Your Church Sign
When it comes to marketing, your building isn’t your most valuable resource. It’s your sign. Your sign in your employee who stands out there by the street, come rain or shine, and invites every passerby to join your congregation for Read more…
Follow-Up: Turning Visitors into Returning Guests
In most churches, the return rate for first-time visitors hovers at less than 15 percent – and it’s even lower in small, declining churches. To turn your visitors into returning guests takes great hospitality, but you can improve the odds Read more…
Getting Visitor’s Contact Information
It’s great when first time guests show up to visit, but once they’ve visited, do you know how to connect with them to invite them back? Or better, can you drop them a thank you note? Or better yet, can Read more…
Leveraging Your Church’s Demographics
All those numbers. All those statistics. Regardless of where you get your ministry area’s demographics, there’s a lot of important information there beyond just the population, age, and ethnicity. In this episode, Mary Frances, noted church consultant and demographer, shares Read more…
Follow-Up: Turning Visitors into Returning Guests
In most churches, the return rate for first-time visitors hovers at less than 15 percent – and it’s even lower in small, declining churches. To turn your visitors into returning guests takes great hospitality, but you can improve the odds Read more…
The Most Important Room – August 19
When it comes to visitors, the sanctuary is not the most important room in the building. Sure, they might be impressed with the beautiful stained glass windows, but it’s not the first space that they’ll talk about when they get Read more…
Building Connections: On and Off Line
Whether you’re doing in-person worship, on-line worship, or a hybrid, the reality is that if you’re not making good connections with your members, your guests, and your visitors, then you’re dead in the water. In today’s world, making connections is Read more…
The Fine Art of Communicating
Believe it or not, Christians aren’t well known for being great communicators. In fact, we have a fairly wide reputation as being argumentative, closed minded, and biased. In this episode, Drs. Kris and Bill have a conversation (?) a discussion Read more…
Teaching Prayer
Where did you learn how to pray? If you’re like most of us, you learned by listening to others who were praying. If you were raised in church, the primary example was the pastor and the pastoral prayer. The problem Read more…
Measuring Maturity
When your nominating team meets, are they looking for warm bodies to fill positions, or are they looking for mature disciples with passion? We’ll get to the passion part in another episode, but how can you tell whether or not Read more…
The 5 Faces of Jesus
It’s a loaded question, as in, it’s a GREAT question for sharing why you’re a Jesus followers: “Why do you go to church?” But the response is too often a mumbled conversation about how wonderful the people are or how Read more…
The Fine Art of Communicating
Believe it or not, Christians aren’t well known for being great communicators. In fact, we have a fairly wide reputation as being argumentative, closed minded, and biased. In this episode, Drs. Kris and Bill have a conversation (?) a discussion Read more…
Multiplying Leaders – July 22
We’ve yet to meet a church where there were enough leaders to get all that ministry done. (On the other hand, we’ve been in plenty of churches where there are too many would-be chiefs who are just dying to tell Read more…
Virtual Resources for Turnaround Pastors
There are a lot of resources out there for you, pastor who wants to turnaround their church. But where do you start? A quick Google search will give you over 33.5 Million web pages of all kinds of “stuff” for Read more…
Make the Most of Meetings
Love ’em or hate ’em, meetings are a part of the church. However, have you been noticing meeting attendance waning? There may be a good reason why your members – and even your staff – are avoiding your meetings. In this Read more…
Make the Most of Networking
If you’re serious about growing your church, then networking in your community (and online) is one of the keys. But where do you network and how do you network is a mystery to too many church leaders. In this episode, Read more…
Virtual Resources for Turnaround Pastors
There are a lot of resources out there for you, pastor who wants to turnaround their church. But where do you start? A quick Google search will give you over 33.5 Million web pages of all kinds of “stuff” for Read more…
Ministry – Too Important for Volunteers
Everything your church does has eternal consequences. Lives and souls and families and eternities hang in the balance. With that in mind, do your really think that a cadre of mere volunteers have the commitment level and the expertise to Read more…
Church Marketing 101
A decent definition of marketing is “getting the word out.” Many churches – most churches – are invisible to their neighbors. Add to the thousands of churches that have jumped online during the pandemic, it’s become difficult to make a Read more…
Effective Church Membership
Effective Church Membership: Some churches have done away with church membership … let’s be honest, the only ones who really count today are those who actually show up (and in most churches, that’s well less than 50 percent of their Read more…