Tony Morgan - Pastor of Ministries at Westridge Church, near Atlanta. Author, blogger, consultant, church strategist | tonymorganlive.com & twitter.com/tonymorganlive
- When people come to our churches they are all obviously at different stages on their faith journey
- Ultimately, everything we do at our churches is designed to help people become fully devoted followers of Christ
- Talk through “What does a fully devoted follower of Christ look like at our church” with your staff
- How can you know what to do between point A and point B if you don’t know where you want people to end up?
- Are the next steps clearly defined?
- God uses unique churches to reach unique people
- When we get more focused in our thinking, we tend to take action more readily
- The fewer options that we have, the more likely people are to take steps
- Instead of designing ministry to help people to become fully devoted followers of Christ, a lot of times we just end up “doing church”
- What event or program requires a major platform announcement in order for it to succeed? If it were really producing life change, if people were finding value, they’d be inviting and pulling people to be a part of it.
- What would you not participate in if you weren’t the pastor?
- Does this program reach people outside the church, or does it just satisfy people inside the church? We need ministries for both, but do we need all of them for people inside?
- Where is the fruit? What is God blessing?
- What would happen if we invested more of our time, prayer, leadership focus, money on the things that God is really blessing?
- Are the next steps clearly communicated?
- You can have steps clearly defined, but still not clearly communicated
- When people don’t hear our message, our natural tendency is to get louder
- Every ministry ends up competing to get people’s attention
- In business they call it “spam,” in church we call it “good ministry”
- We need to have clarity about what our ministry is about
- We need to have a focused strategy
- We need to bring consistency to our message
- Take a 2 week period, and gather all communication materials that are promoted through your church through all mediums, put samples of those communication pieces throughout the room. You are bombarding people with the different messages, and it looks like it’s coming from multiple different churches.
- Begin to prioritize the messages. We need to get over the fact that we think fairness is a value we need to promote in our ministries.
- Life isn’t fair. And then you die. - Mark Beeson
- Eliminate competing messages. There is going to come a day where you will have to say “no”
- It’s very easy for us to add ministries in our churches, but when was the last time we took one away?
- The number 1 reason people show up to churches the first time is that a friend invited them. 75-80%
- If we create environments where life change is happening, people will be compelled to be a part of them. And they will want to invite their friends.
- What would happen if we focused on improving the ministry environments and relationships instead of focusing on promotions?
