Finding new small group leaders is important, but keeping the good ones around is where the majority of your efforts should be focused. Retention should always trump recruitment. In this episode, hear four strategies that, when applied consistently, will increase the retention rates of your small group leaders and make onboarding new volunteers quicker and easier.
Change is rarely quick and easy. Implementing necessary change, specifically in a denominational setting, can be especially challenging. Listen as Tim Cress shares four tips for casting vision for something better – a new strategy for the sake of our kids within the qualities that make denominations unique.
Using email is a great way to stay connected with the parents of your kids and students during the week. Nick Blevins of Community Christian Church in Nottingham, MD, shares nine simple tips for effective communication with parents via email.
How can you reach members of your community who have no interest in attending church, especially as a startup church? This episode explains how focusing on helping families win by creatively connecting them to the Gospel is the key to building the next generation of prevailing churches.
Each year a church has approximately 40 hours to influence a child's life. Parents have 3,000 hours. The truth of the matter is that no one has more potential to influence a child’s faith than a parent. Listen to today's episode as Joe McAlpine shares why partnering with parents should be a vital part of your ministry and how to get started.
Finding volunteers to serve in our ministries is a challenge we all face. No matter the size of the ministry, from a coffee-shop church plant to a multi-campus, mega church, there always seems to be more opportunities to serve than servers. In today's episode, Orange Specialist Barbara Graves shares three simple ways to make volunteer recruiting a bit easier.
Most churches without a formal special needs ministry are already doing everything they need to welcome kids with special needs. There’s no magic formula or special curriculum needed. In this episode, Meaghan Wall shares practical ways you can welcome and serve children with special needs at your church.
A 'phase' is a timeframe in a kid’s life when you can leverage distinctive opportunities to influence a kid’s future. Every phase matters. Every phase is uniquely important for a kid’s future and faith. In today's episode, Elle Campbell and Dan Scott share a few ways you can do a better job of knowing kids in every phase so that kids in every phase can know God.
We all know the impact of serving, but we also know the difficulty we sometimes face mobilizing the people in our church to serve. At Bryan Apinis's church, his full time job is enabling and recruiting people to serve. Today, Brian shares how he approaches inspiring people to serve. He talks about how this approach has caused his church to learn to love not just the idea of service but service itself.
Asking people for money can be one of the hardest things leaders do. When God gives you a mission, though, you must move forward with it and sometimes that requires raising funds. Joe McAlpine is with us today sharing effective ways you can maximize giving at church while also maximizing impact.
If your church's goal is to make an impact in the lives of families, hosting a live event is one of the best ways to do just that. In today's episode, Josh Davis shares how a yearly live event around Christmastime has made a significant impact on his church and their surrounding community. You'll also hear three practical tips hosting your own event.
Marriages ministries everywhere have a reputation of being boring, outdated, and preachy. Is the same true about your church? Over the past 10 years, Ted Lowe, director of MarriedPeople has watched church leaders from all over the country change how they approach marriage ministry. The unexpected benefit: people they thought would never come to their church willingly decided to visit. In this episode, listen as Ted shares six practical ways to make marriage events the best entry point into your church.
Every kid, in every phase, is changing in six ways. They’re changing physically, mentally, culturally, relationally, emotionally, and morally. We won’t address all of them today. However, in today’s episodes, Dan Scott and Elle Campbell will talk about the physical, mental and cultural changes facings in your church, home and community.
If turn on the TV or skim social media for five minutes today, you’ll see our society is facing a myriad of issues. For many, it’s hard to remember a time when our country and world seemed more explosive and divisive. Living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over the last several years, Joe McAlpine found myself in the heart of the national divide as Milwaukee is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. In today’s episode, Joe shares three questions for us to consider asking as we navigate these challenge times.
New Life Christian Church in Northern Virginia has been around for over two decades operating as a mobile church meeting in schools for most of its history. However, in 2011, when given the opportunity to open a church building of their own, New Life Christian Church decided to open the nZone instead. What’s the nZone? Simply put, it’s a 85,000-square-foot sports complex. Why would they do that? Find out today’s episode by Tom Pounder.
When you’re tasked with establishing a solid children’s ministry, you can feel a lot of pressure. For Jon Torres, he knew his first steps were to create an excellent kids area. In today’s episode, you’ll hear how he went about developing his church’s children’s ministry at a recently planted campus in California.
As we work with children and families, we tend to provide the majority of our service projects and programming inside of the church building. It brings a sense of safety which allows for a closer connection among the people involved. While it is very important to bring groups together and create a space that values synergy within the church, in this episode, Bobby Benavides share why it’s also important to sometimes allow young kids the opportunity to interact with the people they are actually serving outside of the church.
Let’s be honest. The church doesn’t always do the best job understanding life outside of our four walls. We spend a ton of time building our culture inside the church. We have countless meetings and vision strategy sessions working on how to improve our identities as places of worship but might spend significantly less time becoming students of the world around us. If you want to change that, where do you start? In today’s episode, Joe McAlpine shares three questions you can ask as you dig in to examine your church’s relevance in the local community.
We all know volunteers deserve to be celebrated, but we also know the stress of program logistics or the blue-sky vision of strategic planning. How can you add celebration and encouragement into the natural rhythms of our ministry routines? In today’s episode, Carla Bregani shares some practical ideas.
There is a story in the making at your church. God is up to amazing things in the lives of people in the local church and it’s worth celebrating! As you do weekly ministry it’s easy to forget to look up and around and take in what’s happening. That’s the real story. Each week kids and families are getting to know a heavenly Father who loves them. Volunteers show up to serve God as they serve in the local church. Goldfish crackers are being massively consumed. In today’s episode, Misty Phillips inspires us to celebrate the stories happening in your ministry.