At one point or another, every pastor has run into the same problem: not enough volunteers! Maybe you're scrambling to find members for your worship team or teachers for Sunday school, but no matter what area you're trying to "staff," it can be difficult to find willing (and able!) people to help out.
On today's episode. we're joined by Zach Bauer, pastor of Red Door Church in Sioux Falls SD, and he shares his ideas for reimagining ministries throughout his small church and how he actually increased his volunteer base by changing the way his church approached their mission. For more with Zach, check out episodes 168, 173, and 180 where he talks about church planting, being bivocational, and working with volunteers in his small church. We also have a great episode with John Finkelde on "Keeping the Volunteer Pipeline Flowing" and the LEGENDARY Amplified Leadership series with Dan "the Animal" Reiland. We loved having Zach join us and we know you'll be as encouraged by this conversation as we were!
TODAY’S PODCAST EPISODE
What is the DNA of your church? If they spliced and diced the genetics of your church, what would they find? Jeff and Jonny talk about the DNA of their church. They focus on the past two Sunday messages – one by each of them. Jonny spoke from Romans 12:1,2 and talked about the difference between a church attender and a follower of Jesus. He said that TRANSFORMATION is a key distinction for a follower of Jesus! A disciple is transformed by the power of Christ, lives in the Kingdom of God, and follows the teaching of the King. Their faith in Jesus is an all-encompassing reality that informs every aspect of their life. Jeff spoke from John 12:34,35 and Galatians 5:14. He asked the questions: What is the active ingredient that produces transformation in us? and What practice or discipline activates that transformation in the life of a Jesus follower? The answer to both of the questions is the same: LOVE. A life transformed by the love of Jesus, and in turn living out that love with others, is the DNA of their church! BACK IN THE STUDIO Jeff and Jonny are back today, in the studio, to record this episode. They have not recorded since April! They recorded ahead in the spring, yet released the episodes fresh every week. But on September 8, they recorded a brand new episode for September 9.
“Bush...suffered from his lack of what he called ‘the vision thing,’ a clarity of ideas and principles that could shape public opinion and influence Congress. ‘He does not say why he wants to be there,’ complained columnist George Will, ‘so the public does not know why it should care if he gets his way.’”
You probably have to be 40 or over to remember this phrase as connected to President George H.W. Bush. We shouldn't feel too sorry for #41 though, because this idea has followed many a pastor into the study and the boardroom. Certain people expect for us to have a vision for the church.
Like President Bush, some of us struggle with "the vision thing" as well. This episode of the podcast is a really fun one. Jonny and I talk about an idea that have finally executed at our church, then we have a conversation with Dave "the Animal" Jacobs on "the vision thing" in our 200churches. Finally, we wrap up the episode expressing how we view vision in our own church. Particularly, I talk about how I think we should think about vision. We hope that you enjoy it!
On episode #78, we talk with Karl "the Shark" Vaters about the astonishing power of small churches! This coincides with his 7th of 12 "Essential" blog posts on his blog and website at NewSmallChurch.com. Karl Vaters is one of our monthly partners who talks with us about all things small church ministry.
In this episode we wonder what is the fastest growing religion in the world. Here is where you can get some current information on this!
We talk with Karl about the strategy that God is using by placing small churches, or 200churches, all over the globe in every country, proclaiming through word and deed the Gospel of Jesus. These small churches (including ours and yours!) are living out the Kingdom values of Jesus in their communities.
As we pastor these churches we can partner with each other for encouragement and relationship, and in this way work together for the advancing of the Kingdom of God! The fact that our churches are small is not a problem, but in fact an advantage as we are able to reach out to people who are, by nature of their very wiring, averse to large churches. Many people just fit better within a small church context. They would never regularly attend a megachurch simply because God has wired them for small contexts. So, our churches are uniquely positioned to reach out to them. Therefore, we should attempt to become the best, most healthy, most ready small churches we can be to welcome and love new people. The fact that people come to our church means that we are meeting their needs. Small churches has a special role and purpose that larger churches just cannot fill or meet. Let's be thankful to God and proud of how he has made us! Karl's goal at NewSmallChurch.com is the same as ours, to encourage healthy small churches by encouraging and equipping small church pastors. Karl's gift is writing and blogging post after post on the topic of small churches. We say that he is a rabid small church defender and encourager. Our gift is to produce a podcast episode every week that speaks to the hearts and needs of pastors of small churches, and Karl joins us in the venture, while we try to point you to his site, where you will find more great training and resources. Remember, that's NewSmallChurch.com! Next week, on episode #79, we talk with a first time guest on the 200churches Podcast - our friend and mentor, Doug Grogan! Doug works all day every day with small church pastors and their churches. He is going to bring the heat with a ton of wisdom and ministry encouragement for you! A new voice - and a fun friend! This week on the podcast we will talk about:
Jonny and Jeff will talk to John Pletcher, Lead Pastor of Manor Church in Lancaster, PA. Jeff met John at that Super-Secret Pastor’s Retreat in the hills of western Pennsylvania.
One of John’s passions is to help church members see how God wants to use them right where they are, in the workplace, marketplace, business, or factory – to do Kingdom ministry with the people all around them. While John pastors a larger than 200church, he cares deeply for pastors of all size churches, and has developed a resource to help them guide their people through the discovery process. John’s book, Henry’s Glory, has a subtitle that says it all: A Story for Discovering Lasting Significance in Your Daily Work. This book combines a fictitious story, with strong theology, and “end of chapter” small group questions that combine to create transformational teaching. As John and Jeff talked in Pennsylvania, it became clear that John could really help us as 200church pastors. He can help us to empower and equip our people to truly discover that lasting significance right there in their place of employment, where they spend so much time, and have so many relationships. We are so excited to have John join us on Wednesday because all of us pastors need the help! We need our people to join us in ministry to our community. We need workplace missionaries all over our towns and communities! We really believe that our people, the church, deployed at their jobs, are the most overlooked resource we have. Finally, it is our calling, our responsibility as pastors, to equip our people to do the work of the ministry not just in our own church family, but throughout our community. What have you been able to do in your church, to equip, empower, and enable your people to be workplace missionaries? Share your ideas with us in the comments section below! We’ll see you on Wednesday for Episode 74, How To Multiply Workplace Missionaries In Your Small Church. [This is a guest post by Greg Atkinson. It is a brief excerpt from Greg Atkinson’s new book Strange Leadership: 40 Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization. Go to the book’s website for more info and to download the free Team Discussion Guide: http://strangeleadership.com/] Greg encouraged us at 200churches by joining us on the 200churches Podcast, episode 25, way back in July of 2013 to talk about how to turn around a messy church. Greg has just released this new book, and we encourage you to check it out! Read an excerpt below: When I teach on this subject of desperation, I share a couple ways that I see desperation in the Church. The first way that I see a sense of desperation is with church plants (new works).
For a while, I coached church planters through the ARC, a church planting organization. I got to attend the church planter’s initiation and first training, their assessment process, and their one-week intensive basic training. As I interacted with church planters in person at these events or on the phone through my coaching, I picked up on their sense of desperation. They were so nervous, so full of excitement mixed with fear; that it made them extremely teachable, which is key to growth and opens the gates for innovation to occur. Teachability is something that comes pretty naturally to church planters. I just recently returned from a church planters conference, and I again was reminded of just how hungry and teachable they are. I’m not just talking about hungry to grow and survive, but a hunger for God and His hand on their ministry. [RESOURCES BELOW] As Shawn Lovejoy, senior pastor at Mountain Lake Church and cofounder of ChurchPlanters.com, said at the Velocity Conference in 2010, “Church planting is hard business. If you can do anything else, do it.” The good news is that with great organizations out there, such as ARC, NewThing Network, The Launch Network, ChurchPlanters.com, NAMB, Acts 29, Stadia, The Orchard Group, Exponential as well as coaches, consultants and writers, such as Ed Stetzer, Nelson Searcy, and Stephen Gray, there is plenty of help and guidance for church planters. Ed Stetzer told me that “68 percent of church plants survive after four years,” which is an encouraging number compared to some of the urban legends I’ve heard of church planting statistics. Still, church planting is an extremely difficult task and not something to be taken lightly. I’ve heard it called the “extreme sport” of pastoring. Because everything in church planting is so new and there are so many firsts, it is like my son, Tommy, saying, “Daddy, hold me.” Church planters are very dependent upon the Holy Spirit. You could say they lead, serve, and act out of a sense of desperation that leads to a dependency on the Holy Spirit. The second way that I see desperation in the Church is through older, established, and dead or declining churches. I used to teach on two ways that I saw desperation in the Church and a nice older man came up to me after I was speaking to Church leaders in Dallas, TX, and gently suggested I consider older, declining churches. He said, “Just as church plants are in ‘survival mode,’ older churches are also in survival mode. They’re trying not to close the doors and become extinct.” God used that older man to speak straight to my heart, and his words resonated with my spirit. I knew what he was saying was true. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I’m not making a blanket statement about older churches in general (First Baptist Name Your City, First United Methodist, First Pres, etc.). I’m talking specifically about established churches that are in decline, which sadly, most churches in the US are in plateau or decline. Many of these churches started out with a burning vision, passion, mission, and other things I’ve shared in this book. Like the church in Ephesus in Rev 2, they have somehow forsaken their “first love.” This goes back to the decision we talked about in the second chapter. You have to decide to grow, decide to try new things and dare to follow God wherever He leads. This takes great faith, courage, obedience and a tremendous amount of intentionality. Andy Stanley says, “Vision leaks.” We all if we’re not careful will drift off course and find ourselves in maintenance mode, too scared to try anything new. It’s the old we’ve-always–done-it-this way mindset. For this second group of the Church that I watch, somewhere along the way, they wake up, they get mad, they have a God-moment, they have revival—something occurs, and they return to their dependency upon the Holy Spirit. Maybe it’s a pastor, deacon, or elder with a burden. Something leads them to attempt to be vibrant and full of life again. They start seeking God like they used to and this sense of desperation comes about. I’m watching it happen right now with the local First Baptist Church in my very own city. Only God can revive a dead church, but you must be desperate for Him. I remember several years ago hearing TD Jakes say, “Some of you need to fight. Don’t give up.” When the leadership of a declining church wakes up to the reality that if something doesn’t change soon they are going to close their doors forever, they start to become desperate again, and it’s a beautiful thing. If you don’t believe God can turn around a dead church, you haven’t met our Redeemer who raises the dead. As a matter of fact, raising the dead is kind of His specialty—He’s actually pretty famous for it. I don’t care how old your church is, how many people are attending and how far behind budget you are, I simply want to encourage you to never put God in a box and to be totally desperate for Him to move. Let your desperation lead to a dependency on the Holy Spirit and you’ll be in a good place. Greg Atkinson is an author, speaker, consultant and the Editor of Christian Media Magazine. Greg has started businesses including the worship resource website WorshipHouse Media, a social media marketing company, and his own consulting firm. As a consultant, Greg has worked with some of the largest and fastest-growing churches across the United States. Greg is the author of Church Leadership Essentials and Strange Leadership. Jonny and I were talking this week about how different mentorship is today from thirty years ago. I had listened to a podcast episode on Entrepreneur On Fire, episode 467. John Lee Dumas talks with Norm Bour about how the generations interact. It’s a fascinating conversation that you could listen to here. As I listened to it, I thought of Jonny and me. I am a baby boomer, and he is a millennial. We have forged a wonderful partnership. We both have strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully we complement each other, at least generationally. He has an understanding of his culture and a desire to change the world. I have experience and wisdom, and a desire to change the oil every 3K miles. Okay, and the world!
But seriously now folks… there are some very obvious differences between mentorship today and mentorship thirty years ago. Here are three: The first of the obvious differences in mentorship between today and thirty years ago is the ability for mentoring to go both ways. When I was twenty, my mentor would tell me what was up. He would tell me how things were, what I should think, do, say, and how I should act. He told me what to believe and, if I was lucky, why. I was the mentee, the newbie, the greenhorn, the Mr. Wet-Behind-The-Ears. I was just supposed to listen, and learn. Today, millennials can mentor up. We allow that. We let them. The boomers know that they don’t know everything, and they allow the millennials to mentor them in areas where they themselves are sharp. This humility on the part of the mentor is a very good thing. It allows both parties to go, as Andy Stanley says, further faster. A second difference is that we don’t expect millennials to be perfect. We want them to make mistakes. Doggone it, we expect them to! We know they will, and when they do, it’s okay. And they don’t expect us as mentors to be perfect either. It’s all good here – we learn from each other’s successes and failures. It’s okay, we don’t even have to take a chill pill! Thirty years ago weakness and failure was a bad thing. You wanted, and needed, to get it right. That kind of pressure is much less today. A third difference is that the Internet has leveled the playing field. We both have enormous access to unlimited information. We don’t have all the special tapes, workbooks, and handouts in our office waiting to let them out piecemeal to our mentees. Nope. They have it all already. It’s all online. So the playing field is quite level in terms of information access and appropriation. So, mentoring goes both ways, neither of us has to be perfect, and we both have unlimited access to information and growth. How about your mentoring relationships? Maybe you don’t even use the “mentor” vocabulary, and that’s okay. How are you doing training and raising up the next generation of leaders? Can I encourage you to engage the millennials? Get to know them, work with them, and learn from them. It’s truly a great partnership – one that will keep your 200church from stagnancy and complacency, and if you're like Jonny and me, it will provide a few fireworks as well! Jonny and I have been enjoying our time off from blogging during our Thanksgiving – New Year’s break… mostly. We both feel out of the loop with our online community. This has been our answer to the online addiction most of us live these days, especially those of us who manage or involve ourselves in online communities. We even found a few spare minutes to get in on the Bitstrips fun… However, we have been working the podcast circuit pretty heavily. We are lining up podcast topics and guests into 2014 and are excited about the future of 200churches. We’ve realized the area of small church pastor encouragement is wide open in terms of need. There are not enough people or organizations committed to the success and joy of small church ministry. So 2014 is full of positive expectations for 200churches.com.
The topic this week on the podcast may go in one of three different directions, so I am not going to preview it yet, but on Christmas day, Dan Reiland will be our guest for his “Part 5” on his book, Amplified Leadership. The next week, on New Year’s Day we will be joined by Karl Vaters from NewSmallChurch.com. New for 2014, Karl Vaters will be our first week of the month regular guest and Dan Reiland will be our last week of the month regular. These are two very different guys who bring so much value to us as small church pastors. We will continue to focus on the equipping and encouragement of pastors of small churches on the 200churches Podcast. That will not change. The 200churches vision statement is this – “Ministry Encouragement for Pastors of Small Churches.” That statement embodies what our passion and heart is for small church pastors – we want to breath life into their spirits, wind into their sails, and hope into their hearts. Small church pastors are changing the world one person at a time! As we move into these last ten days before Christmas, we pray that the joy of the season, Jesus Christ, would fill your hearts and families to overflowing. And that you would pass that joy and love on to others as you lead, shepherd, and pastor the people in your community. We’ll meet you Wednesday on the podcast, episode 49!
Today's podcast is Part 3 of our conversation with Dan Reiland, around his book, Amplified Leadership. This podcast covers chapters 5 & 6, which talk about 1) inviting people into meaningful ministry and 2) training them for ministry success. Dan is the Executive Pastor of 12Stone Church, just outside Atlanta, GA.
Dan, in his book, encourages us as small church pastors to make the most of the asking experience, when we invite a person into what he terms "meaningful ministry". He gives us five components of a compelling invitation:
We hope that this podcast will do the same!
This week on Episode 41 of the 200churches Podcast Jonny and I welcome back Karl Vaters. Karl is the pastor of Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Fountain Valley, CA, the founder of NewSmallChurch.com, and the author of The Grasshopper Myth - Big Churches, Small Churches, and the Small Thinking that Divides Us.
Karl joins us today to talk about his visit to Croatia. A friend of a friend of a friend ended up reading Karl's book and realizing how much the small church pastors (they're all small churches!) in Croatia would benefit from Karl's message. He was invited, and in September he was able to travel there and speak in three different churches in Croatia, as well as with some chaplains at an American Army base in Germany.
Where is Croatia? Glad you asked... It is one of six nations that used to be known together as Yugoslavia.
Karl was challenged by the faith of the people he met with and ministered to, and his heart broke when he realized what the church growth emphasis coming from America has done to their confidence as small churches and small church pastors.
In the wrap up to the podcast, Jeff talks about a part of their conversation that did not make it onto the recording, where Karl spoke about his friend's church. It is a church of 3,000 - that has multiple locations, venues, and service times. So this church never has a crowd of more than 350 meeting in any one place at any one time. This large church has to become a number of small churches in order to accomplish ministry most effectively! Now when you hear them talking about, you'll know the context. If you do not have Karl's book, The Grasshopper Myth, send us an email - we have a few copies and we will send you one as long as they last. (see our Contact tab at the top of this web page) - or, buy your's from Amazon by clicking on the picture below.
Karl has a great website for small church pastors! Check it out and be sure to click on the "Start Here" tab at the top.
We hope you are encouraged as a small church pastor by listening to this episode! |
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