Brad Lomenick

Brad Lomenick is the director of Catalyst. As someone who is in tune with the next generation of church leaders, I was really curious to see what Brad had to share on trends in the church. Here’s what he had to say:

TONY: What’s a current leadership trend that you’re seeing churches across the country begin to embrace?

BRAD: A big trend I see is collaboration. Collaboration among churches in a community, in a region, and even statewide and nationwide. With technology allowing leaders to share ideas and resources in a whole new way, I think we’ll see collaboration grow exponentially in 2011. Everything from mergers among local churches, shared staff and resources, mirrored programming, creative meetings held together, etc.

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UPDATE: The application deadline has passed.

For those of you who are not aware, Michael Lukaszewski announced a few weeks ago that he’s heading to New York City to plant a new church. Through that process, West Ridge Church accepted the invitation to take on Oak Leaf as a campus. After working with Brian and Michael to design the role to best fit West Ridge and Oak Leaf’s needs, we are ready to proceed with finding the right person to fill that critical leadership position.

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Sam Chand

Before I left for vacation, I connected with several of my friends in ministry to ask them about the trends they are seeing in ministries. I thought it might be helpful to begin the year focusing on the future of the church. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share thoughts from folks like Brad Lomenick, Ed Stetzer, John Saddington, Jenni Catron and John Ortberg among others. Today, I’ll begin with Sam Chand.

For those of you not familiar with Sam, he’s a leadership coach, mentor and consultant and works for many of the largest churches across the country. He provided this list of trends that he’s seeing in churches:

• Staffing — Churches are reducing paid staff and increasing unpaid staff. Many if not most churches became overstaffed in better financial times. Churches are redefining “volunteerism” as to how they are “recruited” with intentionality and the very caliber of the recruit is vetted carefully along with fulfilling assignments—usually short-term.
• Transitions — Senior Pastors especially are wondering about their next chapter of life. They want to remain engaged but not with all that comes with leading a megachurch.
• Succession — This is the tsunami that has started hitting the U.S. church in particular. I’ve written a whole book on this: Planning Your Succession. However, over 80 percent of churches are not prepared or even preparing!
• Technology — The evolution of technology has always been there, but now, the pace of innovation has pastors preaching with iPads and power points are so 90s. Keeping up the pace may not be sustainable for churches when it comes to “ready—lights—action”. (more…)

Our family minus my son plus two extra girls headed to the beach the day after Christmas. We just got back home. Here’s a picture of last evening’s sunset:

Emily did the math. This was our seventh Christmas trip to the beach. We skipped a year along the way when Brooke was born. It’s certainly one of the highlights of the year.

While I was gone…

• We rested a lot.
• I read the first half of Decision Points by George W. Bush.
• The girls went shopping. I watched football.
• John Saddington’s team switched my blog over to Standard Theme. (More on that later.)

I love getting away with my family. You should do it too…only take your own family.

Who would have guessed a visit with my friends at Clark would have turned into the most popular post of 2010? It became popular because it generated some controversy. (I love that.) It’s amazing how much people get uneasy when you begin to push against the methods they’ve always embraced. Here’s the post that stirred things up.

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Holographic Technology

I had a fascinating visit last week with the guys at Clark at their home offices near Atlanta. They took me into their new theater where I was able to see a demonstration of their holographic technology. It’s very likely the future of video for churches that are embracing technology to deliver content to multi-site locations.

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This past summer I was preparing for a church consulting experience within one particular denomination that is in decline. That led to a conversation with someone who had worked quite extensively with declining churches. That conversation turned into what became the second most popular post of 2010. If these are the top five attributes of a church in decline, what, in your opinion, is number six?

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5 Attributes of a Church in Decline

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to talk with a denominational leader in a different part of the country. Over the last few years, he’s personally been involved in consulting engagements with about 60 declining churches within his denomination. That grabbed my attention. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of experience working with churches that are in decline. With that in mind, I was curious to learn if there were any common themes. Within moments, he rattled off these five attributes of churches he’s worked with that are in decline:

When I work with churches for the first time, I think sometimes they’re frustrated with me because I’m not willing to help them fix something specific. Sometimes they want me to tweak their internal systems. Other times they want me to speak into improvements in their Sunday service environments. Other times they want me to provide feedback on their website or their music or their facility. I’ve found that churches can become convinced that they know why their church isn’t growing.

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