Enroll early!

Church Leader Alive! is a unique conference experience designed to kick-start your passion and mobilize innovation and mission. It will also kick-start mission and mobilize and innovate passion. 

It’s that time once again, time to get in your early registration for Church Leader Alive!  in pristine Ellendale, North Dakota, the weekend of April 30 - 31 in the plush Ellendale Hilton.
  What can you expect at this year's ALIVE! ?

• The most engaging, topic-unpacking speakers ever!
• A host of dynamic vendors, pastors and best-selling authors converge to reveal top, life-changing, skill-revitalization secrets to totally renew your leadership ministry
• Break-out sessions, workshops and seminars every leader will find mind-blowing, equipping and revitalizing -- learn how to leverage missional workers so they might use words to penetrate culture and bring real change
• Deluxe accommodations loaded with every amenity possible, from Perrier at the bedside to large-screen, Twitter-enabled hot tubs - all in spectacular prairie surroundings near the exclusive Ellendale golf course and country club

Church Leader Alive! 2012 challenges cutting-edge church ministry professionals to recharge and replenish their entire worship performance, through lots of words. Even MORE words than last year. More words than ever before! Heart-confronting words and truth-focused words; best-selling words and top-expert words; mentor-blasting words and truth-engagement words. You will leave packing the most soul-working, God-enthralling words EVER!

This year, movement-movers and missional milestone makers will discover new launching strategies for planting dynamic cultures and exploring compelling conversations on authentic leadership formation events.

Don’t miss it! We have a whole line-up of keynoters waiting to transform your worship journey. Discounts galore for early registrants! If you book four attendees, the prices will be even cheaper. But hurry! The best prairie-view rooms will go fast!

Once again, we’ll hear from all your big-name celebrity speakers and best-selling authors.

• Renowned multi-campus pastor John Worshipmonger speaks on forceful and dynamic ways to reap rewards from the gospel. Learn how to book cruises and get others to pay your way.
• Glen Blather, Best-selling author and Leadership-Mentoring expert, challenges pastors to increase giving by the Four-fold Flattery-Fortune Nexus. He builds on the idea of driving pledges and planting promises. No-fail tips on how to increase offerings more than ever before
  
• Mark Salesemann, pastor of Laodocean Worship Center - a thriving, 25,000 member fellowship - shows how to turn a culture-confronting, multi-platform electronic presence into piles of cash, at the touch of a button
• Blockbuster author Ben Doindat, lists 36 face-palm-simple pointers on churning out best selling books of lists - to boost your community presence. He’ll show you how to plug your books during worship services and also at other churches, for that extra royalty boost
• Rich Klerrick, Senior Pastor at the multi-campus CrashCrunch Hollow Church in Ellendale, ND, shows you how to use the age-old lure of sexual power to reach 20 and 30-somethings and draw attendees from an entire region. Hold a gimmicky marriage sex marathon event and draw in the unchurched and churched alike
• Josh Joaching, head of the international Watch-us-Grow Believer's Fellowship Association, demonstrates how you, too, can organize a pastor conference and watch as Jesus-followers press wads of bills into your hands every time you turn around

And NEW THIS YEAR!: Chris Godfurher, of the new BloggerBusters Security Corporation will present workshops on Christian security measures: Church Security: Why you need a strategy and how you can use Christian muscle-men to keep pesky bloggers from embarrassing you more than once.

This conference will help your creative team discover new avenues of inspiration and vision mastery. It empowers and recharges!

Register today for a 30 percent discount. For your conference pack, simply send a $666 deposit to Luxury Pastor Resorts c/o Judas Jeffries, 666 College Park Circle, Gehenna, SD 57666

Show devotion to your pastor this October

How? Book a cruise.  FBC Watchdog compiles several popular church cruises that allow you to rub shoulders with actual megachurch pastors, in person. While you are enjoying sun and sea breezes, you'll be helping pay the pastor's way, and contributing to valuable ministry in your fellowship. The next time your pastor purchases a sermon from a sermon sharing site on Paul's journeys, you'll know that you played a big part in helping him understand it. At the same time, you'll be able to enjoy the buffets, events and great tourist sites.

Are you a global church influencer?

Let's see just how important you are in the church influencing world. According to one leadership mentor expert professional, you might be a global church influencer if you are part of this list. Check to see.

Are you:

• a pastor of a church that's made it into two of the 18 top U.S. church lists?
• a pastor with a "relatively well known platform globally"?
• a "key leader of niche church movements"?
• a prominent blogger?
• a prominent author?
• a prominent event speaker?
• a broadcast media personality?

If you aren't any of these, then you are probably not among the 545 VIPs who are big influencers globally. (I wonder if Jesus is a global church influencer?)

You can look at a handy graphic to tell if you are one and to see what demographics are likely to produce big church influencers.

But if you are one of the big guys, or even if you're not, you can help lesser churches and non-white men and women who are not doing a whole lot of influencing. For just 31 bucks a month from 500 churches, this philanthropic, selfless group will "help global Church leaders equip each other with ministry ideas and free downloadable resources." Wow.

Soon, influencers will pop up all over the globe and won't be lumped in North American congregations like they are now.

Do you fear change?

  The biggest problem in churches today is not lack of finances, or declining membership or lack of passion for the Gospel. It's fear of change.
 We know this because all the best-selling church leadership books tell us this. All the popular authors , church professionals and superpastors declare it to be so. What better authority do we have than experts, leaders and celebrities?
   So we must stop fearing change and instead learn to embrace it.
   Is your church stuck in Bible-worshipland? Why then, it's time to change: throw off old models of learning. Trade-in those Bibles for the latest best sellers. Hold a seminar, conference or confab. Is your church languishing in hymn-soaked services, with all four verses, and hasn't sung a new song in three years? Well then, do what most megachurches do and use those ragged hymnbooks to prop up the speaker stands. Take down the cross and shine the words on the wall. Watch your congregation grow.
It's time to change your "special music" to a worship band featuring beautiful people with white teeth and perfect hair. Only then will God be glorified and numbers will grow.
  Is your church stuck doing communion all the time, same dull prayers, same old routine? You need a make-over. Explore sermon-sharing sites to see how the experts and professionals do it. Most importantly, get rid of the stale Folgers and serve good coffee in your foyer. Leave boredom central and get a brand new, shiny persona. Fast!
  You must not fear change. Fear tradition. That's what's killing you.

No more Bibles!

In the church of the future (2 years?) young people will fill the pews. Why? Because church won't be church. The Bibles will be gone, as we know them today, and instead, eBibles or phones will take their place.

For kids, it's liberation. They can bring their favorite devices along to church FINALLY! After all, it could be a Bible. Who will know if it's not?  They will enjoy church because it will be the same as any other place, a place to be comfortable, to hang with friends and text across the sanctuary or across town. Imagine, the pews full of young people, playing Nintendos, watching replays of the football game on their small screen, finishing homework, sexting their boyfriends, ordering CDs.

Adults will be clicking through their Kindle Bibles or the iPhone Bible apps, and the kids will be looking at their phones, too. Or other device. Gaming, playing, communicating.

Every once in a while they might catch a word from the sermon, or at least the sermon illustration video clip and song lyrics. And that's a whole lot better than not going to church at all.

Everyone will be happy. The parents will be happy since they'll no longer be harping on the kids to go to church. The kids are happy because they can take their lives with them when they go. And the pastor's happy because the pews are full of youth and life. Sort of.

Canvass your neighborhoods!

To keep from withering in the desert of traditional Christianity, relevant, growth-minded churches must learn what it is their neighborhoods want in a church. Many missional churches go out to the highways and byways, surveys in hand, to find out how they can best serve their communities, how they can supersize their offerings and maximize their spiritual profitability.

What church member type are you?

There are five types of people in your church. Or was that four? Oh wait! Six! 
No, there are actually 13 types.  My mistake, there are three.

The main thing is to categorize. Categorize, categorize, categorize. Church experts believe that Jesus chose 12 apostles so he could divide them into 2s, 3s, 4s or 6s for various purposes during the course of his ministry. It's important that we do the same. As one leading church expert says:  
Categorizing people is helpful to determine where to focus your time and energy and to wake you up to the reality that some people, despite their excitement and interest, simply are not on board. -- Resurgence

The sooner you categorize those in your fellowship, the sooner you can weed out the burrs and thistles.

How can you make church pay off?

Now that many churches are fully automated, are pastors irrelevant? We can pipe celebrity pastor holograms into our services, or at the very least purchase someone else's sermon packages, so we don't have to even go to the trouble of opening the Bible anymore.

Church management software does all the  heavy lifting, and pastoral "care" is pre-sorted, pre-printed, mail-merged and totally pre-formatted.

The sound and lights guys take care of the ambiance. They keep the masses coming, so evangelism is no longer so urgent.

Because of these church changes, a question emerges:

How can we still make money?

INSTRUCT, INSPIRE, INFLUENCE, INVOLVE, and IGNITE

And especially ignite.
How to show your grow, give to live, bet to get, and all kinds of helpful tips that will show you how to use the gospel to your advantage.

From FBCJAX Watchdog

Leadership vacuum explodes once again

When will the average congregation learn that the greatest need in the church is the need for leaders?  Because of this great lack, the sheep will just keep circling the still waters and getting lost in the green pastures. Fortunately, experts are up to the task. High level experts and savvy, intuitive experts. They are ready to offer a "comprehensive approach to help churches facilitate the emergence of a leadership development 'culture' within their church."


The apostles were the first to facilitate emergences. They facilitated emergences and developed cultures like you wouldn't believe, and they didn't even have the help of a "leadership baton" training program like we do today. Imagine what the disciples could have accomplished if they had been gifted with the "vision," "process," and "implementation" for THEIR development pathways.

The leadership vacuum continues to explode. Sometimes, it explodes in immunological ways.
Occasionally, it explodes in functional ways. And in agricultural ways. Sometimes in excavationary ways. The explosion sometimes comes from striding over land mines, resulting in orthopedic leadership vacuums.

In whatever ways these exploding vacuums come, though, the resulting carnage signals bad news for the church.