Not everyone is naturally wired for systems and processes. Here are three things to consider if you don’t like processes.
What should you do this week to capitalize on what God did this past Sunday?
Opinions aren’t in short supply, are they? From worship music styles to service orders and more, individuals within a congregation each have their own ideas as to what’s “right” or “best” for the church.
As you head into the Easter season, here are five practical (and hopefully, encouraging) tips to help you prepare your Easter message.
Here is our humble suggestion of 5 things that only a senior pastor can do.
Your church can grow with a majority of volunteer staff if you consider these best practices.
Here are five ideas to make every Sunday like Easter Sunday
It’s easy to think about what you need volunteers to do or what you need your staff members to do, but what do your volunteers and leaders need from YOU? What must you provide for key people in your church?
As you work on your volunteer system, one of the tensions you will encounter is leading volunteers who are busy.
Believers can use a platform of influence to honor God and spread the Gospel…or promote ourselves. How do you know if you’re seeking to build God’s Kingdom or if you’re working to promote your own?
Focusing on the most important things will help your church be more effective. Limiting your focus and simplifying your programming will help you reach more people.
You know personal invitations are powerful. And chances are, you’ve preached or passionately pleaded with your people to invite others to church. So why don’t you hear these types of stories more often?
When did your favorite pastor join Twitter? And what was the first thing they tweeted?
It’s not just something that hopefully comes together. There is a way to do it that can help your church grow both spiritually and numerically, all while decreasing your stress when it comes to figuring out, what you will preach next.
Here’s a short video about creating an environment that is genuinely welcoming to first time guests and outsiders.
You’ve got big vision with plenty to accomplish, so wasting time in a meeting that doesn’t produce results isn’t going to work.
Every week, we drop our kids off with a few volunteers and head to the adult worship service. While we sing, give, and listen to a sermon, our kids do the same thing. Just on their level. After about an hour, we pick them up and we always ask the same two questions. And always in this order.
You can change your thinking right now. The path to innovative ministry in a Micropolitan context travels through these 4 strategic shifts.
Here’s a sample letter you can send to people who have visited your church in the last six months.
A lot of churches say they are welcoming to guests, but only a few truly go out of their way to help guests feel welcome. If you want to be intentional about helping guests feel welcome, you’ve got to be intentional.
One of the best ways to improve your church is to improve your church service. It happens 52 times a year and provides a greater opportunity to reach people than any program or special event.
Use these resources recommended by Pastor Brad Wick
It’s the one system that influences nearly everything else in your church. It affects everyone and it’s crucial for reaching first time guests and connecting people into the life of the church.
Not sure what your first-time gift should be? The ideas below will help you to get started.
Many times, when you launch something new, it’s not met with excitement, but push-back. The change you think is so necessary is the change that’s actively resisted.
If you’re a senior pastor, you’re the point leader for the local church. Preaching is what most people think you do, but leadership is critical. Here are some common leadership mistakes.
Teaching your church to invite is one of the most important things you can do as a pastor. It’s one of those keystone habits, and it affects nearly everything else in the church. When your members invite others, good things happen.
Here are some leadership and time management tips for pastors who have a lot to do.
What keeps churches from growing? Here are five things.
The local church should have the happiest employees on the planet. It should concisely land on the best places to work list. And people should stay for a really, really long time.
Let’s talk about some things that are free or incredibly cheap you can do to dramatically improve your ministry and reach more people for Jesus.
As your church grows, the pastor’s leadership must continue to grow. Here are four changes you might need to make when it comes to leading a team and leading the church.
If you’re relying on Vision Sunday or a Vision Statement or an email reminder every now and then, you’re missing great opportunities to help the church stay on mission. You’ve got to cast vision all year long using multiple channels. And in a way people can understand and follow.
Christians tend to fall into one of three groups when it comes to doubt and questioning God. People move from group to group over time. Some people have a foot in two groups at once, but in any church you will find all three, and each of them needs a certain kind of care.
Here are five principles about setting up a church staff for success and restructuring a staff for growth.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to stop doing a ministry. In this article, we want to layout one principle and three action steps to help you stop doing a ministry or program.
Here are some important steps you can take to close the back door.
You’ve got to communicate both because both really matter.
Most churches want to reach people, spread the Gospel, and to grow.
So why is it that new people aren’t showing up to your church like you hope and pray? Here are seven possible reasons.
Here are five culture shifts that might need to happen in your church.
Instead of talking about your programs and ministries, change your approach. Start adding value. Start helping people before you invite them to church or into a conversation. When you shift your approach, here’s what will happen.
What happens for your guests after they leave? The Guest Follow Up Course lays it out for you.
As you make your way through the Leadership System, fill out this Leadership Blueprint to build your church’s custom plan.
As you make your way through the Visitors System, fill out this Visitors Blueprint to build your church’s custom plan to see more Visitors!
This copy can be used as a template for BOTH your selfie video script and your copy within the ad.
In today’s world, talking about masculinity is the least masculine thing a man can do. The topic has become so hostile and combative, it’s turned into another online shouting match. These days, masculinity seems to have very little to do with who a man actually is. It’s about politics and culture, brands and evolution, liberals and conservatives, labels and stereotypes. There are only two sides to take and a long list of ways to try and publicly prove it.
We created the Father’s Day Kit to help churches not only celebrate Father’s Day really well, but use the event as a catalyst to overcome the summer slump.
This copy can be used as a template for BOTH your selfie video script and your copy within the ad.
Use these scripts to communicate emails and texts leading up to Easter.
There are so many options when it comes to building and decorating Mother’s Day photo booths! Here are some of our favorite ideas.
After you create and run your FB ad campaign, use these scripts to respond.
Included are sample in-service evangelism scripts and email scripts.
Use this document to plan out everything that needs to get done leading up to Easter.
Stories aren’t just for children. If you’re a senior pastor or church leader, you need to tell stories to your church all of the time.
Some senior pastors obsess over numbers and trends. Others want to focus on leading and preaching and leave the metrics to someone else. Regardless of your style, if you’re the point leader of your church, you have a responsibility to know how things are going.
Facebook is one of the most useful tools a pastor or church leader can use to connect with people. But you can do so much more than share church announcements.
For pastors who would like to be able to take their families on a nice vacation, save for retirement, or build some financial margin so you could better respond to God when he calls, we humbly offer this list of suggestions.
Do you have an upcoming special event or program? Are you getting ready to launch groups, recruit volunteers, or ask people to give online? Is there something on the calendar where it would be better if more people signed up?
Connection cards are a great idea, but if people don’t turn them in, the whole process won’t work. Here are two ways you could get more people to turn in those connection cards.
There are high-capacity leaders sitting in most congregations in the US that are bored and unchallenged. Most pastors, if they would dare risk it, could charge these men and women with tall tasks for the kingdom and these leaders could probably tackle the tasks better and more efficiently than the pastor could.
Here are four things you should clarify for every single volunteer who serves at your church.
Small churches, large churches, and mega-churches have this in common: They all need to involve more volunteers and leaders. Here’s one practical idea.
We’re often asked for book recommendations, so here is a list of some of our favorites.
Carey Nieuwhof gives 7 questions church leaders should ask this year.
So much effort goes into planning Christmas. But, when the Christmas services are finished, what happens next? Here are three suggestions.
We believe that this year can be the best Easter yet! All you have to do is
take the next step. Get free access to all the accompanying resources at churchfuel.com/easter.
It’s the month before Easter and you work at a church. What should you do during this time to prepare for the upcoming Easter weekend?
If you knew you could easily double your church’s regular attendance on Easter by following a preset framework, would you follow it? That’s the vision behind creating this GROW Easter Ads Lab. By following the strategies and framework offered in the Lab, you’ll have a step-by-step plan to create an amazing Easter service, with the goal of doubling or even tripling your church attendance on Easter.
How to Activate Free Google Ads (Google Ad Grant): If you follow these steps, you’ll unlock $10,000/month in free ad money for your church every month.
Molly offers her best suggestions to write effective Google Ads. Of course, every church and community is different – so don’t just copy/paste my ideas. Figure out what works best in your unique context!
Do you feel a tension between your online worship service and physical worship service? Those watching online can feel it, too. Is it awkward to try and engage your church’s online audience in what the physical audience is doing? Those watching from home can feel that awkwardness, too. They feel like outsiders. We must think about how to create a BOTH/AND scenario as we have in person and virtual services. That is why we’ve partnered with Jason Moore, who is known for his pioneering work in collaborative worship design and guest readiness and has devoted over twenty years to resource development, training, coaching, and consulting for local churches of all sizes, styles, and means.
These pre-written emails are all-new, relevant to the current coronavirus circumstance, and can help you communicate with clarity, care, and concern.
The Annual Calendar is an “at-a-glance” look at all the important things happening in your church. Use it to plan at the high level, then come back and assign specific dates.
23 professionally created documents, spreadsheets, flowcharts or templates to help you organize and streamline church operations.
This is an archive course. You Want To Reach Your City, We Can Help.
This is an archive course. Getting the crucial elements of your marketing system ready to go.
When you’re trying to create a culture of invitation, honor the inviter. Just as you get a sticker for giving blood or voting, use this template to create stickers to celebrate those who invited people to your church.
Don’t let your limiting beliefs keep you from your God-given dream!
1. Click here to access the course on How to Apply for the Google Grant.
2. Due to the amount of work and time involved, we no longer recommend churches manage their Google Grant by themselves unless you have a highly trained volunteer willing to devote 5 hours a week to managing your account. Set up your Grow Strategy Call here to visit with our team about managing your account for you.
3. Here are resources you can use to train your volunteers.
4. Here is access to our archive course.
Connect with people in your community through nonprofit advertising. Run text ads on Google Search results with $10,000 of in-kind advertising every month. This course will walk you through applying for the Google Grant, setting up your main ad campaigns, and maintaining your account for performance and compliance.
Everything you need to run Ads and set up Plan Your Visit at your church!
An online conference 100% focused on helping your church get more visitors each week.
On average people get 147 emails a day. You must learn how to cut through the noise and deliver emails people will actually read.
Branding is about developing a unique, consistent, and compelling story. Great marketing starts with establishing your brand.
A financial recovery plan resource with a weekly offering devotional, weekly congregational email, weekly generosity coaching, and a weekly social media plan.
Now, here are some resources to help you streamline your church… Just click the links to download to your computer. Some of them are Microsoft files, some are PDF, and some are ZIP files (which don’t open on all devices). All of them will help you lead at a higher level.
Most lead pastors don’t have formal education on marketing – nor did they get into ministry to learn about marketing. So we partnered with the Church Fuel team to create a Church Marketing Crash Course For Lead Pastors. These are the absolute essentials that lead pastors need to know in order to lead their teams effectively. The bottom section builds on this foundation and helps lead pastors navigate the common pitfalls in this area.
Setting up your church’s review system. Developing a culture of reviews. Dealing with negative reviews.
Great photography of your people will make a big difference for almost every other aspect of your church’s marketing.
Your church’s page posts are reaching fewer people while groups are getting a boost. This course will show you how to build a powerful social community!
Get a jump start on your church outreach with this Church Marketing Bootcamp! Learn the important cultural changes affecting churches and how to get started reaching people in new ways.
Our signature course and your starting point. Implement this course and you will have an incredible marketing system for years to come! This is the 2020 archive version.
We’re not lawyers and this isn’t legal advice. (Consult your legal counsel.) This is how we process this clause with the churches we serve.
How do I get 501(c)(3) status for my church? If you’re a church planter or church leader asking yourself that question, this guide is the place for you!
The Church Growth Summit session replays give you the opportunity to learn from top church leaders focusing on practical ideas to grow your church attendance, giving, team, influence, community, groups, volunteers, vision, and moving the gospel forward.
Websites that are optimized for search engines will get more visitors. That means more people that will potentially visit your church! And, we partnered with SEO expert Tyler Rominger of Ministry Designs to give you brand new content in addition to the legacy modules we’ve already created.
Incorporating testimonies into your regular social media and overall communication strategy help people see what God is doing, invite them into that work, and encourage them to encounter God in their own lives. This guide will provide you a few resources and ideas how to collect those testimonies.
Use these texts and emails to follow up with your guests!
A lot of churches say they are welcoming to guests, but only a few truly go out of their way to help guests feel welcome. If you want to be intentional about helping guests feel welcome, you’ve got to be intentional.
Most churches need more leaders. And most churches say they have tried everything — from preaching to asking to begging, not to mention trying all the ideas from the last online summit you attended. If nothing seems to be working, this is for you. (Fair warning though…you’re not going to like all the suggestions.) But here are four things you can do when you don’t have enough leaders.
A while ago, Facebook held a Community Boost Tour, a campaign with stops in thirty cities, centered around training and empowering local nonprofits and small businesses to harness all that the social media giant has to offer. Here are some highlights to recap the lessons and provide some thoughts on how everything discussed translates to church marketers – even today after so many years have passed.
Videos in this guide focus on three primary categories: leading yourself, leading others, and leading projects.
Ranking on the first page of Google doesn’t have to be complicated! In this article, you’ll learn 4 easy tips to improve your church’s SEO.
Teach your church to evangelize this Easter using these 4 easy steps!
In one place- our BEST tactics for growing your church starting from scratch
Here are some practical tips to help you grow your church.
Want to reach more people and grow your church? We surveyed over 2,000 churches of all sizes, backgrounds, denominations, and locations to find out what they were doing and how successful it was (or was not).
There are some strategies that you can implement to help them address feeling overwhelmed and reduce the likelihood of it recurring.
Lessons from a Lead Pastor’s Perspective on Social Media and Church Growth
Wondering how church works in the metaverse- or if it’s really even “church”? This guide will help you explore the possibilities!
How do you create social media posts that help your church grow? You need a plan that works! In this article, we’ll outline strategies we use to create our Daily Social Media Guides, and help you create a process that works for your church!