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.

Data collection gets short shrift

While some leadership-mentor-experts think that pastoral leadership is more than just "data collection" and "technique," in reality, data collecting and technique are the heart of relevant Christianity. Why come down on data collecting? Isn't that what Jesus asked his disciples to do as he sent them out in pairs?

The essence of pastoral leadership is collecting information, information about the unchurched in a community, information about other churches trying to fill the needs of the unchurched, information about your members and their spending habits and offering-history; their service contribution and their hobbies; and relationships. The real meat of Christian living is collecting information. And Christian businesses are here to help. Church management software companies will help you "to discover the relational networks of your congregation and identify key influencers who can help you to implement change and lead for church [sic] the ministry [of? for?] potential growth." (From ConnectionPower)

Technique is important! Kiosks are essential. If a visitor sees a kiosk, on arriving at your church, he or she will be wowed and amazed. This must be a church that cares! This must be a church that will know me, my family, my preferences and my spending habits inside and out! Visitors will instantly feel they are a part of the family of God when their name is plugged into the database, and their children leave for Kid Awesometime Hour wearing numbered stickers.

When lights dim as your sermon comes to the climax, when the praise team plays those soft, poignant chords, when the coffee comes at just the right temperature in the foyer, that's when the spirit of God can move the most.

So, let's not diss technique and certainly not data collection.

Insights worth remembering

What I learned at last year’s Church Leader Alive conference:

If church was what it should be, how would it change you, and how would it change the culture around you?

    * “We wouldn’t be rushing around, looking for pens all the time. We’d be prepared, like the Boy Scouts.”
    * "Vision is a great term to use whenever things get a little dicey. No one can argue with 'vision.' "
    * I would learn what it’s like to be the sound guy
    * I need to "inject a little humility into my leadership veins," and not swagger as much. It’s good for image.
    * Great Leaders don’t get up at 10 a.m. and start tweeting. Great Leaders ask their administrative assistants to tweet for them
    * “We have confused purpose with action, and action with getting in the leader’s way”
    * “Your calling is not to be road kill for someone else’s high speed vision"
    *  You know your leadership style is finally effective when people avoid you in the hallways
    *  "God is calling us to greater heights; that means breaking a few eggs from higher and higher platforms"
    * "Being a leader means you have to absorb a lot of flack. That’s why you have staff members watching your back"
    * Don’t just pretend you are a leader. Put on your leadership glasses and move like one
    * Let your staff make mistakes a time or two before jumping on them. This conditions them for big, Kingdom work, missional work.
    * In life, nothing is free. In church, freedom must be earned. Earn it.
    * “Be bold and adventurous, especially with the time and money of others. It gives you a quality of dynamism without all the work involved.  Start by claiming your own parking space at the side door."
    *We need to stop dusting off the Bible in times of crisis instead of moving forward with our own profound words and thoughts.

A penny saved is not always a penny earned

As stewards of church resources, leaders need to be savvy as to when to devote time, energy and money to an effort. Sometimes a decision is counter-intuitive. That means what seems like a good use of time or money often isn't.

For instance, reason might tell you that heading up a Bible study each Wednesday night is better than watching college basketball on TV. Still, there are times when you need to get away from the crowds like Jesus did. College basketball might be just the thing you need.

Also, you might think that instead of a new speaker system for the sanctuary, you should install a handicap ramp. Makes sense, right? But it may not be at all what is the best use of your resources. If you install quality speakers, you might attract or retain those valuable upwardly mobile couples in your community who can increase your offerings significantly, allowing multiple handicap ramps in the future.

You might think that working hard each week is the best use of your energy, pounding out original sermons and digging into the Word. But as this post shows, hard work is not always the way to go. It may be that purchasing online sermons instead and going out for a couple rounds of golf, a dinner at Olive Garden, an evening with friends playing Kinect in your living room, a trip to the Gelato cafe with your wife, a helicopter tour over your community to view the marketing potential of the area, a therapeutic massage at the spa, and a soak in your private hot tub is a better use of your time.

It's time not only to think outside the box, but to start thinking outside the entire crate.

Getting to the Essentials

Churches spend too much time on theology and not nearly enough on the essence of what faith is all about: Image.

Instead of prayer meetings, groups should gather to discuss logos and slogans. Instead of Bible studies, we should emphasize what makes us what we are. After all, it's all about what it's all about!

Jesus spent more time on introspection than anything else. He constantly admonished his disciples to look within and find the logo that best described each of them. Outreach? Naw. It's time to be more inwardly-focused!