Anything!

A Written Goal

I mean a compelling and specific written goal with a due date.  By compelling I mean something you want to achieve and you know why you want to achieve it.  To simply say you want to “read the bible through” or “lose 10 pounds” doesn’t carry enough weight (pun intended) to get you to actually change your behavior.  You have to have a compelling “Why” or reason for moving in the direction of your goal.  Keep it positive.  Focus on what you want to gain and not what you want to lose.

A Solid Strategy

My good friend Mark Cole defined strategy this way.  “If your goal was to occupy Normandy your strategy might be to use the air force the navy and the marines for a Continue Reading…

7 Ways To Leverage Disruption

Recently I was on a flight where the flight attendant delivered his safety instructions over the PA and finished with this statement, “Please be careful when you open the overhead bins because, in flight, shift happens”.  Clever, huh?  I don’t care if you’re a pre-school teacher or the Pope, in this life, things don’t always go as planned.

Here are 7 ways to leverage disruption and thrive when shift happens to you.

1. Don’t make things worse:  You won’t make your best decisions when things are on fire… so just don’t!  The easiest way to worsen any complicated situation is to make major life decisions before the shock of the situation has worn off.  If you just had a bomb dropped on you, give yourself some time to let the concussion wear off before you dive into a solution.  Making promises, good or bad,  or offering forgiveness too early may come back to bite you.  Promises made during disruption are almost always formed out of anger.  Premature forgiveness can lead to bitterness on your part or on the part of the person who thought they were forgiven.

2.  Decide ahead of time how you’ll leverage disruption: You must decide ahead of time how you’ll be affected and perfected through disruption.  Disruption that is certainly coming.  Yes I know that’s hard to do when you’ve lost your job or your marriage.  This isn’t an easy step.  Most of the time the lesson is only obvious in the rear view mirror, but still you have to be committed to the lesson.

3. Take as much responsibility as you can:  My pastor, Andy Stanley, claims that counseling has never been his strong suit but that he knows one thing with absolute certainty.  If he couldn’t get people to focus on THEIR CONTRIBUTION to the problem at hand, they weren’t making progress.  Continue Reading…

4 Leadership Lessons From The Costa Concordia

1. The Law of Minor Deviation

Ok maybe this isn't an official law but maybe it should be.  The Costa Concordia was only a few hundred yards from where it should have been.  Given the number of miles they'd traveled, how much of a problem could it be to deviate from the path a few hundred yards.  Apparently huge!

The bigger the thing you find yourself in charge of the greater

the potential a small deviation has for disaster.

Pastors, that's why a little flirting may not seem like a big deal now but can causes a 3 mile island situation if it isn't eliminated.  Great news!  You guys have the opportunity to crash your job and your marriage in one simple step.   Nobody wakes up one day and says "today's the day I throw it all away".  You have to understand the path that leads to destruction and then determine if you're on it or not.

2. Decide ahead of time how you'll handle a crisis

I have no doubt Captain Francesco Schettino had crisis decisions made for him by people farther up the food chain.  To reach his leadership level he must have been drilled on emergency procedures and systems, but apparently he never committed to them.  We'll never Continue Reading...

Everyone dies of something

few die for something!

Andy Stanley

No Observable Effect Level

For the past few weeks one of the audio books I’ve been listening to is the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris. (Caution there is some adult language and a couple of very adult topics included)

Overall the book has been pretty good but there has been one phrase that really grabbed me. Tim does a lot of strategic testing of supplements and exercise strategies using himself as the test subject. In one experiment he tried a certain dosage of a natural supplement and reported:

No Observable Effect Level Continue Reading…

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