Blog | Leadership
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...
Read MorePreparing 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...
Read MoreHow to Effectively Lead Older Worship Team Members
It’s not always the case, but the job position “worship leader” seems to be appealing to a younger audience these days. It’s common that worship leader positions get filled by recent college graduates, which is great for a lot of reasons! Primarily, it’s bringing church leadership to the hands of younger generations, prepping them to lead ministries as the baton gets passed on. But wo...
Read More5 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...
Read MoreHow 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...
Read MoreLetting Worship Team Members Go: How to Handle It
The people you have on your worship team contribute so much to your church. You know better than anyone that being on a worship team is not just a fun activity – it’s a spiritual leadership responsibility. The worship team members standing on stage carry a responsibility to demonstrate their love and commitment to God on and off stage. In addition to that, performing with musical excellence is...
Read MoreThings 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, ...
Read MoreRaising 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...
Read MoreChurch Media Directors: Where to Get Design Feedback
Church media and tech directors are certainly never short of stage design inspiration. Between various Facebook groups, referencing other church’s livestreams, finding Instagram posts, and looking at church stage design Pinterest pins, chances are you have more ideas than you even know what to do with. But when it comes to design feedback, most church tech directors don’t know where to get ...
Read MoreChurch 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...
Read More4 Tips for Growing Your Worship Ministry
Ministry needs people. That’s a plain and simple matter of fact. And unfortunately, we’ve heard all too-often that worship pastors will turn down an idea because they simply don’t have enough people to pull it off. If your worship ministry doesn’t have many people involved, you will frequently find it to be a bottleneck for creative pursuit and growth. Growing Your Worship Ministry: 4 H...
Read MoreHow 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...
Read MoreScheduling 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...
Read MoreDealing with Untalented Worship Ministry Volunteers
Worship ministry is truly a team effort. The quality of music, the attitude of the volunteers, and the culture of worship in your church are all dependent on the collective behaviors and standards of your team. And usually, those team members are all relatively similar in ability, commitment, and reliability. But what do you do about the few situations where you are dealing with a very… very unt...
Read MoreMedia Production: Getting Sermon Notes and Lyrics on Time
Everyone has a different responsibility at church, and the general philosophy is that “as long as I get my work done when I need it done, Sunday will go fine.” And most the time, that’s kind of a true statement. In a sense, the thought is that it doesn’t matter if you practice the songs 2 weeks before rehearsal or 2 hours before rehearsal – as long as you know them by the rehearsal or Su...
Read MoreHow 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 ...
Read MoreHow 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...
Read MoreLead 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...
Read MoreRecruiting 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...
Read MoreTips 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...
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