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, break-in 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 in the basement. 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

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.

Leverage social media to work for you

It's a new day, a new time. If you want to exert influence, and influence is what it's all about, you need to get up to date with social media.
Churches shouldn't be the last to embrace new technology; they should be leading the charge. Pastors who step ahead and grab social media by the horns will see fruit in the field of influence and be able to manipulate customers more efficiently than those who sit back and cling to their Bibles and hymn books.
We need to intentionally go out and give intentional pithy maxims on Facebook, post some intentional cool church photos on an intentional My Space page, twitter what we are intentionally doing every fifteen minutes and start REAPING!
Get with it, people!
Only by mastering social media will you be able to rub shoulders with other super leaders. How can you know what other leaders are doing if you're not twitting them and reading their twit feeds? You need to be able to learn what works and what doesn't from other business-driven church leaders, especially the big ones. So, it's time to get out there and connect!

Sermon on the Move

We all know Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Heh. No, we don’t. Well, sort of we do, but don’t quiz us on it, okay? Because our God is a creative God, and he wants us to be like Him, we should be coming up with our own sermons on the mounts. And because this is a new age and a new day, our ideas need to be new, too. His ideas were radical for his time, and ours need to be, too.
What’s YOUR sermon on the mount? Here’s ours, gathered from the best and most relevant and missional church sites available today.

1. Be Willing to Risk Time, Energy, Manpower and Money to an Idea (especially manpower) as long as you risk other people in making good ideas come to life, no problem.

2. We must exercise our responsibility to tend our own souls. It’s important to tend our own souls because if we don’t, who will?

3. To show honor to leaders is to treat them as being special because in reality that’s what they are. God has placed them in a unique position over you. Jesus honored Caiaphas and Annas, and we should likewise honor our superiors.

4. As the modern church strives to be relevant to a modern generation, I think it is important to remain focused on God and His spirit as the Decider-in-Chief of our collective mission. This is a great point. We should let the Holy Spirit have some say every once in a while, between leadership conferences.

5. All church starts with a very small group of people - sometimes even just a person - with a vision - and then should go global as fast as possible. Don’t forget the vision part. The vision part is THE most important part.

6. You never know when a game-changing blip will appear on the radar screen of your life. No. The game could change at any moment and we gotta be ready. My radar screen is showing a cold front moving in from the west. What does yours show?

7. Too many people both in and out of the church seem to have a vision that is unmovable. Movable vision. That’s what it’s all about. Do you have a fixed stare? The disciples didn’t. Their vision was moving all the time. Get a move on with that vision!

Feeling pumped? Time to be creative. Climb a mountain, or skate park hill, and come up with your own. It's easy!

When things go wrong

In the culturally relevant church, when a  team member exits, it's not just a matter of leaving the 90 and 9 and working to reconcile the brother. If the stray lamb doesn't return, you can't just shake off the dust from your feet and move on. No. In the relevant church, things are a little more complicated than that.

How to make room for humility

Because the most important trait in Christianity is LEADERSHIP, top experts on leadership issues worry about balancing heady issues on managing people with the Christian call to meekness and humility. This can be a fearsome task because of the immense leadership vacuum in the church and the strong call to many otherwise ordinary folks called to do monumental tasks of a superior caliber. Fortunately, leadership leaders are up to the task and have come up with more handy lists (also here and here and here) to make even humility easy.  List-making is the key. It always is. Effective leaders know it and practice it.