Greg Atkinson

I’ve known Pastor Steven Furtick since he was in high school in South Carolina. He was a passionate leader in a local youth group when I was in college at Charleston Southern University. His church that he planted a few years ago has exploded to over 8000 people in worship.

Their band and worship music is amazing. Here’s a taste of how they opened their services this past weekend. Worship leaders: This is the kind of creativity and innovation I’m looking for. This is what I mean by breathing new life into an old hymn. Watch and enjoy! HERE is the link in case you having trouble viewing on my blog.

Yesterday I took my son to the eye doctor because he had been complaining of having trouble reading things up close. He’s getting reading glasses to wear just for homework and reading and will hopefully get better with time. As I sat in the room with him and watched them test his vision, I had a very interesting experience.

As they asked my son to read a chart up close, he began to mess up and couldn’t focus on the letters. I sat there feeling helpless, uncomfortable, grieving and sincerely wishing he could do better. I left the doctor, dropped him back off at school and couldn’t shake the feeling.

I started thinking about vision as it relates to leadership and what it must be like for people in a church where the leader lacks vision and there’s nothing compelling about their mission. I wonder if they feel helpless, uncomfortable, if they grieve and sincerely wish the leader would make a call and lead them. The Bible says:

Where there is no vision [no redemptive revelation of God], the people perish; - Proverbs 29:18 (Amplified Bible)

I started thinking about that word perish. One of the definitions of perish is “to pass away or disappear” – I wonder if people in churches without vision die a slow death. I wonder how long they stick around feeling helpless, uncomfortable and grieving for their leader, their church and their community.

Yes, there are some people that quickly pick up on the lack of vision and leave the church to find another more vibrant church, but how many people keep coming back week after week secretly hoping things will get better? Hoping and praying that the pastor will get a word from God, lead with passion, conviction and purpose. I wonder how many gifted, capable, passionate lay leaders are sitting untapped in congregations around the country. I wonder.

LifeChurch.tv (through their OPEN Network) has done it again! Known for years for offering free resources to the Church, now they are helping you with your church’s Facebook page through a series of training videos.

With training videos on how to do events, extras and configurations, fan updates, insights/metrics, moderation, notes, photos, videos and wall updates – they have you and your Facebook team (which can be made up totally of volunteers) covered on how to create, manage and lead an effective and attractive Facebook page for your church.

Check out their resources and videos HERE. Now you have no excuse for not having a great Facebook presence!

If you read my blog via email or RSS, you may not have noticed several things – such as the new blog design and some of the new sponsors recently added to my blog homepage. Sponsors such as HymnCharts and their Easter resources and my newest sponsor: Interactive Worship Live.

I’ve known Phillip Edwards for several years and remember when he called me and several Church leaders together in Dallas to show us his new resource and give us all an up-close-and-personal demo.

At my current home church in Georgia (where I play keys with the praise band when I’m in town), we use IWL each week and love it. I asked our worship pastor, Michael Wells, to share his thoughts on this resource for our church. Here are Michael’s thoughts:

I have been an Interactive Worship Live user for some time and would highly recommend it. There are three areas that IWL has made us more effective in.

First, because you can isolate studio quality musicians, our musicians can clearly hear things like strumming patterns or vocal inflections which has improved their skill level and learning speed.

Second, you don’t have to worry when a musician has to cancel last minute. If our bass player calls in late Saturday night sick I can unmute the bass player channel and sleep well.

Last, IWL fills out the sound by adding instruments not on our team. I may have an electric guitar but I do not have five and many artist tracks today will have multiple layers of instruments.

All three of these areas have made use a more skillful team.

*** I agree with Michael and have personally witnessed this great worship resource in action. We’ve had weeks where the drummer was out and we just plugged in the drummer track on IWL. We had a week when the bass player was out and we did the same thing. I also resonate with the third point Michael made of filling out our sound. We have a basic band, but love having the added percussion sounds added in and it’s always good to add a couple more electric guitars to fill out our sound.

Have you heard of IWL? Why don’t you check them out HERE at their website? If you use IWL at your church, please comment and share with us why you like it/use it and if it’s ever saved the day.

As you know, I (Greg) consult with and secret shop for churches across the country. My friend, Will Mancini does the same thing with his company. Recently he wrote a great blog post on why he thinks this service for churches is vital and I loved it. I thought I’d share it with you here today:

Every month for the last decade, the Auxano team has conducted ministry observations during weekend services. They call it the Guest Perspective Evaluation. Here is why they keep this strategic component in Auxano’s toolbox. Okay, each reality by itself may not be mind blowing, but when you put them all together, the case is staggering and couldn’t be more compelling.

#1  You will have more guests in one year than you think. Our “information gathering” in churches doesn’t even capture the majority of guests. Auxano research shows that five to eight percent of your worshipping community will self-identify as guests. Therefore the number of guests in one year is:

[(Ave. weekly worship attendance) x (.05) x (52)]

#2 Many of your guests are going through situations that make them more responsive to God. These are the folks that are most likely to be moving, changing jobs, getting divorced, having kids, etc.

#3  Your guests are assessing very quickly whether or not they are coming back. This happens much faster than we think. For example, read The 11-Minute Difference.

#4  Your guests represent step one of accomplishing the Great Commission- these are the people coming to you! How much does your church spend on foreign missions? Compare that to how much we invest into the fish that swim to the boat before we cast a net.

#5  A guest who is attending may represent years of prayer, service, and invitation by a church member. My mom and I attended church without my father for 12 years. The first time my Dad came to church with us, imagine how I felt about the church and the hospitality of the people. All I could think was “Don’t screw up!”

#6  Studies show that guests will talk about their initial experiences 8-15 times with other people. Serve guests well and multiply your message.

#7  A welcoming ministry is a great “shallow end of the pool” to get people involved in service for the first time.Yes, you have plenty of intimidating places to serve like worship, small groups, and children’s ministry. So why not leverage an easy place to start?

#8  Building a great ministry to guests nourishes a culture of hospitality because of the concrete reminders to the entire congregation that guests matter.

#9 Investment in a welcoming ministry is an investment into every other ministry your church offers. I ask churches to dream about what ministry they might start. I then tell them to get it done by first having great guest services. Do you want an amazing prison ministry? Maybe the next Chuck Colson is visiting next week.

#10 We are commanded in Scripture to be hospitable. The Greek word philoxenia literally means to “love strangers” and is used in Romans 12:13 and Hebrews 13:2.

***The following was a guest post from Will Mancini. You can visit Will at www.willmancini.com/

This video link was sent to me by a friend and reader of this blog. He knew I should see it. I watched it and wept. My heart goes out to this dear man of God. I listened to and appreciate his story, but don’t agree with his lifestyle. Take a look and listen to this man’s story.

Randy McCain’s Story from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

I reached out to Randy and emailed him twice – asking him to start a conversation with me and invited him to be interviewed on this blog. As of now, I haven’t heard back from him. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, I love homosexuals and have a special place in my heart for them. Where the tension comes in is over whether or not gay Christians should live a life of celibacy like my friend, Justin Lee of The Gay Christian Network. There are “Side B” Christians that are homosexual, but don’t date and live a life of celibacy.

Recently, I was asked to review a new book by Zondervan and found that not only Justin feels this way, but many others. The book I was asked to review is called Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality and is part theology, part memoir. Wesley Hill writes as a gay celibate Christian – someone who believes in the Bible’s prohibition against homosexual practice, but struggles with same-sex attraction.

If you are a part of church ministry  you likely know someone who struggles with same-sex attraction. This book will help you understand their feelings of loneliness and isolation better, and also provides encouragement for them by “waiting” on the Lord.

I’m curious, IF you took the time to watch the entire video above and hear Randy’s story, what are your thoughts? Do you think his moving story of love and romance trumps what Scripture teaches? Is Scripture out of date, out of touch, wrong, misinterpreted? Do you celebrate Randy’s story and his ministry as a senior pastor of a church or do you grieve and wish he would live a life of purity and faithfulness to his tremendous calling in Christ? You know where I stand. Where do you stand?

I just came across this series intro video online and thought it should be seen and appreciated for the hard work, creativity and innovation that went into it. This is from Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC.

Momentum from Geoff Schultz on Vimeo.

I often wonder if senior pastors are aware of the countless hours that went into something like this? It’s a 50 second bumper, but probably took at least a week to create. Do you have a series bumper to share? Post the link here.

The last decade of the 20th century saw the rise of the multisite innovator-pioneers. The first decade of the 21st century saw the wave of the multisite early adopters with over 3,000 multisite venues and campuses launched across North America. Now as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the middle adopters will mainstream the movement as it speads around the world.

Here is my annual forecast concerning multisite trends as we enter 2011 and the next decade:

1. The multisite movement began as a band-aid formegachurches that were out of room or limited by zoning restrictions. It quickly evolved into a growth strategy for healthy churches of all sizes and will become a revitalization strategy for stuck or struggling churches. Many of these aging churches are solid, but stuck in non-growing situations because of the inevitable social-demographic changes occurring around them and/or their inability to embrace contemporary worship styles and culturally-relevant ministry practices. Multisiting allows stuck churches to reinvent themselves by extending in new ways and to new locations without abandoning their base.  Revitalization mergers also allow smaller struggling churches to have a new beginning by being adopted by a stronger vibrant church. This revitalization will be the impetus in the surge of church mergers that is growing across the church landscape.
2. Church leaders will focus less on growing their church and more on reaching an area for Christ through externally-focused multisite campuses and “missional communities” (small groups).
3. The new big is small. Though the majority of megachurches have multiple campuses, smaller multisite churches already outnumber them and will lead the way in launching new campuses with a   smaller core in smaller communities.
4. The rise of the collegiate model of church reproduction. This is the hybrid of mullti-siting and church-planting. Church-planting churches will incorporate multisite campuses and multisite churches will launch church plants. These reproducing churches will be the newtribes or mini-denominations of the future.
5. Denominations will integrate multisite into their strategic plans and offer multisite and merger coaching to their churches.
6. The buzz word in church circles in the 1980′s wasgrowth. In the 1990′s it was health. At the beginning of the 21st century the word is connected. Effective churches of the future will fully utilize all the social networking tools available to build community and foster relationships.
7. Businesses and organizations that serve churches will fully incorporate a multisite orientation in the development and marketing of their products and services.
8. Technology will continue to produce more and innovative tools for communicating the Gospel and biblical truth. Multisite churches will lead the way in utilizing these tools. Video-streaming over the internet will be easier, cheaper, and the primary way video sermons will be delivered to multisite churches.
9. Multisite churches will explode across Europe, Africa, and Asia in the next decade.
10. More mergers, internet campuses, and international campuses.

What do you see on the horizon?

The following was a guest post from Jim Tomberlin. Follow him on Twitter HERE and read his blog HERE.

A friend of mine who is on staff at The Rock Church in San Diego did this video recently. Take a look and be inspired. Got a link to something you did at your church? Post it here.

The Rock Church Vision 2011 from chris loope on Vimeo.

I came across this powerful video/story yesterday on my friend Steve Murphy’s blog. Watch and share your thoughts.

Pennies HEART from phos pictures on Vimeo.