My dad used to own several leisure suits. Had I been smart, I would have raided his closet and kept one of them. Since I wasn’t smart enough to do that before I left home, I decided to purchase one of my own using eBay. I paid a chunk of money for it. Needless to say, Dad could have gotten rich if he would have held on to his leisure suits.

At one point the leisure suit was trendy, highly functional, everyone was wearing it, and it was easy to care for. It served a purpose: people needed to wear clothing that was functional and fashionable at the same time. What better solution than a polyester suit?

Eventually, the leisure suit went the way of the pet rock and the cassette player. They disappeared because better ideas came along. That’s the way history works.

Some churches are still wearing their leisure suits. Figuratively, of course. Many churches are stuck. Though they may have had a season where their kingdom impact was expanding, things have slowed down or started to decline. They know something has to change, but many times they’re unwilling to change. They’d rather keep wearing the leisure suit.

The leisure suit disappeared as fashion trends changed. Anyone caught wearing one was immediately branded as out of touch with reality or irrelevant. Sure, the leisure suit still serves a purpose, but almost no one wears them. Unfortunately, many churches still do! They sit comfortably watching the disco ball spin overhead wondering why the congregation is growing older and smaller. What they are doing is no longer connecting with today’s culture. They are not seeing the fruit.

By the way, whatever you perceive to be “traditional” churches aren’t the only churches that are stuck. Your church may have started one hundred years ago or ten years ago or even just ten months ago—but stuck is still stuck.

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Last week I opened applications for my new coaching network starting in August. The response has been very positive. At this point, the coaching network is full; however, it seems there may be enough interest to offer a second coaching network. With that in mind, I’ll continue receiving applications if you’re interested in participating.

In case you’re curious, here’s the profile of the current applicants:

• They are primarily lead pastors and executive pastors, but there are several staff leaders from ministries like life development, creative arts, family ministry and student ministry.
• They represent churches that, for the most part, range in size from 500 to over 5,000.
• They include leaders from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

Here’s the post from last week. Here are all the details. On that page, you’ll see the link to the online application. The deadline is Tuesday, June 28. Again, it seems that both networks will fill up before that deadline, so act quickly if you’re interested.

Here’s an interesting article from The Nielson Company on the media habits of our children. Among other things, our kids are out-texting every other age group. Only senior adults are talking less on the phone than our kids.

That reminded me how we tend to hold on to practices that worked in the past assuming they’ll continue to work in future generations. For example, think about how we’ve handled follow-up with first-time guests in the past. It used to be that home visitation was expected. In fact, I’m guessing my grandparents would have welcomed that.

When that became creepy, we started to make phone calls and send something in the mail. My parents probably loved getting something in the mail and then having the opportunity to make a personal connection with someone by telephone.

Then my generation started using answering machines and screening phone calls on their mobile phones. We stopped talking to anyone that wasn’t already in our contact list. When the nuisance of junk mail and telemarketing calls became a barrier, we found out that email messages offered a nice, personal touch.

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You may be interested in checking out some of the ministry resources that are available. Here are the folks that are making things happen at TonyMorganLive.com in June:

Sharefaith – one-stop solution for all your church media and communication needs

faithHighway – provides total marketing solutions to attract visitors to churches

Connected Church Conference – inspiring a generation of connected churches with speakers including Will Mancini, Jim Tomberlin and Ron Edmonson

dc – design and communication solutions that create raving fans, inspire people, and honor Christ

Church Community Builder – a web-based church management software with multi-site capabilities

Clover – provides websites for growing churches and ministries

Church Leader Insights – join Nelson Searcy for a free, 75-minute webinar where you’ll discover the eight systems of a healthy church

Ministry Insights – offering tools like Leading from Your Strengths to strengthen leaders, teams, marriages and families

Outreach Events – specializes in dynamic, outreach-oriented events with people like Scott Rigsby that create opportunities for sharing faith

SHARPchurches.com – free report on “The Top 3 Accounting Mistakes Churches Make”

Standard Theme – the best-coded WordPress theme ever (My site is built on this theme.)

StreamingChurch.tv – provides everything you need to broadcast your services live

TheCommon.org – offers a simple way for people to get and give help to their community

I only have one advertising spot open. If you are interested, email me for more details. I’d love to have you join our team!

Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate six different leadership coaching networks with more than 75 leaders from across the country. I will be launching a new network this fall for 12 church leaders. We’ll be meeting six days over six months beginning in August.

After a number of preliminary inquiries about this new coaching network, six of the 12 spots have already been claimed. If you’re doing the math, that means only six spots remain available.

Here are some things to keep in mind…

• This is not an opportunity for someone who is looking for inspiration. My coaching networks involve work. You can’t just show up. You will have to commit to six months of reading and engaging exercises with the ministry team at your church. This is designed to help you discover new systems and strategies.
• This experience isn’t for people looking for leadership theory. Yes, you’ll learn some leadership skills, but this experience is designed for you to put those skills into action. Every month you will leave with new tools to implement in your ministry environment. I want to help you shift your thinking and shift your behaviors.
• This is not a conference experience. In a conference, you can sit and soak in the teaching without engaging anyone else. In this coaching experience, you will be encouraged and challenged by other leaders who will be counting on you to participate fully.

Here are what a few folks had to say about participating in previous coaching networks:

• “As a lead pastor this was incredibly awesome. Tony is a systems and process genius. Through Tony’s network I was able to gain a better view of helping structure my vision, my dreams and better lead my team. This was a six-month commitment and well worth the time.” –Michael Robison, Lead Pastor of Grace Church in Kingsport, TN
• “I can honestly say this has been one of the best investments of my life. It’s amazing how much stretching and encouraging happens when folks with similar responsibilities get around the table and talk strategy. Tony’s insight and foresight are amazing! Anyone taking a part of this networking opportunity will be stretched, blessed, and a better leader for it.” –Jamie McDonald, Executive Pastor of New Horizon Church in Durham, NC
• “This has been a great opportunity, not only to suck up information and advice from Tony, but to interact with and learn from some very gifted ministry leaders from all over the country. This is a growth opportunity I would have not enjoyed any other way. If you can swing the investment of time and money, do it! You will not be sorry.” –Hal Hunter, Ministry Pastor of The Church at Argyle in Jacksonville, FL

Here are all the details. On that page, you’ll see the link to the online application. The deadline is Tuesday, June 28, but I fully expect this coaching network to fill up before then.

Email me if you have any questions about this opportunity.

Media. That one word entails a world of sensations, experiences, visions, apparitions, stuffed email inboxes, exabytes (yeah, that’s a word) of information, old cell phones, new smartphones, trillions of dollars, mesmerizing messages, absolute bewilderment—a seismic cultural shift. It’s all about media. In today’s info-torrential and media-saturated world, don’t think that the church has gone unchanged. It’s changed — in a big way.

Here we are  smack-dab in the middle of 2011. It’s the age of the Millennials, an 80-million member generation that is more plugged into tech and tuned out to God than any other generation in American history. The world is online; nearly two billion people now have Internet access. A shocking five billion people in the world are cell phone users, tribespersons of Nokia, Apple, Droid, or any of the many other cellular iterations. Amidst the glow of iPads, the buzz of mobile the phones, flash of advertisements, and the ubiquity of WiFi hotspots, the church must somehow get its message across.

Part of reaching this generation is speaking their language—communicating in a way that is understandable and powerful. Churches must embrace technology, redeeming it for relevance and authenticity. In a word, churches need an affordable, professional, and accessible place for all their media needs.

Sounds like a tall order. If you could have your wildest pastoral media dream, what would it be? Blow-you-away awesome graphics for everything (ideally created by an übertalented graphic designer who loves Jesus). Video backgrounds for worship. Church welcome videos. Rocking PowerPoint sermons. Bulletins for every Sunday. Flyers galore. Newsletters. Graphics. Everything. (Dream, dream, dream.)

And if you had to put a price tag on it, what would you be willing to pay? I know, you have a small church, so you’d only be willing to pay, oh, maybe like three cents a day.

Oh, and one other thing. You need a church website. A good one. Like a megachurch website—complete with video and audio. It would have to be a website that was easy to set up, to update, and to use. And it would have to be free.

Is this kind of one-stop media solution possible (outside the realm of your wildest pastoral dreams, of course)? Yes. In a word, it’s Sharefaith—the world’s largest collection of church media. With an online library of over 38,000 designs, and a membership of tens of thousands of churches, Sharefaith is the church’s partner for reaching this generation with the truth of Jesus. We want to help you achieve excellence in your communication, to grow your church, and to reach more people. We invite you to join us.

Okay, one final thing. We’re going to drop the price. Our special promotion with Tony Morgan isn’t going to come along every day, so we want to give you an insane discount: 20% off our regular price.

Basically, your wildest pastoral media dream just came true.

Signup for for a Sharefaith Membership today.

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This is a sponsored guest post from the team at Sharefaith, one of my ministry partners on TonyMorganLive.com.

I read a fascinating article in Wired recently about how Google has failed to respond appropriately to rise of Facebook and other social networking sites. Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt is taking full responsibility. Schmidt is quoted as saying, “I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it.”

For me, this was the most intriguing line in the article. Sam Gustin, the writer of the article, explained Schmidt “was so focused on running Google’s day-to-day operations that he didn’t give the issue the necessary attention.”

That’s when leadership fails. It’s easy to fall into the trap. We get focused on doing what we do. We try to get better at. We do all we can to get the team focused on what we do. We want improvement. We want quality. We want to do what we do well.

The problem is that when we get so focused on doing what we do well, we run the risk of missing what’s happening in the bigger picture.

• What we do well and had success doing in the past, may not work now and in the future.
• Other opportunities may surface, but we’re so focused on what we have to do today that we miss them.
• New threats to our strategy continue to pop up. If we only work on the day-to-day, they go unnoticed.
• We may falsely assume that the people we’re trying to reach stay the same — we assume their needs never change.

Here’s what’s most challenging about all this — leading the day-to-day is the easy part of leadership. We know it. We’re comfortable with it. We feel good doing things we know how to do.

The challenge, of course, is that an organization concerned about impacting multiple generations will experience a brief existence and then die if it’s focused solely on the day-to-day…even if the quality of the execution is flawless.

It’s probably time we pause to notice and then act on what requires our necessary attention.

Here are the articles that generated the most traffic and conversation in May:

1. This White Church Doesn’t Want Black Members
2. Stop Paying People to be Nice
3. Unconventional Wisdom
4. 20 Things We Learned to Stay Married for 20 Years
5. Life’s Not Fair
6. Making Bad Hires
7. Leadership is Dead
8. Unstuck: Building a Healthy Foundation
9. John Piper Interviews Rick Warren about Doctrine Behind ‘Purpose Driven Church’
10. We Have Too Many Messages

What are the topics that you are wrestling with these days? Share what’s on your mind by leaving your comment.

I want to thank everyone who has read one of the three eBooks that we’ve released over the last eight weeks. The response to this series has certainly exceeded expectations. Here are the current stats for the three eBooks:

By the way, the newest one, Big Churches Getting Bigger, has only been out for a couple of weeks. It’s generated some fun dialogue with readers. In case you’re wondering, it’s not really intended for “big” churches. In fact, I had churches of every shape and size in mind when I wrote it.

What’s most encouraging is the number of stories I’m hearing from pastors who are using the free downloads in their staff and ministry team conversations. They were built with that in mind.

In case you missed the opportunity the first time around, here are the links to all three of the eBooks in this series. Feel free to share them with your friends.

And what does this say about mine?

Anyone want to venture out and explain what these stats say about the people who are a part of this community?

What do you think?

p.s. Don’t wait until Monday at noon to comment.