I guarantee there's a decision you've been putting off that if you postpone it any longer, it is going to cost you dearly. How do I know this? Because I have an earned doctorate from Harvard in the science of “I’m so stressed right now and have so many things coming at me and I’m kinda afraid of the potential backlash so I’m going to choose to put _______, ______, _____, … [Read more...]
Five Changes Worth Making
This week I received an encouraging email from a friend I coached last year. For those of you serving churches 200 and under, I thought you would appreciate his perspective on the five changes he’s made in his church and life that made the greatest impact. Here’s what he sent me (with my comments): Five Changes Any Senior Pastor Should Make Hey man, hope you’re well. … [Read more...]
11 Ways To Make This Your Most Generous Giving Year Ever
Here are eleven specific things that churches around the country are doing that could help you make this year your church’s most generous year to date. As you well know, people give to vision. Period. But sometime the reasons people don’t give is because a church is not up to date with how 21st century people prefer to give towards vision. Here are a few things culturally … [Read more...]
Do One Thing At A Time
Try it. Before you start something new, finish the thing that you’re working on. Things Unfinished Finish that book you so desperately needed three weeks ago, but now languishes on your nightstand. I don’t mean feel the need to finish every book you start (because we pick some lemons from time to time, don’t we?). I mean “finish” it. “Finishing” a book, to me, means I … [Read more...]
Becoming A Minimalist Pastor
We would all agree that the worst possible rut to ever be in as a Pastor is living in a perpetual state of distraction, overwhelm, and superficiality. Yet, if someone were to ask us how we’re doing, we’d be lying if we didn’t say that’s how we spend the majority of our week. We race from one “oh that’s good enough” partially finished task to the next. In his book The … [Read more...]
4x4x4 Coaching Process: The Key To Helping Staff Lead At The Next Level
I’ve never met a Senior Pastor who didn’t have the ability to do an outstanding job leading their staff, but I have met quite a few who didn’t have a clear plan in place for making that happen. I would like to share with you a very simple framework for coaching your staff that will make your job, and theirs, much easier. I call it 4x4x4. A 4x4x4 coaching process is when a … [Read more...]
The Passion Myth (or, what Senior Pastors can learn from artisans)
If you feel like you’ve lost your passion for ministry and can’t seem to regain the excitement and motivation you felt in earlier years, that’s a very good thing. Where in the Bible do we see any of the early church leaders praying to “get their passion back?” The idea that “passion for the ministry” is an indispensable requirement for long-term effectiveness is a lie the … [Read more...]
How To Create Compelling Sermon Titles
Here’s a quick and easy process to follow that will help you generate compelling sermon titles every week: 1. Title Your Message Only After You Preach It. Jesus said there are three sins that are worse than all the rest combined: (1) hurting children (2) the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (3) and Senior Pastors who presume to know what their sermons should be titled before they … [Read more...]
How To Finish Your Sermons By Noon Monday
Everything I was taught about preaching in seminary was backward. Between undergraduate school and seminary, I took eight preaching courses. Each of them was taught by amazing people who loved God and poured themselves into me. For them, I am grateful beyond words. The problem, looking back, is that the classes focused on the wrong thing: their goal was to make me a … [Read more...]
How Senior Pastors Can Schedule Their Week For Maximum Impact
One of the first things I do when I begin coaching a Senior Pastor is lead them through a process of redesigning how they schedule their week to ensure their highest ministry priorities get consistently accomplished. It is the same process whether they serve churches of 50 to 5,000. Here’s what that process looks like: Draw A Weekly Calendar The first thing I have … [Read more...]
How To Reach Searching Catholics
One of the greatest joys of my life is serving my friends and neighbors who grew up in the Catholic Church but are now, for whatever reason, looking for God outside the church of their youth. Knowing how to reach searching Catholics has been a huge learning experience for our church. I must admit that when I was growing up I didn’t know too many Catholics. That’s … [Read more...]
50 Limiting Beliefs That Hold Senior Pastors Back
It's the time of year when many of us in ministry are thinking about how we can improve ourselves and our ministries in the coming year. Here’s a list of fifty of the most common limiting beliefs that hold Senior Pastors back from leading at their full potential. See if you can recognize some of these in how you view yourself and the church you lead. 50 Limiting Beliefs … [Read more...]
5 Reasons Churches Don’t Break The 400 Barrier
If your church has been running in the 290 to 490 attendance range for more than five years, you are stuck at the 400 barrier. In my experience, more Senior Pastors reach out for help at this size range than any other. That's because the complexity of issues they get hit with at this size are fundamentally different than what had to be addressed to break the 100 and 200 … [Read more...]
3 Free Ways To Double Your Christmas Eve Attendance (and why it matters)
Christmas Eve attendance matters because 25% of all your visitors for the entire year will come (or not come) on Christmas Eve. My experience has been that only 1 out of 10 new visitors that attend a church will come back, come to Christ, and grow to full devotion. That means if you want to grow by 100 converts, 1,000 people will need to visit your services in 2016 and 250 … [Read more...]
What To Do When Facing A Massive Budget Shortfall
In the past few weeks, I've lost count of how many Senior Pastors I've talked to whose churches are hemorrhaging financially. Dealing with a massive budget shortfall is something every Senior Pastor will face sooner than later. Churches get into this situation when a combination of the following five factors are in play: Common sense budgeting, forecasting, and … [Read more...]
There’s No Substitute For Hustle
Hustle beats strategy every day of the week. When we've stopped growing, 99 times out of 100 it's not because we don’t know what to do next, it’s because we've grown complacent. Senior Pastors come to me all the time looking for the silver bullet to church growth, to preaching, to leading their congregation to become generous. I’m going to let you in on a little … [Read more...]
How Senior Pastors Can Reduce Email Fatigue
There’s not a Senior Pastor out there who hasn’t loathed the day email was invented. What began as a tool to make communication easier, has become the ministry equivalent of the ancient Trojan horse – a seemingly innocent messenger that can quietly sneak into our well-ordered world and wreak havoc. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with email fatigue, here are three proactive … [Read more...]
How To Define Your Preaching Audience
Each Spring I set out a red bird feeder in my backyard. It is a red metal box that stands affixed on a 5’ pole. I always position it so we can see the swarm of birds that come to it through our kitchen window. I’ve always felt that that bird feeder is the simplest metaphor for understanding a preaching audience that I’ve ever witnessed. Here’s why… When The Bird Feeder Has … [Read more...]
Why You Must Discover Your Senior Pastor Archetype
For Senior Pastors to thrive they must discover, and then operate within, the framework of their unique God-given style of doing ministry; in what I call their "Senior Pastor Archetype." Most leaders, I’ve discovered, spend YEARS fighting against their natural archetype because (a) they’ve never taken the time to discover who they are, (b) the way their mentors modeled … [Read more...]
How Senior Pastors Can Overcome Depression And Burnout
Almost every single Senior Pastor I’ve coached over the last two years have dealt with depression and burn out. I don’t think this says anything specifically about the people I’ve coached as much as it does about how hard it is to be a Senior Pastor in the 21st century. I can say with certainty that virtually no-one understands the immense, unrealistic, and unrelenting … [Read more...]
