Church Growth

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8 things Apple can teach about church hospitality

Church hospitality teams can learn a lot about the care and feeding of the church visitor from Apple, one of the most profitable retailers ever. Apple’s success isn’t due to iPads and operating systems; it’s about how they train their employees. Carmine Gallo, in his book The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer

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friendly-church

7 simple steps to 1st rate church hospitality

  When was the last time you visited a place that billed itself as “the unfriendliest church in town?” Me either. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one. But they’re out there in spirit if not in name. Tim Dolan reports that one of his lay ministry students found one. As an assignment, I

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Ministry metrics: the hard and soft measurements

The church I’m currently serving as the intentional interim pastor has the Annual Business meeting scheduled for the last Sunday in January. This past Sunday we conducted a dry run to finalize what would be included in the report to the congregation. The Executive Pastor, the outgoing chairman of the Board and the incoming chairman

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Church vision statements: how the interim pastor sells ’em

Church vision statements are like diet and exercise. Everybody knows its good for you but relatively few muster up the discipline to stick with it for long. How many well-crafted vision statements end up gathering dust in a neglected file jacket? How many failed because they weren’t properly communicated and executed? It turns out that

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Pastors nurture organisms and lead organizations

“Pastor, you’re building your own kingdom. Shame on you!” “This church has lost its soul. It’s become just another corporate provider of religious goods and services.” “I long for the days gone by when everyone pulled together. We were all on the same page and life was grand.” Certainly you’ve heard these laments if you’ve

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Can megachurches be church visitor friendly?

A colleague of mine once visited a mega-church in southern California while on vacation. The 6,000 seat auditorium was filled to capacity that Sunday morning. He was quite surprised when, during the ritual exchange of the secret Churchman’s handshake, an elderly lady made her way down the aisle from several rows back to greet him

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Book Review: Revitalizing Congregations

Interim pastors, permanent pastors for that matter, will enjoy reading William Avery’s Revitalizing Congregations: Refocusing and Healing Through Pastoral Transitions (affiliate link) for its clear, simple style, for its useful information and for the mirror it holds up for us to look at our ministries. In the preface the author identifies his target audience: The

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