Blog – Page 4 – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

Working Ahead: Building a Sermon Calendar

Staying on top of your work as a pastor can be difficult at times. You wear a lot of hats, and depending on your church size and culture, you may be working what feels like much more than a single job. But your primary job as a pastor is to lead your congregation and “make disciples”. While preaching a sermon allows you to teach someone about a single concept or passage of scripture, “dis...

Will a New Building Grow My Church Attendance

Being a church planter is one of the most difficult and demanding jobs you can have. You’re starting a ministry from scratch, and while you may have a solid idea on why your church needs to exist and what its long-term goals are, it can be really difficult to get people on board during the early stages of your church’s life. If you are trying to grow your ministry, and moving into a new bui...

Finding a Location for Your Church Plant

Starting a church plant is a big task - there’s a great deal of courage, prayer, support, and planning involved by you and others that’s required to make it all happen. All that said, when it comes to the final step of finding a location for your church plant, things can get a bit stressful. You have enough on your mind as a church planter - you don’t want to make the wrong call and find ...

Hiring Your First Church Staff Member

As a pastor, you deal with a ton of difficult tasks. You’re faced with growing your ministry, leading a congregation, and leading volunteers in places of leadership over your church; not to mention all the administrative tasks you have to take care of on a day-to-day basis. One of these difficult tasks you’ll encounter is hiring your first church staff member. Tips for Hiring Your First Chu...

Preparing Your Church to Move Into a New Building

Finding a location to do ministry in is difficult. Church plants often struggle to find willing venues and schools to host Sunday morning church in, and even after finding a venue, it’s a lot of work to setup and tear down the necessary gear every Sunday. But it’s almost always worth it - despite the work, the commute, the long hours - you do it for the community of believers that call your ch...

Emergency Volunteers: How to Handle Volunteer No-Shows

We all want to be able to rely on our teams. With staff members, you can usually assume they will be there when they’re supposed to. But when it comes to volunteers, things can get a bit problematic. Depending on the position they’re volunteering for, level of commitment, communication they’ve received, or just plain old forgetfulness, there may come a Sunday morning where you’re short vol...

5 Tips for Improving Church Volunteer Meetings

Every pastor understands that meeting with their teams is absolutely crucial. But often times, the meetings happen between leadership staff and other employees while neglecting volunteer teams entirely. The truth is, volunteers often provide just as much value as the employees of a church, and attempting to run a ministry without them would be nearly impossible. That’s why it’s crucial to devo...

How to Increase Giving at a Small Church

As a small church, you rely heavily (if not entirely) on the giving of your church’s congregation. Giving is important for a variety of reasons - not only does it allow you to cover all base expenses, but reliable, recurring giving enables you to more accurately forecast your budget. This makes it easier to meet church goals of hiring staff, upgrading equipment, moving venues, funding missionari...

Things That Won’t Grow Your Church Attendance

You’ve probably had this conversation with yourself in one way or another: “If I could just do this one thing, I could really grow my church’s attendance.” We look to other thriving and growing ministries around us and are inspired by certain aspects of their church. We convince ourselves that if we could change that “one thing” that our ministry could grow tenfold. Unfortunately, ...

Raising Finances as a Church Planter

Funding is incredibly important for churches. While money is far from the reason anyone plants a church, having a solid, reliable cash flow is an absolute necessity for the sake of growing and investing in your ministry. Startup churches don’t need much to begin, but soon, finding a space, getting sound equipment, video equipment, holding launch activities, paying staff, and other demands req...

a-pastors-guide-to-effective-sunday-morning-huddles

Church Volunteer Management: Volunteer Scheduling

Handing off church ministry responsibility to volunteers can be a huge benefit to your church. Introducing volunteers in more circles within the church often means the responsibility over details is alleviated from leadership, allowing them to focus on managing and directing the overall goals and mission of the church. However, while having volunteers is a great idea, actually making it happen ...

Church Livestreaming: Keeping Your Congregation Engaged

It kind of feels like every church in America is moving to or integrating livestreaming. When congregation members can’t be there in-person, or your church is closed for a Sunday, livestreaming is a great way to stay connected with everyone virtually and make your message available to your church. One of the biggest fears of livestreaming is that your congregation won’t stay engaged. Will m...

4 Ways to Livestream Your Church Services

This is certainly a difficult time for many churches. The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is forcing many churches to keep their doors closed until the pandemic is calmed, but amidst the chaos, we still hold a responsibility as believers to continue sharing the good news of Christ and assuring the world that God is in control. Unfortunately, that’s difficult to do if your church doesn’t know h...

meaningful-youth-ministry-trends-for-2024

How to Keep Volunteers Excited About Church Goals

In leadership roles, it can seem like you spend equal amounts of time directing or guiding the church’s mission as you do getting everyone on board. But that’s the essence of being a leader – if you’re going to craft the mission and goals of the church, you’re going to be the one responsible for building a supportive culture around it. That might be easy to a certain degree when worki...

Scheduling Volunteers for Their Strengths

Having a strong volunteer team can dramatically improve the experience for visitors at your church. A well-operated volunteer team means everyone is present, educated, and ready to go for their respective areas. But volunteers are needed for a diverse set of roles within the church – some dealing with kids, music, relations, guests, leadership, and so many more. For example, just because someone...

How To Have Beneficial Church Volunteer Meetings

Volunteers are truthfully the backbone of success in a church. Volunteers cover more ground than any church plant leadership team can imagine, from worship to children’s ministry, ushering, first impressions teams, managing social media, tech, and so many other ministry operations. So it’s no wonder why meeting with volunteers is such an incredibly important practice as a pastor. The issue ...

How to Find Volunteer Worship Leaders

We all know of the “church shopping” phenomenon. It’s usually the bane of any church planter. When a church is just starting out, getting everything sorted and finding its “home base”, so to speak, takes time. In other words, congregation patience would be incredibly helpful for church plants, but the truth still stands that first impressions often have a greater weight in choosing a chu...

Lead Pastors: Preparing to Take a Sunday Off

Everyone in the church takes days off - whether for vacation or just to rest for a Sunday. That’s simply part of living a healthy lifestyle. You need time to yourself to recuperate and come back refreshed for your job. And while weekdays are often a good time to take work off, it’s important to have a couple Sunday’s away. However, while everyone else has no problem taking a few Sundays t...

Recruiting Volunteers as a Church Planter

If there’s one thing that church planters never need, it’s quality, committed, and invested volunteers… Thanks, we practiced that one all weekend. To state the obvious, finding volunteers that are capable and talented, as well as invested in the church’s mission is incredibly difficult. Talk to any church planter (or any church for that matter) and you’re sure to hear about the dif...

Tips for Recruiting a Church Planting Team

Having a strong church planting team isn’t about numbers – it’s entirely about the quality of everyone who's involved. Church planting is an intense, long, and sometimes strenuous process, and having the right people behind the effort can make or break the endeavor as a whole. Keep in mind also that the average turnover for church planting teams is around 80% 2-years after the launch date, s...