Get Your Strategy On
Wish you were here for this year’s Innovative Church Conference? Or, you were here and you just want to relive all the fun? Now’s your chance. You can now download all the sessions for a small fee from WiredChurches.com. Also, we’re offering free streaming of a few sessions from Mark Beeson, Tim Stevens, Mark Batterson and Perry Noble. Check out all the fun here. Enjoy!
Tony Morgan is a pastor and the Chief Strategic Officer at NewSpring Church where he develops creative solutions for communications, technology and NewSpring Ministries--the church's ministry that equips other church leaders.
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Brenton Balvin
September 30th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Tony, why are you guys charging for this stuff? I can’t believe it is to cover costs of production.
John Piper and Mark Driscoll both have chosen to ‘give away’ material for the sake of the kingdom. In fact, their churches know that part of the offering they give goes to blessing the greater church.
Granger could really be innovative by giving away cds and mp3’s instead of charging people for them.
This is the Gen. 12 drum I will keep on beating. Keep it up man!
tony morgan
September 30th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Brenton, you’ve identified a difference in ministry philosophy between these churches and Granger. At Granger, we’ve decided that 100% of our offerings will be used for our missions efforts to reach our region for Jesus. What we don’t spend in local missions efforts here, we invest in our global missions efforts in India and Mexico. We’ve made a decision that WiredChurches.com, our ministry to other church leaders, will be self-supporting. In other words, we don’t take a dime from our general offerings to support what we do with WiredChurches.com.
Because of that decision, it means we have to fund all of our events, resource development, communications, technology and staffing through event registrations and product sales.
By the way, I’m not saying I disagree with Piper and Driscoll’s decisions to use tithes and offerings to fund this part of their ministry. I’m just saying it’s different than how we’ve decided to steward our financial resources. We’ve decided 100% of our tithes and offerings should be invested in our local and global missions efforts in focused regions.
That said, WiredChurches.com still wants to do what we can to provide quality resources that are helpful for church leaders to grow their churches. And, though we need to sell some of those resources to fund this part of our ministry, we continue to offer quite a few resources for free. Recently, I listed some of those resources. Here it is again:
> Free video streaming of the previous week’s services;
> Free podcasts of weekend messages and message notes;
> Free small group discussion guides;
> Free weekly newsletters with creative ideas from the Granger team;
> Free Simply Strategic Show podcasts talking about ministry strategy;
> Free blogs from various ministry leaders including our executive pastor, pastor of connections, communication director and student ministry team; and
> Free access to sample videos and music on the coolest video player around.
Just wanted you to understand our ministry philosophy. If we stopped charging for resources, we’d probably have to stop providing resources all together. For us, equipping other church leaders is a secondary part of our ministry vision. Our primary mission is reaching the unchurched for Jesus in the South Bend, IN region and now in specific communities in India and Mexico.
Great question, though. Hopefully this explanation helps. For us, it’s an Acts 1:8 drum that we need to keep beating.
tony
Brenton Balvin
September 30th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
That is an excellent response and a philosophy of ministry that I can support. Thank you for taking the time to explain what Granger is doing and why. I appreciate it.