Most pastors put 10+ hours into their sermon each week. Then they preach for 30 minutes, record it, and upload it YouTube to garner 301 views.
What a shame! Put that hard work in sermon prep and delivery to better use!
Here are ten simple ways to extend the reach of your sermons online.
Firing a volunteer is a horrible experience. I remember the first time I had to fire a volunteer I was responsible for leading. I felt terrible and delayed having the conversation for a long time.
This person had been giving their time to serve under me for a while. They loved serving, but there were just so many things that weren’t working.
After a couple moves to different roles within the same team, and even trying to move them to another team, it was clear that it was time to ask them to step down.
Lots of church leaders have been talking about mobile for at least 8 years. It’s logical; everyone has an Internet-connected device in their pocket now. Even my 90-year-old grandma has an Android phone (a JitterBug).
Most advice you see is about what features you need in your church’s mobile app or how to build a responsive website or the best tools for mobile giving. It can be tough to make sense of it all, especially if you’re trying to figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
Based on my experience putting the Bible app in millions of pockets, I believe there are 4 basic stages you must go through to build a killer mobile ministry strategy.
Ron Edmondson wrote in 2011 about 3 Places to Find New Church Leaders. He makes the case that churches should be looking inside and outside for leaders. Inside, look for people that are “doing” who could be leading. And find people serving in one area that should serve in another. Outside, find leaders in the community.
Most young churches today trend toward hiring from within. They would rather find someone already serving and promote them. Rich Birch makes a great case for hiring from the outside. He wrote about it recently in 6 Reasons the Next Hire at Your Church Should Be External. Still, every church must figure out how to raise up leaders from among their many doers. If they don’t, hiring will outpace budget limitations.
[Update: You can sign up for an account now, but I still want to talk to my customers. Give me a call any time! My mobile number is (904) 994-2919.]
Right now, the only option that’s available to try TrainedUp is to request a free trial, which requires a phone conversation with me before your account will be created. It’s much slower than your typical SaaS experience, but there’s a very important reason for the increased friction in the signup process.
I want to talk to my customers, but not for a hard sell. I want to learn from my customers. I want to know what their expectations are, what they’re trying to accomplish, what problem they’re trying to solve, and who they anticipate will be using the platform from their team.
Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, once said “premature automation can lead to blindness.”
I don’t want to automate the sign up process yet. I want it to be manual because it gives me the chance to serve my customers personally instead of them interacting only with my product. I want my customers to know they’re signing up for more than a software tool; they’re signing up to work with me personally.
To take that one step further, I’m giving the first 100 churches on the platform my personal cell phone number and an open invitation to call whenever they need help. They should feel like I’m an adjunct part of their church staff, someone they can call whenever they have a question they think I can help them answer, whether it’s about TrainedUp or anything else.
There are plenty of areas where automation makes sense and TrainedUp is highly automated in other ways. Heck, TrainedUp even provides the most dead simple automation tools for on-boarding new users that you’ll see in any tool. But sometimes you have to see that just because you can automate a process, it doesn’t mean you should automate it.
Not every leader is the one in charge, but every real leader acts like an owner. To them, what happens to the team or the church is personal; it effects them or someone they care about directly.
They harbor long term thinking and won’t sacrifice the future health of the church for short term wins. Nor do they allow short term setbacks to cloud the long term vision.
The phrases “that’s not my job” and “I don’t care” are never heard coming from their mouths.
I spoke with Ryan Stigile a couple weeks ago. He generously spent time with me talking about leadership development at his church and at churches he serves through The Unstuck Group as a strategic analyst.
He covered some amazing stuff, but the Big Idea takeaway that I got from the conversation was that leadership development needs to be baked into every aspect of church life.
He said that volunteer training can’t just happen on a special Sunday morning or during a scheduled training event. And he said that leader development has to be more than a book reading group or special events.
Those things are good, but they should be supplemental to the process of leadership development that’s happening at all times, in every interaction. Ryan gave example after successful example of effective leadership development that didn’t look like a program.
Bottom line: leadership development needs to be a cultural value that weaves its way into every aspect of local church ministry.
Three things I loved about my chat with Ryan:
Systematized leadership development is a phrase that’s uncomfortable for most leaders I’ve talked with. To them, leadership development is highly personal and requires discernment. Systematizing something often sounds like de-humanizing it.
That’s not what I’m advocating for. I believe that leadership development should be well-defined in every church, but especially in multisite churches where the senior leaders are further removed from lower level staff and volunteer leaders.
Multisite churches face several stages of growing pains as they expand from one location to two, then from two to three or more. At each expansion stage, they face a specific challenge: maintaining culture/vision.
In single-site churches with one teacher, the teaching time is the primary dispenser and maintainer of vision. This dynamic can easily be maintained in a multisite church with a single primary teacher, but when each campus has their own teacher it requires more intentionality to maintain vision consistency in the teaching time.
Email automation is a simple way to drive deeper engagement with people exactly at the right time. When done properly, the recipients of your emails should feel better, not worse, about giving you their email address.
The simplest form of email automation is a scheduled email. For example, you may write an email to your church on Saturday night, but schedule it in Mailchimp to be sent on Sunday afternoon as a followup to your sermon. That’s a simple form of email automation.