Reggie Joiner's Blog, page 52

Creating Holiday Social Media Content for Your Church

The holidays are upon us! It is a wonderful time of year that incorporates some major events: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. With these events come wonderful opportunities for your church to create amazing holiday social media content that inspires, challenges and engages your community. In fact, there is so much you can do around the holiday season that it becomes less about what to do and more about what not to do.

So what do you do? How do you communicate it? Who do you get involv...

An Experiment in Creating Parent Small Groups

This fall, we launched an experiment as a NextGen team. We’ve been wrestling with what it looks like for us to better partner with parents—to move beyond handouts and to work together. For us this has resulted in a small group experiment.

For the past several months, our NextGen staff has been working on a small group experience for parents. With the support of our leadership and adult ministry, our children’s and student ministry is taking the lead on adult small groups targeted at parents....

Behind the Smile: What You Want Every SGL to Know

You know them. You see them every week. They are students in your ministry. They walk in without a care in the world (or it seems), a smile on their face, phone in their hand and a hidden secret that no one knows. These smiling faces represent broken families, baggage, scars from failures, anxiety, pressures from social media, addiction, walls built to avoid disappointments, and a longing for someone to know the real them. These are the smiles we see week in and week out. As SGLs we are allow...

How Churches Can Use Partnerships to Reach the Community

Within your community, there are hundreds of organizations and likely thousands of people with a common goal: to reach and to help people.

They have this goal in common with your church. This is why the church and the community not only need each other for practical purposes, but are better together for the good of the world.

Instead of simply saying, “Let us know how our church can help!” there are many reasons and many ways a church can begin to actively use partnerships to impact the commu...

How Your Church Can Partner With Others to Impact Your Community

Teamwork makes the dream work and two heads are better than one. These statements are so true. And, if any group should be able to work together to impact the community, it is the Church. With our faith and efforts combined, we can leave a tremendous impression on the lives and hearts of our neighbors.

Imagine communities that knew their local churches work together to serve them. What kind of message does that communicate about our faith? How much greater influence will our churches have as...

Creating Church Events That Soar

There’s nothing quite like spending time and budget on an event that is poorly attended. We live in a culture that is always looking for something to do. Something to attend. Somewhere to spend their family time. So when our churches put an event together and it is poorly attended or misses its target audience it can leave us feeling defeated and frustrated. If we knew the secrets to plan an event that will succeed, I believe that no one would take a loss in this area ever again. These losses...

What I’ve Learned About Being a NextGen Pastor

A year and half ago I transitioned from middle school ministry into a role as NextGen Pastor. I immediately began asking, “What does this look like?” Since that time, I’ve asked that question and have heard it asked countless times. Just a few days ago, I was talking with another Family Pastor before Orange Tour and she was asking, “So what do you do every week.” Another new NextGen Pastor asked the same thing days earlier online, “What do you spend most of your time on?”

My first answer: “Me...

Why My Church is an Orange Church

I remember standing in a mall bookstore looking for some new reading material to challenge me to the next level as a leader. I was drawn to the bright, strangely shaped book called, “Think Orange.”

At the time, I was not a youth pastor but was serving as a young adult pastor in a very large church. My heart has always been for youth but I took the job to serve young adults largely because—after being a youth pastor for about 10 years—I was frustrated at two things. First, I was frustrated th...

Empowering Youth Leaders to Be the Church

The comment, “The youth are the future of the church,” has always made me cringe. It would be said in meetings, interviews and the halls of our church. Oftentimes, I would stop the well-meaning utterer of this phrase and politely (most of the time) correct them by saying, “No, they are the church now.” This always led to polite, halfhearted agreement.

You see, our church has been on the path to being Orange for a decade. We send leaders to the conferences, read all the books, and host a month...

What You Lose When You Widen the Circle

One-on-one connection with kids about their faith is, without a doubt, my favorite part of being a kids’ pastor. It’s within these conversations where I’m given a front-row seat to God’s grace and goodness in their young lives. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are certainly days when getting a child to open up about their personal faith journey is a struggle. But more often than not, kids have a beautiful way of articulating in their own words how Jesus is making a difference in and around them...