Maximizing Your Church’s ROI (Return on Investment)
Unless you’re a church leader in a very large church, you’re probably aware that your congregation has limited resources (and in today’s economy, even large churches are struggling with decreasing resources). During those times when resources are exceptionally limited, it’s more important than ever to be very careful where you invest them. Every investor wants […]
Flip Your Church Step 5: Rethink Church
For a moment, suspend everything you think you know about doing and being church. Pretend, for argument’s sake, that you’ve been transported back to the first century… even before the birth of the church. As of this moment, there is nothing that “looks like” church. There are no traditions, no creeds, no history, no clergy… […]
Flip Your Church Step 4: Become Missionary to the Community
(Deu 10:19) You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I heard a great sermon the other day that spoke about our strangeness. God reminds the Hebrews that they’re to love the stranger because they were once strangers. As members of the church, we often forget who the […]
Flip Your Church Step 3: Develop Congregational Unity
For some, the thought of congregational unity may be more like a fantasy than a vision of reality, and yet there are churches dotted across the nation that are not only missionally aligned, but they are unified in all they do. That doesn’t mean the members are all automatons or that everyone agrees with everything. In […]
Flip Your Church Step 2: Embrace and Embody the Mission
Churches and church leaders committed to becoming missional must build on five principles. The first, modeling the Christian faith, was covered in a previous post. The second pillar of the missional church is, probably unsurprisingly, embracing the church’s mission. The creation of mission statements really came into its own a couple of decades ago. Since […]
Flip Your Church Step 1: Model Thought, Word, Deed
This post is a continuation of “The Missional Church: The Comet That Killed the Dinosaurs or a Knight in Shining Armor?” “Everything rises or falls on leadership.” John Maxwell wasn’t the first one to intimate it, but he made the statement famous in this generation. In the fairly recent past, leadership was considered more of a […]