Thom S. Rainer's Blog, page 190
July 8, 2017
Notable Voices and the Week in Review: July 8, 2017
Is There a Church Death Spiral?
Why Church Members Attend Less Frequently — Rainer on Leadership #342
Five Surprising Discoveries about Growing Churches
10 Content Suggestions for Your Church Newsletter
How Stability Can Hurt a Church – Rainer on Leadership #343
The Number One Reason Missionaries Go Home — Paul Akin
The most common reason missionaries go home isn’t due to lack of money, illness, terrorism, homesickness, or even a lack of fruit or response to the gospel. Regretfully, the number one reason is conflict with other missionaries.
2 Signs You’re an Insecure Leader — Chad Williams
At its core, insecurity is a sinful response to the reality that the only leader who actually has it all together is Jesus. So, what does insecurity look like in the life of a leader? There are many possible manifestations, but for the sake of brevity, I will share a couple of tell-tale signs. Insecure leaders are typically:
3 Reasons Kids Ministry Is Important — Eric Geiger
The last two weeks have provided great reminders to me about why kids ministry is so important. I served as camp pastor at CentriKid camps for a week. The whole family came and we had a great time. The kids participated in Bible studies, recreation, track times based on their interests, and morning and evening worship gatherings. Then the next week, Kaye hosted a backyard kids club in our neighborhood for neighbors and friends from school. Friends and some incredible teenagers helped provide games, recreation, singing, crafts, and a Bible story each morning. About 50 kids came. The experiences reminded us why kids ministry is so vital:
4 Reasons Why More Money Won’t Solve Your Financial Problems — Art Rainer
Certainly, there is a time when an increased checking account balance helps. But for many financial struggles, money is not the answer. More money will only exaggerate the existing problem. We sometimes see this with those who win the lottery. The winnings end up exaggerating existing issues and crushing the winner. When won’t money solve your financial problems? Here are a few circumstances when more money is not what you really need.
5 Honest Struggles Most Church Leaders Don’t Want To Admit — Carey Nieuwhof
Sometimes all you need to know is you’re not alone. And you’re not, even if you feel that way. Here are 5 ways ministry leaders struggle in their relationship with God:
6 Ways to Make Your Guests Feel Welcome at Church — Chris Weatherly
We all love our churches but rarely do we think about how they operate from a church guest perspective. Then someone brings a first time visitor. As soon as we bring a church guest or someone tells us they brought a guest our brain goes into hyper drive. What will they think about us? Do they think we are weird? Is the music too loud? Did somebody greet them when they came in? Will the sermon minister to them? All of these are normal questions to ask, but what if instead of waiting until the guest showed up to think about these questions, we think about them ahead of time. Here are 6 suggestions to help you get the process of thinking through the first impression of your church.
July 7, 2017
How Stability Can Hurt a Church – Rainer on Leadership #343
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Stability is often a goal for churches. Unfortunately stable churches are often stagnant churches. So when we talk about stable churches today, it’s in that context. And there are five reasons that can be a very bad thing for a church.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
Stable doctrine can be good thing. Stagnant ministry is not.
A stagnant church is not a church on mission.
Comfort is often the enemy of obedience.
For too many church members, the extent of their missions involvement is just giving money.
One of the biggest mistakes churches make is not being intentional about starting new groups.
If you’re not creating new groups, your church is likely inwardly focused.
Being a part of a local church means making a commitment to focus on others.
The five points we cover are:
A stable church is not a church on mission.
Comfort is the enemy of obedience.
Stable churches are not reaching their communities.
Stable churches do not create new groups.
Members of stable churches want the focus to be on their preferences.
Episode Sponsors
The Timothy Track, from Midwestern Seminary, offers select residential M.Div. students placement in internship positions in a local church in the area. Now you can complement your studies with in-the-field ministry experience. In addition, all Timothy Track students will receive up to 12 credit hours for the internship and a 50% tuition scholarship for the first year.
Find out more at mbts.edu/TimothyTrack.
Vanderbloemen Search Group is the premier pastor search firm dedicated to helping churches and ministries build great teams. Their Fall Lead Pastor and Executive Pastor Coaching Networks are now open for registration, and our very own Dr. Rainer will be speaking at the Fall Lead Pastor Coaching Network.
So if you’re a Lead Pastor or an Executive Pastor looking for peer roundtable coaching, check it out at vanderbloemen.com/coaching. It’s limited to 16 folks, so apply today before it fills up.
Feedback
If you have a question you would like answered on the show, fill out the form on the podcast page here at ThomRainer.com. If we use your question, you’ll receive a free copy of Who Moved My Pulpit?
Resources Mentioned in Today’s Podcast
Five Reasons Why Stability Is Bad for a Church
Church Answers
Evangelism in the Early Church
Technicolor
PerceptGroup.com
I Am a Church Member
July 6, 2017
10 Content Suggestions for Your Church Newsletter
By Jonathan Howe
Every church can and should have some kind of email communication or newsletter for members and guests. And while many churches may do a monthly newsletter, a weekly newsletter might be most effective because of the infrequency of attendance by many members.
So if you’re going to have a weekly newsletter, it’s good to know what to include and what not to include. Below are 10 suggestions for your weekly newsletter. You don’t have to have all 10, but these serve as a good starting point as you build your newsletter.
A word of encouragement from the pastor. The pastor’s note does not have to be long. A couple paragraphs will suffice. But it’s always best for members to hear from the pastor (or another staff member) each week in the church newsletter.
Important upcoming dates. Include your important dates—church-wide functions, special events, holiday celebrations, etc. This is neither the time nor the place to list every little thing going on at a church. You don’t have the room, and it will overwhelm the reader.
The upcoming sermon title and text. Inset boxes or sidebars are the perfect location for this. By listing the sermon information for the coming week, your members can be more prepared for the proclamation of God’s Word each week. They can also pray for the pastor during sermon preparation.
Worship set list for the upcoming Sunday. This is very similar to the previous point. By listing the worship songs for the coming Sunday, attendees can be more prepared to worship through music. A link to a Spotify playlist is one simple way to accomplish this.
Scripture for memorization. Scripture memorization is a lost spiritual discipline for many Christians. By having a weekly or monthly verse to memorize, you can foster this discipline in your church members.
Daily Bible reading for the next week. Like memorization, you can keep a list of daily Bible reading passages in front of your members. You’re more likely to have members stay engaged throughout the year in Bible reading when they are constantly reminded about what to read.
A volunteer feature. Churches often have difficulty finding volunteers for ministry. The more you feature volunteers and remind members about places of service, the more likely you are to have members who are open to serving.
Sharable social media content. Create action steps in your church newsletter for those reading to share some of the content. Provide pictures or sample tweets for members to share on their personal social media accounts. The easier you make it for members to share, the more likely they will follow through with it.
Excerpts or links to relevant news or articles of encouragement. We constantly get requests to feature posts from ThomRainer.com in church newsletters. We always grant permission, and all we ask for in return is a link to the original article. This is a common practice; so if you see something on a site that you want your members to read, use a paragraph or so of it and link to the site so they can read the full article.
Prayer emphases. Newsletters are perfect for coordinating prayer in your church. While I would steer clear of listing all the prayer needs in your church, choose one or two major prayer initiatives to ask members to pray for.
Again, a newsletter with all ten of these might be too much, but you will likely know what content works best in your context. I encourage you to try implementing these and see if member engagement with your email newsletter increases.
Do you include any of these in your church newsletter? What else would you add to this list?
Jonathan Howe serves as Director of Strategic Initiatives at LifeWay Christian Resources as well as the host and producer of Rainer on Leadership and SBC This Week. Jonathan writes weekly at ThomRainer.com on topics ranging from social media to websites and church communications. Connect with Jonathan on Twitter at @Jonathan_Howe.
July 5, 2017
Five Surprising Discoveries about Growing Churches
Do you want the bad news first or the good news first?
I always ask for the bad news first. I can’t enjoy the good news knowing that a report of bad news looms in the next few statements.
So I gave you some bad news in my Monday post. I shared with you the statistical reality of the death spiral. Once a church declines below 100 in average worship attendance, its rate of decline accelerates. In other words, the church declines faster and faster.
In this article, I share some good news. The news is about the growing churches in our study. As a review, you can look at the details of our research at my blog post on June 28, 2017. Simply stated, we conducted a random sample of 1,000 churches with data from 2013 and 2016. The margin of error of the research is +/- 3.1 percent. It’s an accurate study. It’s a very accurate study.
So let’s take a few moments and look at the churches whose average worship attendance grew from 2013 to 2016. Here are five of the surprising discoveries from this research:
Over one-third of the churches are growing. The conventional wisdom says 80 percent of churches are declining or plateaued. Our research shows that number to either be a myth or no longer relevant. Among the 1,000 churches we randomly selected, “only” 65 percent are declining or plateaued. In other words, 35 percent are growing.
If a church is growing, it is highly likely to be growing faster than the community in which it is located. In fact, 91 percent of the growing churches are outpacing the growth of the community. That is a huge number! And it’s really good news if we can move our churches from decline to growth.
There is a good representation of churches that are both growing and are evangelistically effective. Granted, the percentage of the total churches in this category is low, but we have sufficient numbers to conduct deep dive research on many of the churches individually. This information may prove to be some of the most relevant and powerful, especially from the perspective of evangelism renewal in our churches.
Growth and evangelistic effectiveness are not limited to any one geographic area. To the contrary, we saw a very low correlation between the geographic region and evangelistic effectiveness. I see such information as very hopeful, because it tells us that demographics and geographic location are not usually limitations for churches. I will expand upon this discovery in a future post in a few days.
We can no longer use membership in our metrics for churches. It does little good to use membership as a metric in most studies of large numbers of churches. Many churches have bloated membership rolls filled with missing and deceased members. Other churches don’t bother to even measure membership at all. This reality forces us to use worship attendance as our base metric. It is the most common and, usually, the most accurate metric churches keep.
As a final note in this post, I was really surprised by these summary metrics. I think you will be too.
31.8 percent of churches are growing, and they are growing faster than their respective communities.
3.0 percent of churches are growing, but not as fast as their respective communities.
4.2 percent of churches are declining or plateaued, but they are not declining as rapidly as their respective communities.
61.0 percent of churches are declining or plateaued, and they are declining more rapidly than their respective communities.
In my next post, I will look at the evangelistic metrics of our churches. Brace yourself for an abrupt dose of reality.
July 4, 2017
Why Church Members Attend Less Frequently — Rainer on Leadership #342
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Regular church attendance has waned in recent years as the commitment level from members has dropped. Today, we address five major reasons for this drop in attendance.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
Is the church so important that you need to gather with other believers on a regular basis? Yes.
It is extremely difficult to make disciples of church members if you don’t know where they are.
Culture is not causing churches to compromise. Churches are compromising and culture is saying it’s okay.
The way you bring people into a church will show them the expected commitment level for the future.
Those who are leaders in the church set the example of commitment for the rest of the church.
If leaders in your church sporadically show up, the rest of the members will see that and follow suit.
Unfortunately, there are a significant number of Christians who don’t see church attendance as important.
The five reasons we discuss are:
We are minimizing the importance of the local church.
We worship the idols of activities.
We take a lot of vacations from church.
We do not have high expectations of our members.
We make infrequent attendees leaders in our churches.
Episode Sponsors
Vanderbloemen Search Group is the premier pastor search firm dedicated to helping churches and ministries build great teams. Their Fall Lead Pastor and Executive Pastor Coaching Networks are now open for registration, and our very own Dr. Rainer will be speaking at the Fall Lead Pastor Coaching Network.
So if you’re a Lead Pastor or an Executive Pastor looking for peer roundtable coaching, check it out at vanderbloemen.com/coaching. It’s limited to 16 folks, so apply today before it fills up.
Midwestern Seminary, one of the fastest growing seminaries in North America, exists to train leaders For The Church. The local church is God’s “Plan A” for the proclamation of the gospel, and there is no Plan B. And this is Midwestern’s vision and heartbeat—equipping pastors and other ministry leaders who are called to expand God’s mission in the world through the local church. At Midwestern Seminary: they train leaders ‘For The Church.’
Visit them online at MBTS.edu and start your ministry training today.
Feedback
If you have a question you would like answered on the show, fill out the form on the podcast page here at ThomRainer.com. If we use your question, you’ll receive a free copy of Who Moved My Pulpit?
Resources Mentioned in Today’s Podcast
The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown
July 3, 2017
Is There a Church Death Spiral?
Please don’t shoot the messenger.
And please wait on additional data and research that will be more positive and helpful.
But please read my words closely and carefully. I am troubled by one major aspect of the research we just conducted.
A Review of the Research
You can peruse the details of our research at my previous blog post. Simply stated, we conducted a random sample of churches with data in 2013 and 2016. The margin of error of the research is +/- 3.1 percent. It’s an accurate study – very accurate.
In the previous post, I shared that 65 percent of churches are declining or plateaued. For most of us, that number was better than the conventional “wisdom” we have heard. In that sense it was good news.
And Now the Bad News, At Least Some of It
Over 61 percent of churches average fewer than 100 in worship attendance. Yes, we are a nation of small churches. I love it. I love small churches.
But if your church has fewer than 100 in worship, it is likely to be a declining church. In fact two out of three of these small churches are declining.
Even more, there is a direct correlation with the rate of decline in a church and the size of the church. Simply stated, the smaller the church, the greater the rate of decline in attendance. Perhaps these three statements will clarify my point:
A declining church with an attendance of 200 or more declines at a rate of 4 percent each year.
A declining church with an attendance of less than 100 declines at a rate of 7.6 percent per year.
A declining church with an attendance of less than 50 declines at a rate of 8.7 percent a year.
It’s a death spiral. Declining smaller churches decline much more rapidly than larger churches. Once the declining church goes below 100 in attendance, its days are likely numbered.
Here is the sad summary statement of this portion of the research: Once a church declines below 100 in worship attendance, it is likely to die within just a few years. The life expectancy for many of these churches is ten years or less.
Gloomy But Not Hopeless
Yes, I am very concerned about our churches. Yes, I am very concerned about our smaller churches. It is a gloomy scenario.
But in my next article, I will share some of the good news. I will demonstrate how growing churches are not just growing; most are growing faster than the communities in which they are located.
Once a church has a turnaround from decline to growth, the outlook becomes very positive.
In the meantime, we must seek God’s solutions to help these smaller and declining churches.
We are learning so much even as I write this information.
Stay tuned . . .
July 2, 2017
Pray for Evangel Church
Location: Lewistown, Pennsylvania
Pastor: Bill Howe
Weekly Worship: 10:20 AM, Eastern
Fast Facts: Evangel Church is located 25 minutes south of State College, PA, home of Penn State University. The church is transitioning to new leadership style and is an urban church in an old mill town surrounded by bucolic mountains and fertile farmland worked by the Amish for more than 100 years. Please pray for their community VBS which starts July 17 as well as athletic events in their gym which will be used to reach out into the community. Finally, pray for unity in the congregation as they move forward. Pray that the elders and pastors will remain united and strong and that God will give them wisdom and courage to move forward.
Website: evangel.family
July 1, 2017
Notable Voices and the Week in Review: July 1, 2017
Five Terrible Reasons to Enter Vocational Ministry
She Reads Truth with Raechel Myers and Amanda Bible Williams – Rainer on Leadership #340
Dispelling the 80 Percent Myth of Declining Churches
Six Items to Include in Your Guest Welcome Packet
13 Signs of Pastor Fatigue – Rainer on Leadership #341
Five Reasons Lead Pastors Should Be Involved with VBS — Sam Rainer
If you’re a lead pastor, it’s tempting to take off the week because you’re not really needed to lead VBS. Many churches have longstanding volunteers and leaders who basically run with VBS every year. But the week of VBS is not the time to take a vacation. When your congregation is all-hands-on-deck, then you need to be there. The lead pastor should be an active and visible part of VBS. Here’s why.
Helpful Practices for Pastoral Revitalization — Marty Duren
Personal/pastoral revitalization concerns the whole being, not only the body or only the emotions. Observing these practices on an ongoing basis will help keep us on a path of physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
How to Encourage Your Pastor — David McLemore
Pastoring a church is not an easy job. Here are 10 ways you can encourage your pastor (or pastors).
10 Ways to Create an Unhealthy Team Environment — Ron Edmondson
Seriously, I realize no one intentionally sets out for unhealthiness, but I’ve seen it so many times. There are things which injure the health of a team. Perhaps understanding how it develops can help, because just as with a healthy team environment, creating an unhealthy team environment doesn’t happen without intentionality. We have to work at it.
3 Phrases Smart People Should Stop Saying — Eric Geiger
I have noticed some recurring phrases that make the intelligent people seem less so, that blunt the impact of their words and distract from the message. After first hearing them on podcasts, they are now showing up in regular life as well. Maybe I need to take a break from podcasts and go old school and listen to music again, but here are three phrases smart people should stop saying:
Curing the Sickness That’s Killing The Church — Sean Palmer
There is a corrosive contagion killing the American church. Quite simply, it’s consumerism, the desire to be served. Americans exist in a culture built on productivity, buying, and selling. We don’t need to deconstruct the nature, causes, positives, and negatives of a consumeristic culture, but the by-product of that culture is a Christianity that has almost wholly imported consumeristic reflexes. This seizure of Christian imagination is the leading edge of the lack of meaningful spiritual formation in most churches. I don’t know all the answers, but I want to highlight a few manifestations of the virus and invite you to offer gospel-shaped remedies to eradicate the contagion.
June 30, 2017
13 Signs of Pastor Fatigue – Rainer on Leadership #341
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There are danger signs in any vocation. But if you ignore these, it might be more than just your job that you lose—it could be your ministry that’s lost. Thanks again to Chuck Lawless for the post from which these warning signs come.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
Living for your days off is a miserable way to live in ministry.
If you consistently don’t get enough rest and sleep, you likely won’t produce good results at work.
Don’t try to feed the congregation without first feeding yourself.
If you’re not happy and content in the work to which God has called you, people will notice. You can’t fake it.
Your family is your first line of ministry.
Pastors should invest in assistants to help with administrative work.
When you work a ministry schedule, you need a system for returning calls and emails.
Don’t make friends just to use them as conduits to find your next place of ministry.
The 13 warning signs we cover are:
Living by a “get me through the day” philosophy.
Losing vision.
Developing poor sleep patterns.
Declining spiritual disciplines.
Repeating lessons and sermons.
Faking joy and excitement.
Frustrating family members.
Magnifying minors.
Failing to return emails and phone calls.
Misdirecting affections.
Decreasing exercise.
Focusing on a “grass is greener” syndrome.
Avoiding people who speak truth.
Episode Sponsors
The Timothy Track, from Midwestern Seminary, offers select residential M.Div. students placement in internship positions in a local church in the area. Now you can complement your studies with in-the-field ministry experience. In addition, all Timothy Track students will receive up to 12 credit hours for the internship and a 50% tuition scholarship for the first year.
Find out more at mbts.edu/TimothyTrack.
Vanderbloemen Search Group is the premier pastor search firm dedicated to helping churches and ministries build great teams. Their Fall Lead Pastor and Executive Pastor Coaching Networks are now open for registration, and our very own Dr. Rainer will be speaking at the Fall Lead Pastor Coaching Network.
So if you’re a Lead Pastor or an Executive Pastor looking for peer roundtable coaching, check it out at vanderbloemen.com/coaching. It’s limited to 16 folks, so apply today before it fills up.
Feedback
If you have a question you would like answered on the show, fill out the form on the podcast page here at ThomRainer.com. If we use your question, you’ll receive a free copy of Who Moved My Pulpit?
Resources Mentioned in Today’s Podcast
Seven Ways to Deal with Gnats in Ministry
BELAY
June 29, 2017
Six Items to Include in Your Guest Welcome Packet
In podcast episode 300, we briefly touched on guest welcome packets. Following the interest in that episode and after last week’s post on guests’ gifts, it seemed only prudent to expand on the topic.
Guest welcome packets differ from a guest letter. And while they can be mailed, it’s sometimes more effective to hand these out at an information desk while the guest is still on campus. Some churches opt to have packets available at kids check-in or in the student ministry area as well. This makes it easy to include age-appropriate information in the packet because the parents are dropping off a child in that age range.
So whether you mail your guest packet or give it out on Sunday, here are six items to be sure to include:
General information about the church and next steps. The information should be a brief overview. There’s no need to have a 30-page history of the church. Provide an overview of the church’s vision, its group strategy, and how to take the next step toward membership. This next step should also include information about making a personal decision for Christ.
Information about specific ministries that might be of interest. Trained guest experience volunteers can make the difference in a guest connecting to the church or not. Volunteers need to be perceptive to the needs and wants of the guest and provide the specific information that’s relevant to them. As previously stated, this can easily be pre-loaded if the packets are given out in age-specific areas, but if you hand them out at a welcome center, insert this information according to need as you give them to the guest.
A welcome gift. I covered four common guest gifts last week and several others were mentioned in the comments—including my personal favorite of chips and salsa. Whatever your gift may be, if you can provide it in the packet, that’s great. If you deliver it later to the home, that also can work in certain contexts.
Stories from members. Member stories allow you to connect to guests on a personal level. When compiling member stories for the welcome packet, just use first names of those who provide their story and highlight three main points in each story: where the member was in their life before coming to your church, how they connected to the church, and how the connection changed them.
Weekly schedule. Don’t assume the guest will look up times and events online or in the bulletin. Provide a schedule of major weekly events for them to hang on to or to stick on the fridge. Even if you think the times are easy to remember, it will take guests some time to remember dates and times when they are new to your church.
Important upcoming dates. This can be compiled for each major season of the church calendar. Right now, you should include late summer events, back to school events, and major fall events. Later in the year, add the holiday schedule to the list. Then in the spring, add your Easter and major summer events.
What else does your church include in its guest welcome packet? Do you even have a guest welcome packet?
