Blog – Page 6 – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

3 Tips to Be More Efficient with Sermon Prep

Being a pastor isn’t a typical day job. You’re pretty much on call 24/7, and it’s rare that you ever have the ability to devote 100% of your attention for an extended period of time to any one thing. That’s just the nature of the job. Being a pastor is a lot more than speaking on a Sunday. But… sermon preparation is incredibly important and it’s a weekly activity. While you probably...

Why is My Church’s Giving Decreasing?

Church giving is so important for your ministry to thrive. You know more than anyone how valuable congregational giving is for the growth of your church, and the investment in worship, youth, young adults, and other ministries. But giving isn’t always the easiest topic to deal with. Your church will almost certainly go through seasons where congregational giving is down. The question is - why is...

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...

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...

How 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...

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...

Letting 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...

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...

Church 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 ...

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 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...

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...

Dealing 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...

Media 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...

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 ...