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The 5 Most Important Indicators of a Healthy Church

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Numbers can be overwhelming. I’ve seen churches keep numbers and measure all kinds of things. First time guests, returning guests, empty parking stalls during services, kids attendance, student attendance, short-term mission trip participation, first time givers, on and on the list goes…literally. None of these (or other categories not listed) are necessarily bad things to measure. In fact in totality they can help you gain understanding as to which direction things are moving at your church. The thing is, there are a lot of things you could measure, a lot of things you could pay attention to. But what are the most important things to pay attention to? I know some people will disagree with me, but based on my experience working with churches around the country, and being a guy that’s in the trenches day to day at a local church, the 5 most important numbers to keep a pulse on are the following.

1. Baptisms

You can measure first time guests and the number of people who say yes to following Jesus (and you should); but the most important number to measure in all of that is baptisms, because the other two numbers are wrapped up in the number of people being baptized at your church. And after all, this is the whole point of the church to help people follow Jesus, and a public declaration of that intent is a huge part of that process.

2. Volunteers

The number of unique volunteers you have serving at your church tells you two really important things. First it tells you who is with you. Who is bought into the vision of where you believe Jesus is uniquely leading your church. After all in today’s’ world it’s a lot easier to give some money than it is to give time. These are all-in people. It also helps you identify and develop potential leaders in your church, because volunteering is discipleship. You can’t follow Jesus without learning to live an others oriented life!

3. Groups

Simply put life-change happens best in groups…in the context of friendships, because after all what we are being discipled to when we follow Jesus, is friendship with Jesus. This is where people “work out” their belief system and begin to change their thinking. This number gives you an indicator of the number of people who are being discipled and moving towards what Jesus wants them to become.

4. Giving

You cannot follow Jesus without giving and serving. Giving is an indicator of the level of buy-in people have in the direction you’re moving as a church. Healthy churches have a strategy to help their people become more generous. Not because they want something from them, but because they want something for them. They want them to look and live like Jesus. They aren’t simply teaching or telling their people to give, there is a holistic strategy to help them move towards becoming generous like Jesus.

5. Attendance

You knew this one was coming didn’t you? It may be simple but attendance numbers matter. Numbers count because people count. Every number has a name and every name has a story. The goal of the Gospel movement, called the Church, that Jesus started was not that it would get smaller and less influential, but rather that it would become a movement that would go to the ends of the Earth!

Interested in discovering how healthy your church is? Take the step to engage the Unstuck Group in a comprehensive Ministry Health Assessment of your church!

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Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation, Volunteers

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You Can’t Lead in a Hurry

Sunday, May 3, 2015

As a leader it is possible to be busy and have peace. A leader can carry a lot of responsibility and the natural pressure that comes as a result of that responsibility and still have peace. It’s possible to have a full schedule and a long “to-do list,” and still have peace. The future that a leader is tasked to lead through can be daunting and yet it is possible for that leader to still have peace.

But it’s impossible to be hurried and have peace. You can’t lead in a hurry. You can spin plates in a hurry, rushing from one task to the next, but you can’t lead in a hurry. You can make decisions at a fast pace but you can’t lead in a hurry. Being hurried as a leader is not about pace, volume of work, or the gravity of responsibility. It’s something that happens inside of a leader. When the leader gets hurried bad things happen…

1. Staffing

When you are hurried as a leader your team becomes an expendable commodity to get you where you want to go instead of people to be invested in.

2. Metrics

When you become hurried as a leader metrics and goals become burdens to bear as opposed to benchmarks to celebrate.

3. Fun

When you are hurried as a leader the excitement, passion, belief, and simple fun that you used to have becomes substituted by anxiety.

4. Inner-Life

When you are a hurried as a leader you trade peace for anxiety, anger, disappointment, and bitterness. When this happens the leader is not only a danger to themselves but to the whole organization. Leaders know the longer you lead somewhere the more the organization begins to look like and take on the “personality” of the leader. Their “inner-life” begins to naturally be put on display throughout the behavior of the organization. Everyone suffers when the leader suffers.

So if you were honest with yourself today, are you a busy leader or a hurried leader? What are you willing to do about it? What would change this week if instead of calendaring for what you need to get done you calendared for what kind of person you want to become?

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Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

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Why Churches Don’t Grow: #3 No Spiritual Maturity Pathway

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Today we’re continuing this series of blog posts about the 5 key contributors that lead to 80% of churches in America being stuck or in decline. These key contributors have been observed repeatedly in our work with churches at the Unstuck Group. While churches get stuck and decline for all kinds of reasons, these 5 key contributors are the consistent culprits.

Many churches are stuck or declining not because they have a difficult time attracting or introducing new people to Jesus but because they have no plan in place to move people towards spiritual maturity or the plan they’re working is broken. Here are a couple of indicators that there is a breakdown somewhere in your spiritual maturity pathway:

1. Content is Mistaken for the Solution

Neither Jesus nor the Apostle Paul defined spiritual maturity as knowledge. Content is not the solution. It’s not what you know; it’s what you do with what you know. It’s an issue of obedience and application. Is your church actually helping people apply the Bible to their everyday life or are you just teaching bible classes?

2. There are Too Many Steps

If the road map to spiritual maturity has been defined at your church and it’s too long or has too many steps it simply won’t work. People will quit on you. Then you will have the tendency to think the few people you end up with at the end of the arduous process you’ve build are the spiritual elite. Meanwhile many people who could have been brought along with you have been left by the wayside to figure it out on their own. Jesus only spent 3 years with His disciples and then turned them loose to change the world. Most churches today would never let the disciples serve in a leadership role, much less lead the church because they hadn’t “walked with Jesus long enough.” We’re not building Fords, we’re building disciples. Disciplemaking is not an assembly line.

3. There is No Clear Next Step

When someone says yes to following Jesus have you defined the next step for them to take? Then what happens next? Is the process working? Each step in the process needs to be clear, natural and intuitive. Has your church taken the time to map out and answer the question of “What’s my next step?” Then ask that question over and over again until you’ve arrived at some point of “spiritual maturity.”

4. People aren’t Giving or Serving

You’re never more like Jesus than when you give or when you serve; because giving and serving are the very essence of what it means to live like Jesus. Does your church treat volunteering as discipleship? Does your church not only provide opportunities for people to give and serve but train them how to do both well?

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Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

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20 Ways Church Leaders can Help their Church become more Generous

Sunday, March 22, 2015

I’ve been around very few church leaders that didn’t wish their people would become more generous. But very few church leaders have defined a strategy to help their people take steps to become more generous. Fortunately last week I had a conversation with the Leadership Coaching Network that I lead about generosity and they came up with this great list of 20 ways church leaders can help their churches become more generous!

1. Preach about Money

Most pastors start to twitch when the idea of preaching about money comes up. But few things are more powerful than doing an annual teaching series or quarterly sermons where you help people biblically connect the dots between following Jesus and generosity.

2. Celebrate Wins & Connect them to Generosity

What you celebrate gets repeated. Help people understand that the life change that people who are far from Jesus are experiencing through the ministry of your church is directly connected to the generosity of the faithful followers of Jesus already at your church.

3. Be Prepared for a Significant Gift

If someone were to drop a 6 or 7 figure gift would you know what to do with it? Do you already have a strategy?

4. Make it Easy for People to Give

No one carries a checkbook anymore, so come up with simple modern methods for people to give to your church. For instance a reoccurring automatic online withdraw, stocks, property, bill pay, text to give, giving kiosk, and be prepared to help large donors consider tax implications.

5. Say Thank You

Pretty simple. You’d be surprised how few churches simply say thank you, not just from stage, but through a personal handwritten note.

6. Intentionally Set Up the Offering in the Worship Service

Don’t just receive an offering during your worship service. Take a moment to help people understand what is happening and what happens through their generosity.

7. Receive an Annual Missions Offering

Model generosity through receiving an annual generosity offering where 100% goes to a cause that is connected to the unique vision of your church.

8. Host a High Capacity Donor Dinner

Identify and invite high capacity donors to a dinner to say thank you and help them understand the vision that Jesus has given your church and their part in it.

9. 90 Day Giving Challenge

Challenge people to begin the spiritual habit of giving for 90 days…and get this…provide a 100% money back guarantee. Literally.

10. Tell people to Take Money Out of the Offering Plate

During the offering tell people that they can take loose cash out of the offering plate if they are in financial need.

11. 5th Sunday Benevolence Offering

When there is a 5th Sunday in a month take the lose cash from the offering and use it to meet the physical needs of people in the church.

12. Require Giving for Membership

Literally require people to give in order to become a member of your church…and yes that means checking to see if they give.

13. Model Generosity through Stories

Tell stories of people who have been generous and share the results and impact of their generosity.

14. 1st Time Giver Letters

Send a personal handwritten note to say thank you to people the first time people give to your church.

15. Send a Thank You to Generous Givers

Send a personal handwritten note to say thank you when people give a generous gift to the ministry of your church.

16. Send Out a Mid-Year Contribution Letter

Send a mid-year contribution letter to everyone who has given to-date to the ministry of the church, including wins and stories of life change.

17. Provide Financial Training

Help people learn how to handle their money through training opportunities like Financial Peace University.

18. Annual Commitment Cards

Each January encourage your church to fill out an annual commitment card indicating what they are planning to give this year.

19. Legacy Giving

Provide the opportunity for people to write your church into their will or living trust.

20. Provide a Creative Annual Report

Create a visually intriguing annual giving report and send it to every donor. Include stories, pictures, and info graphics that share wins and how money was spent this last year at your church.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

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Why People don’t Financially Invest in your Church

Sunday, March 15, 2015

I recently read Not Your Parents’ Offering Plate by Clif Christopher. It’s a quick read that you can get through in one sitting, but it’s full of principles that you’ll come back to over and over again. There are a lot of reasons why people don’t give to churches as much as they used to. This book does a great job of helping to identify those reasons but it also gives pastors and church leaders steps they can take to move things in the right direction. If you’re a church leader and you haven’t read this book…you should. Here are some of the key ideas that stood out to me from my reading:

1. There is more Competition than ever for Charitable Dollars in America

The number of non-profit organizations is increasing every year and as a result competition for charitable dollars is increasing. It’s not that people are less charitable; it’s just that they’re directing it to other places than the church. “Since 2001, giving to religion has shown a rate of growth of 3.6%, while disposable income has increased more than 8%. People have the money and they continue to give. Religion is just no longer their charity of choice.” Church leaders should be asking themselves, “Why?”

2. Nonprofits know Why people Give while Churches just think people should give out of Obedience to the Scriptures

Multiple research studies have shown that there are three key reasons that people give: (1) A belief in the mission of the institution, (2) A high regard for staff leadership, and (3) Fiscal responsibility of the institution.

3. Nonprofits communicate from a position of Strength while Churches communicate from a position of Weakness

Nonprofits rarely, if ever, communicate about finances. What they communicate is stories of life change, real results from the investments that others have made in the nonprofit. Then they ask for more money. Churches don’t talk about results (probably because truth be told not many are actually producing many life changing results) instead they talk about their needs and how they are behind budget or need more volunteers. People with the ability to significantly invest in the Gospel work at your church don’t want to throw good money after bad. They are looking for a return on their investment, and rightly so. The Scriptures teach us that Jesus is too.

4. The Pastor should know who gives what

I know this may sound off to some but listen…(1) It will help them raise more money to fund the work of the Gospel [different people have different gifts and roles to play in the body of Christ] (2) It helps determine if what the church is doing is actually working. [people give to and support what changes their lives] (3) It allows the pastor to say thank you to donors [the church is notorious for not saying thank you]. Most people whose hair stands up at this idea simply don’t want their pastor to know what they give because they’re not being generous and following the Bible’s teachings on finances.

5. Help people Give

Many people want to obey Jesus and be generous with what they have to advance the Kingdom of God through the local church. Unfortunately many of those same people have not used the money that God has given them very well up to this point and they’re not in a position to be generous. Does your church have a plan or resource to help people learn how to manage what God has given them in a God honoring way?

6. The best way to raise money for your church is to DO YOUR JOB!

Peter Drucker wrote, “A business has discharged its task when the customer buys the product, pays for it, and is satisfied with it. Government has discharged its function when its policies are effective. The nonprofit institution neither supplies goods, services, or controls. Its product is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The nonprofit institutions are human change agents. Their ‘product’ is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.” In other words when your church consistently shows how lives are being changed, when marriages are healed, addicts find freedom, people fall on their knees and follow Jesus – people will support your church.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation
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