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The Systems & Frameworks Course

The Follow-Up Course provides you with the tools and templates you need to follow up effectively. If you’re tired of people falling through the cracks in your church, this insanely practical course will help you create, improve, and launch effective follow-up processes to get guests, givers, and new believers connected in your church.

Introduction

Lesson 1: The Guest Follow Up Framework

We thought long and hard about where you should start and we think it’s here.
Guests are going to visit your church this year.  It’s important to be ready for them, and it’s important to know what happens next.  The Bible says we should show hospitality to all people.
That’s why, “We’re glad you’re here,” has to be much more than something we say on Sunday.
 
Start with a Great First Impression
 
While you have many opportunities to make a positive first impression on guests, there are four that really stand out.
  1. Website.  The goal with your website is to set expectations.  People have said the sermon begins in the parking lot. Well, today, the sermon begins on your website.  How guest-friendly is your website?  If you really want to know, ask someone who doesn’t go to your church to visit your site and answer questions.  You can hire someone to do this for just $5 here at this site.
  2. First Impressions.  The goal of your first impressions team is to say hello.  Placing friendly people at strategic places and teaching them how to make eye contact, recognize new people and say hello can make a huge difference.
  3. Church Service.  Imagine visiting a Buddhist temple for the first time.  Would you be confused about what to say or where to stand?  It might not be quite that dramatic, but new people in a church service can still feel a little uncomfortable.  That’s why you need to explain everything.  Do everything with guests in mind.
  4. Follow Up.  How you follow up with someone says a lot about how much you value them and want to help them. That’s why putting a good follow up process in place is one of the most loving and pastoral things you can do for new people.

We’re dividing up the training into three separate videos.  We’re going to talk about what to do BEFORE the service, DURING the service, and AFTER the service.  It’s all a part of the follow up system
 
The first video is going to help you BEFORE the service. Watch it below.

Part 1: Before the Service

Part 2: During the Service

Part 3: After the Service

The Best Next Step
You get to design this process and it’s up to you to make sure it’s effective. In the video, we talked about leading people to one clear and simple next step.
  • It might be something like The Growth Track like Church of the Highlands.
  • It might be a monthly orientation or newcomers event at the church or at the home of the pastor.
  • Or it might be a series of online videos.
No matter what you choose, make sure you communicate with clarity and measure for effectiveness.

Lesson 2: The Volunteer Framework

In the first module, we talked about creating an intentional guest follow up system to help people take the best next step.
A great volunteer system has three parts:  Recruit, Train and Pastor.  Very few churches are good at all three parts of the system, so no matter where you are, there are some important things to work on this month.
PA System to Recruit
 
First, you need a system to recruit new volunteers.  You and your staff will never be able to do all of the ministry that needs to be done.  This video will help you put a plan in place to recruit the volunteers you need.  Watch now.

Part 1: Recruit Volunteers

A System to Train
Getting new volunteers is one thing, but making sure they know what to do is something else entirely.  That’s why you need a system to train them, preferably one that doesn’t involve a bunch of poorly attended training meetings.  Watch the video below.

Part 2: Train Volunteers

If there was a secret weapon in preventing volunteer burnout, creating a healthy culture where volunteers WANT to serve, and always having the right people in place, this is it.  Watch now.

Part 3: Pastor Volunteers

Lesson 3: The Stewardship Framework

This module is all about giving. Stewardship is a huge topic so we broke it into two parts.
Part 1 – Raising Money.  Here’s where we will talk about preaching, communicating, strategies and tactics.
Part 2 – Managing Money.  This is about budgeting, stewardship and making wise decisions.
Schedule some time with your finance or stewardship team to watch the videos together. 

Part 1: Raising Money

Part 2: Managing Money

Lesson 4: Assimilation Framework

“We need to close the back door.”

Can I get a witness?  Yes, in the back, I see that hand.

Getting people connected to the life of the church is a huge part of church health and church growth.  It’s great to be able to get people to visit church, but it’s also important to get them connected.

In this module, we’re going to talk about the two best ways to get people connected into the life of the church.

Watch now.
 

Part 1: Close the Back Door

Your Homework

There are a lot of things you can do to take action, but one of the most helpful things is to define what it means to be connected at your church.

If you’re going to focus on getting people connected, start by defining it.  Ask yourself, “What do you really want people to do.”  At our church, we came up with The Big Three.  We wanted people to…
  1. Get in a group
  2. Serve on a team
  3. Give money to the ministry.
There were other important things but these were our big three.  We decided if someone was doing two of the three, they were connected.

You don’t have to define it this way, but you do need to define it.  So pull some people together and ask this question…

What does it mean to be connected at our church?

Lesson 5: The Leadership Framework

Whether you’re talking about your staff, your volunteers or yourself, leadership development is never going to happen by accident.  Nobody is going to come and ask you to work on your leadership; they aren’t going to ask you to make time on your calendar to think.

But leadership raises the level of everything in your church. Even if it doesn’t feel urgent, it’s incredibly important.  That’s why we’re going to help you create leadership systems throughout all levels of your church.

This module will help you lead your staff – from full timers to part timers to volunteer staff.  We’ll get into developing lay leaders to run various ministries and programs.  And we’ll talk about how to create a plan to lead the hardest person of all…yourself.
Let’s start by talking about your team.

Part 1: Leading Your Staff

Leading your team is critical to healthy growth in your church.  But you also need to develop leaders throughout your church. You need a leadership pipeline and a culture of leadership, but in this next video, we’ll help you just get started.

Part 2: Developing Leaders in the Church

The third part of a good leadership development system is meetings.  Here’s a video that unpacks a meeting system that could work really well in your church.

Part 3: Leading Meetings

Lesson 6: The Communications Framework

There’s a secret weapon when it comes to organizing your church.

It’s not fancy and it requires no numbers. This particular tool has been around for thousands of years and it has helped countless numbers of people, families, and organizations. The solution I’m going to propose in this module might sound like a passionate sermon that ends with a challenge for people to read the Bible. Everybody knows that, but few people do it.

I’m talking about a calendar.

Hunters used calendars to know when wild game would migrate south. Farmers used them to know when to plant their corn. The ancient Jews used them to mark the date of Pentecost or celebrate the beginning of the year of Jubilee.

Without calendars, we wouldn’t know when the football season starts, when to set our clocks forward an hour, or when to blow up millions of dollars of fireworks on the 4th of July.

A simple calendar is one of the most powerful tools you can use to organize your church.
I’m going to talk about four different calendars your church should have, but I’ll begin with the most important one, which I simply call an annual calendar.

An annual calendar isn’t a calendar for this year…it’s a calendar for every year. It’s an at-a-glance overview of your entire year. And it’s one of the most important things you can create for your church.
  • What happens in your church in January…every January?
  • What do you do in the summer…every summer? ?
  • How do you kick off the fall…every fall? ?
  • What do you do during the Christmas season…every Christmas season?
It’s even more important to plan the ordinary.
When it comes to planning and creating calendars, the more ordinary the ministry the more important it is to plan properly. In the church world, the regular programs and ministries often get pushed off the plate because of special events. These “now” events take us away from the everyday ministries.

Think back to your last few weeks. How much time did you spend planning or working on something out of the ordinary compared to your regular programs and ministries? It’s tough to plan the normal stuff because we feel like we’ve got a handle on it all. But in reality, the regular stuff needs focus.

I’m convinced planning will solve (or at least dramatically help) most problems in the church. You may want to get people into small groups, but what’s your plan and when are you emphasizing it? You may want to get better when it comes to stewardship, but when? are you planning to talk about money? Carving out time on your annual calendar for these ordinary things is one of the biggest keys to success.

Now, once you have a good calendar, how do you communicate it?  How do you let people in the church know what’s going on?  That’s what we’re going to talk about in this video.

Part 1: Within the Church

There’s a second part to church communications…communicating with those outside of the church. That’s what we’ll talk about in this second video. 

Part 2: Outside the Church

Lesson 7: The Preaching Framework

Part 1: Foundation

Part 2: Frame

Part 3: Finish

Part 4: Furnish

You’ve reached the end of the Systems Course, but your content is yours forever.  Come back to any section and share with others in your church.  To say thanks, here’s a free PDF of my book STREAMLINE: How to Create Healthy Systems.  If you want to order multiple copies of the paperback to discuss with your team, you can do that here.

You’ll read some of the ideas we’ve covered here in the course, but there’s lots of new stuff too.

All Resources