Tiffany is Director of Marketing & Communications for The Unstuck Group. She graduated from Clemson University and spent five years working in public relations with major national retail brands, nonprofits and churches on content creation, strategic planning, communication consulting, social media and media relations. She also founded and writes for WastingPerfume.com, a devotional blog for young women and teen girls.
His church was actually increasing in attendance, giving and small groups, but the rate of that increase was slowing. That’s what led John to see stuckness in their future if they didn’t dig into the church’s health and strategy and take action.
We are losing the content battle. Searching people are finding answers from everyone but the local church. Communication in the church needs to be more active now than ever.
Ginghamsburg Church in Ohio has quite the history of growth and effective church leadership. Mike Slaughter, the current Senior Pastor, has become known as an early innovator in multiple areas of ministry. So, how does succession work in a church with a history of leadership like that? We caught up with Mike and incoming lead pastor Chris Heckaman to get their insights as this church enters a new season.
We recently asked our consultants the church leadership trends they’ve noticed over the past year. Here are some of their insights:
With most churches preaching in decades-old formats, I wonder if pastors are equipped for the direction of future preaching. So, where do we go from here?
Want to expand your message’s reach? Here are two simple streaming tools few churches are leveraging to their maximum potential.
It’s so much easier to read the headlines — to watch the show and allow the stereotypes to create monsters out of the people coming behind us — than it is to listen. If we refuse to engage on a personal level with the people we go before, our churches will never succeed in reaching Millennials.
Most organizational communication problems are really something else. Still, when churches sense their message isn’t getting through, they often dive headfirst into changing the technology or the graphics, trying more announcements, redesigning the site, etc. Perhaps you lead at one of those churches. The problem is they are often trying to solve the wrong challenge…
Your vision is not your to-do list. It’s not the event calendar. It’s not your preaching schedule. It’s not your building repairs. It’s not your most pressing need. It’s easy to reduce vision to the next thing to be done. But the action items on your list are supporting players, and though they are very important ones, they too often grow to a gargantuan size, blocking out all light from the true aim — the very reason why you have a list at all.
Is the language of the culture within your church toxic to people living in the culture outside it? What I’m not talking about is the “church people” we see in news clips holding venomous posters on the side of the road. That’s clearly toxic. What I am talking about is more subtle: church t-shirts that sell an exclusive membership. Or, rally cries intended to foster community within one church that instead suggest competition between churches. Or, insider language decorating an Instagram post without regard for how it may be interpreted in a public context. We say things outside our church walls that take on new meaning. We all need to get better at evaluating our language.
I have an obsession. I bet you have it, too. My obsession reveals itself in…
As we’ve already covered in this series, over-programming is one big reason why churches feel…
