THE MINISTRY MBA

10 Practical Courses to Lead a Thriving Church

Do Your Sermons Impress Your Seminary but Confuse Your Church?

Preaching and speaking are emotionally taxing experiences.

There are few places in our life where we are expected to stand in front of a large group of people and be interesting, insightful, helpful, and accurate.

Can you imagine a political speech that maintained these requirements?

Did I mention these speeches happen every seven days?

Luckily our preaching goal isn’t to impress but to help people digest. The digestion of truth allows for application that leads to transformation.

In this post, I focus on making messages more simple. Not simplistic, but simple.
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One more thing: I’d love to work with you, your team, or your campus pastors on communication and preaching. I offer a six-session mastermind course on this topic online or in person – https://churchacceleratorcommunity.com/speaking/

Additionally, I’m happy to preach for you one Sunday and spend time that afternoon and the following day working together. If that’s of interest, let’s chat soon. My 2023 calendar is filling up. I’d love to save you a weekend. Just reply to the email and we’ll go from there.

Talk soon.

Fixing, “The Church Just Wants My Money!”

“In just two months, 122 people gave to Centerpoint Church for the very first time, and we added 18 new recurring givers! Working with Gavin on our generosity system gave us a plan to grow giving and fully fund our church.”
– Bryant Golden, Senior Paster, Centerpoint Church, Tampa, FL

This is why I’m offering my new MASTERCLASS: The Giving Funnel that Funds Your Church – https://churchacceleratorcommunity.com/givingmasterclass/

This giving post may help your church, but if you’re looking for more, check out the Masterclass Experience.

NEW POST: Fixing, “The Church Just Want My Money?”

“The church just wants my money!”

How do you overcome that obstacle as a church leader?

Undo the past thirty, forty, or fifty years of Christianity? Too bad that’s not an option! One simple solution is to stop talking about money, which certainly would fix the problem. Of course, that could create many more. If you never taught or mentioned money, nobody would complain and nobody would give. Worse, nobody would begin to trust God with their financial life. Yet, when you talk about money, people both complain and leave.

It’s unfortunate the perception exists. But it is for legitimate reasons. We, as church leaders, have done a terrible job talking about money and stewarding what we’ve received…

8 Terrible Reasons People Leave Churches

Perhaps more than ever before, people are leaving (or changing) churches en masse.

There are some good reasons to leave a church. What I’m seeing of late, though, doesn’t fit in the “good reason” category. The pandemic launched several more pandemics — fear pandemic, anger pandemic, political pandemic, racial pandemic, and a church pandemic.

The recent climate has given way to a mass exodus from churches, mostly for terrible reasons.

In this post, I outline 8 terrible reasons people leave churches.

If you’re a pastor, this may explain some of what you’re seeing. If you’re a church attendee, pay attention to these tensions!

3 Statements to Better Handle Unsolicited Advice

Does everyone seem to be a critic in your church?

I mean, how often do you hear, “Can I give you a little suggestion?”

I get it. I critique everything we do, as well. When you are a part of something, you want it to be great. When you serve and give to a church, you want your time and resources to be leveraged in the best way possible. Unfortunately, “great” is quite subjective.

I’m sure everyone means well. But hearing this week in and week out doesn’t do my heart well.

I use to respond with a simple “Thanks for your feedback. We’re working on that…” Sometimes that was true. Sometimes that was just an acceptable response. Sometimes that was a way more acceptable response that I wanted to give! Either way, it typically ended the conversation.

I’ve discovered a new and better approach. And it seems to be working.

In this NEW ARTICLE, I outline the three statements that me and the unsolicited advisor move forward together.

It will take you less than 5 minutes to read this in full.

6 Strategies to Preach Your Best Sermon

This might be the most important preaching principle I’ve learned.

Before I tell you the lesson, though, let me walk you through my process of discovery:

When I first began preaching, I took an entire manuscript on stage. It was a pastoral security blanket – except not pink and fuzzy. I tried not to read it directly, and in most cases, I was successful. But in my mind, it was good to know it was there… just in case I needed to snuggle.

Unfortunately, as I watched my messages the next day (it’s awkward, but you should do this if you don’t already!), I felt my preaching was lacking an important ingredient – CONNECTION. I was communicating all the content. I didn’t miss any stories, illustrations, points, or verses. But as I watched myself, I realized something significant:

Great content without great connection is poor communication.

And that was my problem. I communicated clear content without any relational connection, and it wasn’t working.

As I diagnosed my lack of connection, the problem became apparent: I was more focused on WHAT I was saying than WHO was listening.

In this NEW POST, I outline six strategies to help your next sermon be your best sermon.

If you’ve got 10 minutes, I think these strategies could make a huge difference.

One more thing: If you’d like some help with preaching, content development, content structure, or presentation, let me know. That’s part of what I’m doing for lots of great pastors and preachers right now.

Funding Ministry: The Four Types of Givers in Your Church

Ministry takes money.

Which means raising money (AKA inspiring generosity) is part of the job.

For many in ministry leadership, fundraising is a constant pressure. Fundraising can be frustrating. It’s easy to feel discouraged by this aspect of the job, but I’d like to suggest an alternative to that negative emotion.

In this NEW ARTICLE, I discuss a strategic pathway to move people from tipping to generous giving.

This isn’t just a solution to fund your ministry. It’s an opportunity to create disciples.

How can I help?

Helping ministry and marketplace leaders through change, transition, and transformation is why I created Transformation Solutions. Go right now to mytransformationsolutions.com and sign up for a free, 30-minute conversation to decide if working together works for you.

The 6 Dangers of Success

If you’re successful, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

It’s incredible, really. The one thing we want to be (successful) is the one thing that can create our downfall.

You see it all the time. You may have lived through this a few times. The stories are all relatively similar. The pathway goes like this: hard work produces great success. That success gives way to entitlement and then arrogance. Finally, arrogance causes leaders and organizations to relax. The world around is still changing, but the organization is not. After all, look at how much money we have. Look at how many people are attending. Look at our online engagement.

I’m a church leader, but I spent a decade in the marketplace before transitioning into ministry. The dangers of success are present in both spaces in equal measure. For now, let’s look at church success. Or at least how churches tend to define success.

In this article, I present six red flags of success. I’d love for you to read about them and let me know if you’ve experienced them.

Three Reasons Churches Resist Change

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We often hear that people resist change. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate.

We’ll tackle that partial truth another time. For now, let’s focus on why pastors and churches are so resistant to change.

Some Background:

Every organization (church, business, non-profit, and all the others) struggles with change. Change moves people from a state of known to a place of unknown. Known is comfortable, and the unknown is far from it. Organizations exist because leaders need to bring order to the chaos of creative activities. Order allows for scale and predictability, all of which are essential. The bringing of order created the organization and simultaneously slowed the creative, leadership elements of change. This happens in every organization, but for churches, it seems worse.

Obviously, a complete lack of order isn’t the answer. Churches need order. The cyclical nature of what we do (is it already Sunday?) requires organizing our work, staff, and volunteers. This is a tension: Order produces resistance to change because change provokes disorder in the organization.

That’s a problem that desperately needs a solution. The church is the hope of the world. We’ve been given the saving message of the Gospel to share and spread across the globe. But the world is continuously in a state of change. Culture changes. Openness to truth changes. Consumerism has changed how people look at products, organizations, and churches. Expressive individualism has changed our response to authority (like God and his church). Moving from a Christian to post-Christian culture has dramatically affected the church. There are generational effects.

These current changes aren’t the only changes that we’ll face. These are just the recent changes. There’s more on the way, because change is the only constant in life (that’s from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus – 500 BC). If the world we serve is ever-changing, that leaves us with only one choice:

Only a church capable of changing can maintain influence in an ever-changing world.

Why do churches resist change?

The One Challenge Facing Every Church

I’ve decided to start something new. If you don’t mind, here’s some quick background and an announcement of sorts. First, some background. A decade ago, I stood in the North Point Community Church hallway, watching thousands of church leaders walking to the parking lot. Our DRIVE Conference had just concluded. Inspired, encouraged, and probably challenged, […]

The Multisite Mistake Nearly Every Church Makes

I love being a part of the multisite church movement. And it’s certainly a movement!

According to the most recent research I’ve seen, this movement in the church has grown from 100 to 8,000 since the year 2000. That’s explosive growth. All the cool kids are doing it, right?

Of course, with any rapidly growing phenomenon, there will be issues and problems to navigate. The multisite movement certainly isn’t immune to issues. We should probably come back to this topic a few more times, but for now, let’s take a moment and address one specific tension between existing locations and newer campuses.

For background, I am a Campus Pastor. We call it Lead Pastor, but that distinction deserves its own post. I’ve been leading at Woodstock City Church, a campus of North Point Ministries in Atlanta, for nearly seven years. In this time, we’ve experienced a great deal of change in attendance, meeting locations, and staff just to name a few. All along the way, one of the greatest tensions we’ve navigated was learning to act our age.

Here’s what I mean specifically.

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