Don’t assume you have to be a preacher to benefit from this! If you communicate in any way, to any age group, this will be helpful. Like many of you who read this blog I spend the bulk of my time communicating to kids, students or volunteers and this free event will help us in those arenas as well.

Here’s who will be sharing:

• Andy Stanley
• Perry Noble
• Dr. Charles Stanley
• Louie Giglio
• Jeff Foxworthy
• Jud Wilhite
• Vanable Moody
• Jeff Henderson

I love that Jeff Foxworthy will be part of it. Comedians, more than most communicators, really have to captivate an audience and usually in a short amount of time.

(Hint: Make sure you’re meeting regularly with a team of leaders and potential leaders)

• Have everyone on the team take a personality profile and go over the strengths/weaknesses of each profile and discuss as a group how knowing that can help you work better as a team.
• Have everyone complete a spiritual gifts inventory and discuss how every one’s gifts are being used or not, and what shifts need to happen to maximize strengths and delegate weaknesses.
• Listen to 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Podcasts and discuss - http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-21-irrefutable-laws-leadership/id264791387
• Delegation
  • Make list of tasks you are responsible for.
  • Divide the list up between things only you can do, things others could do, and things you should stop doing.
  • Highlight tasks you love and tasks you hate to do.
  • Work on delegating things others could do and stopping things you don’t need to do.
  • Revisit the list in 3 months to see what everyone has delegated.
• What would be your one sentence job description? Discuss.
• Clarify the win for each environment and role within the environment.
• Discuss What Every Volunteer Needs resource from Willow Creek - http://www.willowcreek.com/wca_prod.asp?invtid=PR32892
• Read 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. Use the assessment to evaluate your team and employ the ideas from the end of the book (Overcoming each dysfunction) to work on them: http://www.tablegroup.com/dysfunctions/
• Read Death by Meeting and restructure your meetings to be more effective.
• Read Making Vision Stick, create a simple vision statement that is clear and compelling and create a system to help you cast it, repeat it, celebrate it and embrace it.
• Play Patrick Lencioni’s interview on the Catalyst Podcast about volunteers and discuss the relevance to your team.
• Draw up the organizational chart for every team and ministry you lead
  • Make note of the empty slots/roles that need to be filled.
  • Draw up what the organizational chart would need to look like if you doubled in size.
  • Use the future chart as a guide to know what you’re working toward.
• Listen to the Harvard Business Review Ideacast 8 – Leading Through Conflict. Is there conflict in your organization? How should you address it?
• Watch Systems: Liberating Your Organization as a team and discuss systems in your organization.
  • What behaviors/actions in your organization do you want to go away?
  • What behaviors/actions in your organization do you want to see more of?
  • Systems create behaviors – discuss the systems behind each of them and figure out how to celebrate them or change them.
• Read Tony Morgan’s post about Empowerment vs Delegation – how can you empower people on your team?
• Watch Trust vs Suspicion and discuss the level of trust in your organization.
  • Trust is built by keeping agreements?
  • What spoken agreements does your team have?
  • What unspoken agreements does your team have?
  • Of those agreements, which ones have been broken, resulting in the eroding of trust?
• Watch 5 Big Ideas for Church Leaders and discuss how those ideas relate to your context.
• Watch Becoming a Great Staff and talk about what your team can do (staff or volunteer) to become an even better team.
• Read Tony Morgan’s ebooks and talk about how to implement those teachings and systems in your context.
• Listen to any Catalyst Podcast and discuss as a team.
• Watch this video called Bookie by Craig Groeschel. It’s taking risks and failing forward. Discuss the risks your team has taken and whether or not failure is okay in the culture you’ve created.
• Andy Stanley teaches that 3 keys to an irresistible environment include:
  • Helpful content
  • Engaging presentation
  • Appealing context
  • Which one are you best at? Worst at? What can you do to make sure all 3 are present in every ministry environment you lead?
• Read about the 4 Stages of Leadership on Tony Morgan’s blog. What stage are you and your team leading from?
• Use the Jim Collins Diagnostic Tool to evaluate your team and figure out how you can go from Good to Great (my link).
• Listen to this interview with Erwin McManus and discuss.
• Read this post from the 99% about Creativity, Routines, Systems and Spontaneity and discuss.
• What are our organizational assumptions as it relates to our ministry, team and “customers”? What decisions are we making off of those assumptions? Assumptions could be that parents need help raising their kids in faith, people like singing to worship God, people won’t show up on time, or that most people in our church are reading the Bible for themselves.r
• Read this post about What Motivates You and Your Team, watch the linked video, and discuss how you’re providing the things people want when they serve on your team (paid or volunteer).
• Watch the Upside of Tension. Talk about tensions (not problems) that exist in your ministry and how you’re currently managing them. What needs to change? What are you treating as a problem to be solved when it’s really a tension to be managed?
• Visit another church as a team to learn from them.

What have you used? Any chance you could post a list of things you’ve done and link it here in the comments?

• YouVersion
• Open Free Church Resources
• Church Metrics
• Video Teaching
• Babel With Me

On January 9 they will launch another product designed to help churches have online services – Church Online - http://churchonline.org/.

LifeChurch.tv was not the first to have services online but they took it to another level and have helped tons of other churches move online as well. I love their innovation and heart for the local church. If your church has thought about streaming services online you’ll want to head to the site and sign up to receive more information.

Our middle school environment, EPiC, is one place where volunteers get to teach from the Bible and typically write their own messages. In order to help train and equip those teachers we recently had a quick 3-week group designed to help them learn about preaching and teaching. Our plan was simple:

Week 1 – Read chapters 11-14 of Communicating for a Change (my link) and be prepared to discuss.

Week 2 – Read chapters 15-17, conclusion and Q&A of Communicating for a Change and be prepared to discuss. We also used what we learned to help brainstorm for a message that was going to be taught that week.

Week 3 – Our senior pastor came and shared his thoughts and lessons learned on teaching and preaching.

We met for 2 hours each time and grew a lot in just 3 short weeks. If we had more time we would have read the entire book. We plan to do groups like this regularly and use different sources for information and even focus on different aspects of good preaching and teaching.

How do you train your teachers/communicators?

In that post, Heidi Grant Halvorson goes on to basically state that smart kids who are praised for their intelligence may incorrectly believe their abilities are set in stone and cannot be changed and will subsequently give up easier when facing failure. On the other hand, kids who are praised for their effort were more willing to push through failures and challenges and work harder to achieve the goal. They study they did was simple but if their analysis is even slightly on point, it’s a big deal. Halvorson says:

“The kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities — including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice.”

Of course my mind goes first to how this relates to kids as they seek to learn about and follow Jesus. At its core Christianity is about being saved from our sin, our mistakes and ourselves. It’s about getting second, third, fourth and one millionth chances. It’s about being willing to take risks and get up after failure. Peter made the biggest mistakes, was admonished multiple times, and was rewarded with great authority and responsibility.

I hope in our families, churches and schools we will communicate to kids and students that they are not stuck. I hope they believe that hard work and persistence matters. I don’t believe that kids can do or be anything they want. But I firmly believe they can become who God desires them to be and do anything God calls them to do and that is far greater than anything they can imagine for themselves.

Your thoughts?

It is fairly common in church settings to assume that people would be more likely to get involved in church after having children. The thinking is that parents will in the very least want their kids to grow up with strong morals and the Church is a place to help them do that. If they do believe in God and Jesus, they may think it is important for their kids to believe the same, even if they don’t live like they believe themselves.

Here are some of Barna’s findings:

• 50% of parents said having children had no influence on their church involvement
• 17% of parents said having children helped them reconnect to the church after not attending
• 20% of parents said having children encouraged them to get even more involved
• 4% of parents said having children decreased their involvement in church
• 5% of parents said having children led them to get involved in church for the first time

While the majority of parents do not get move involved in church after having kids, the 42% who do represent a lot of people and my hope is that our churches are equipped to help them get connected, involved and invested in the church. More importantly, I hope we can lead them to Jesus and help them lead their kids to do the same.

Have you seen people get more involved after having kids?

An extensive research endeavor by the Barna Group revealed some new insights into this huge issue facing the Church. The details are found in a new book called You Lost Me. Here are some highlights from the full post on their site:

• 1 out of 9 (11%) lose faith in Christianity
• 4 out of 10 (40%) leave the Church but still call themselves Christian
• 2 out of 10 (20%) disconnect from Church and express frustration about “church culture” and disconnects with society
• 3 out of 10 (30%) stay involved church

Yes, that’s 101%, because the “out of 10″ references were probably rounded. Here are the myths they believe exist, that aren’t true from their research:

• Most people lose their faith when they leave high school.
• Dropping out of church is just a natural part of young adults’ maturation.
• College experiences are the key factor that cause people to drop out.
• This generation of young Christians is increasingly “biblically illiterate.”
• Young people will come back to church like they always do.

Looks like the 70% number is accurate if we’re looking at church involvement.

What do you think? How can we help change that trend?

• Our church is in the midst of kicking off a 2-year generosity initiative called 212 {www.ccc212.net}. In 5.5 years we have talked about money twice as a church, and this is the first time we’ve talked about it in conjunction with a church initiative. It’s been great to hear people’s stories about what CCC has meant to them and about how they plan to get involved with 212. Ultimately we want to see lives transformed as we invite God into our finances and give to support his mission through the local church.
• I’m wrapping up my master’s degree classes. Everyone close to me knows I couldn’t possibly be more excited to have that behind me. I enjoyed the learning but hated the extra burden. I’m officially done Dec 15.
• My wife Jennifer blogged for the first time in over a year. She is awesome and I hope she shares more like she did in that post because I know it helps others as well.



• Two babies we love are turning a year old. Collin, our friend’s son, will be 1 on Nov 26 and Jake Ainsworth, my nephew, will be 1 on Dec 10. In the picture Collin is on the left and Jake is on the right.
• Our friends Ryan & Melissa are adopting a special needs child from China. Melissa started blogging about their experience and it’s a lot of fun to watch them passionately pursue what God is calling them to. I think she’s trying to break the record for fastest adoption. You can follow along here: http://youwereborninourhearts.blogspot.com/
• I’ve been doing some WordPress Website development on the side for extra money. It will help with our commitment to 212, which we have to rely on God to fulfill since we decided to stretch ourselves. It’s been good but I have enjoyed not having a project for the last few weeks.
• I have really enjoyed our new staff structure and the chance to work as a family ministry team all together each week. It’s been a lot of fun.
• I have not had time to work on something for Orange I started in August, a guide for ministry leaders to help them with volunteering, or the church website business I plan to start. I rarely don’t finish what I start, or plan to start, so I look forward to getting all of that rolling.

What’s going on in your world?

• Tony’s first eBook in Leisure Suit series was about why churches are stuck, this one is about how to get unstuck.
• Tony shares a great list of symptoms to identify if your church is stuck. I think many churches know the symptoms are there but don’t have the courage to admit it and deal with it. Some don’t have a systematic way of looking for the symptoms regularly.
• I love the equation VISION + [STRATEGIES & SYSTEMS] + EXECUTION = RESULTS
• I’m a systems guy, so I don’t need to be convinced that it’s Biblical but Tony uses some great examples from the Bible to show how God uses systems to carry out his purposes.
• Tony believes a healthy organization includes all 6 of these elements – Purpose, Strategy, People, Structure, Systems, Metrics.
• Tony talks about the importance of not relying too much on teaching to encourage life change. It made me think of Bill Hybels‘ quote of “We will teach our way out of any problem.” He even talks about it as a first step, as I’m sure he realizes there’s much more involved. Andy Stanley says “systems create behaviors, not preaching or teaching”.
• This might be my favorite quote – “Good people using bad systems will never produce good results. Normal people using good systems can produce great results.”
• The discussion questions at the end, along with the quick assessment about the 6 elements, would be a great resource for your church staff and teams to use to assess your church.

Is your church stuck? Even if it’s not, you’ll want to glean the insights from Tony’s latest eBook.

It’s Finding Volunteers

Click here to read a post I wrote for Tony Morgan’s blog about how to increase volunteer engagement.