Chapter 1: Why Trust This Guide?

Barnett and his wife had joined several other couples in starting their small Sunday worship service at the community center months ago. Things had gone well. The retired minister who joined them gave brief homilies that encouraged the couples, who enjoyed singing and praying with one another. When a few more couples joined them, the group discussed starting a formal church. But none of them knew what steps to take to do so. They agreed that they felt God’s call to move forward with forming a church. What they needed, though, was a clear guide, a roadmap really, for how to do so.

Guidance

It’s alright to seek guidance. Many counselors make for wise decisions. Even Moses had his father-in-law Jethro as a leadership guide. And if God can speak through a donkey, as he did to the prophet Balaam, then he can also speak through humans with experience, insight, and skill. Church leaders shouldn’t feel as if they must do everything alone. Just the opposite: the church is the body of Christ, with its many members all having their roles. Christ is the head, and the church is his bride. We do not lead, staff, or serve churches alone but within a body of believers with Christ at the head. Pastors gather to learn from one another. Elders gather to learn from one another, too. We all discern through prayer, deliberation, and consultation, under the authority of the word of God. How to operate your church need not come solely in the form of a lightning bolt and thunder from on high. You might discern God’s word for your church in the whisper or warning of a humble counselor. Seek guidance, and test it against the word of God.

Authority

Corporate bodies of all kinds operate under authority. For-profit corporations follow the law of their state of incorporation, under the governance of their boards, held to account to their shareholders or members. Churches likewise operate under authority, although they do so under the supreme authority of a holy God. Yet God doesn’t generally join a church elder board meeting, to issue edicts on the structure of the worship liturgy, the distribution of the church budget, or the style of the church’s songs. Churches discern God’s desire for their governance, operation, worship, and ministry through his appointed pastors and elders, his holy word, the movement of his Spirit, and the providential creation within which he sets his churches. We submit to God’s authority. We also respect the prophets, seers, and guides through whom he speaks. Pray that your church’s leaders discern and carry out his desire. Don’t depart from the word and authority of God. Instead, let wise counselors share what they discern of that word and authority, even as you also do so yourself.

Mirror

Another reason to read this guide is for your reflection. We all need to hear counsel from one another lest that counsel point to the word and desire of God. But you also need to listen within yourself or, better said, to listen to God’s reason and Spirit within you. You need a mirror against which to judge and discern how God is moving and shaping your own thoughts. By addressing church issues start to finish, one after another, this guide gives you that mirror. As you read here about your church’s issues, you may discern what God’s Spirit is saying to you, in the reflective manner you need to hear God’s word to know what you should do and not do. Each chapter thus ends with a paragraph encouraging your reflection.

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Chapter 2: What Is a Church?

Communion always reminded Kari what church really was. The closeness, even intimacy, of communion reminded Kari that the fellowship in her church was more than a society, more than like-minded people gathering to affirm their values and commitments. When the music played quietly, and people started forming circles to pass the given body and poured-out blood of Jesus for each participant to imbibe, Kari always recalled that her church was the body of Christ. Her church was the bride of Christ, a gorgeous entity of which she was a part. Kari liked being a member of the body with Christ at the head. She needed only to do her humble part.

Definition

A church is indeed the body of Christ, more than a membership organization, more than a club, more than a society of like-minded individuals committing to a cause or set of beliefs. A church still has doctrine and beliefs to which members publicly commit. A church is still an organization with a legal form the state recognizes, similar to the corporate form that a charity or golf club adopts. A church still has finances, a budget, and in many cases a building and paid staff, like other organizations. A church also has a mission and may have bylaws and policies to guide its members and staff in carrying out its mission. Yet a church will always be something greater than those worldly particulars common to other organizations. A church will always be not of this world but of the realm beyond, an extension in this world of the body of Christ. Keep that divine perspective in mind in all you do in, around, and for your church, and you will have treated your church with the distinction its Lord deserves.

Body

That the church is the body of Christ means something. Christians would naturally say that it means everything that we could reunite and participate with God as the body of Christ. And indeed, the church as the body of Christ does mean everything in that awesome, otherworldly sense. Yet when thinking about how to understand, lead, serve, and otherwise participate in your church, the church as the body of Christ means several related things. First, it means that every participant in the church also participates with Christ. The proximity of its members to Christ, their intimacy with Christ, holds the church together. Members of the body do not qualify by their education or service, nor by their heritage. They qualify by rebirth in Christ, born of the Spirit, not of the flesh, and by the Spirit in the body of Christ. To be a member of a church is thus to live in Christ. We do not say the same thing about any other organization. In that sense, the church isn’t an organization but an organ or organism, the body of Christ. Pray that your church’s members would come together as Christ’s body.

Unity

Being a member of the body of Christ also means unity in that body. A body doesn’t function in opposition to itself. A body is an integrated organism, with all parts functioning interdependently, one part relying on the other parts, while other parts rely on the one part. All parts of a body must relate to one another in unity. Each part must honor the other parts. While some parts may be more visible and prominent than other parts, even the prominent parts depend on the low, humble, and less visible parts. No part can raise itself up against another part for long, without transgressing the body. All parts must serve one another because they are all parts of a body, each with their own role and function. Pray that your church would retain its unity in Christ.

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Chapter 3: Why Start a Church?

For years, Angie’s Bible study with a few other friends had been a blast. Rotating among their homes to make it easy on everyone, they always had fun, and Angie always felt like she came away with an inspiration. But recently, things had turned serious. Several others had left their church over serious disagreements with its direction. And Angie and her friends were discovering in their Bible study that they, too, fundamentally disagreed with their church’s direction based on their scripture study. None of them wanted to talk about it, but it seemed like they couldn’t help but talk. The discouraging thing was that they knew they had nowhere else to go. But then one evening, to everyone’s surprise, they began discussing whether maybe they should start a new church.

Beginnings

Churches, big and little, have beginnings. They begin in several different ways, for several or even many different reasons. But they all have a beginning in some event or series of events, under some founder or group of founding members. And the beginnings can be quite important. A church’s beginning can continue to set the church’s tone, mission, and direction for years, even for decades. The plan or cause for the church’s founding, the vision and character of the founders, and their tradition or denomination can all give the church its liturgy, doctrine, culture, and identity into the future indefinitely, perhaps for as long as the church survives. The church’s members may forget their history, but the patterns the founders established may still live on. And the beginning that a church’s founders give a church may well determine whether the church survives and grows at all. As many as three quarters of new churches survive for ten years, but few grow much beyond their initial size. Make a good beginning, in the right way and for the right reasons, and your church may not only survive but also thrive. 

Reasons

To start a church properly, have the right reasons. God considers your motives, whether in your prayer or actions. Starting a church might in the abstract look like always a good thing. But starting a church primarily to avoid tax on income or real estate, or to profit from manipulating the poor, likely won’t draw God’s favor. Starting a church out of pride or for power won’t provide a solid foundation for the church to grow. Much of what we do has mixed motives. When starting a church, ensure that your motives are pure. Ask what God would honor. For example, starting a church where none exist might bring a witness to a spiritual desert or give a church home to the isolated. Starting a church around a soup kitchen might give those whom the ministry feeds a spiritual meal, too. Starting a church in a community where all the churches are full, are of the same tradition, don’t encourage new believers, or don’t welcome seekers might open new doors to the kingdom. Pray that God would reveal your true intentions, purify your heart, and equip you with the right motives. Start a new church for spiritual growth and guidance, a new community of believers, gospel outreach, and loving service. 

Assessment

The prior paragraph suggests that assessing the community in which you desire to start a church might be a good idea. If starting a church is something you feel that God placed on your heart, you might not need any other reason. You might not need to know the church landscape in your area or know the reasons to start or not start a church. Yet the natural heart is deceptive beyond cure. Christ himself warns that when going to war or building castles we should first count the cost. Learn the church terrain before you start. If your area already has abundant, vibrant churches seeking new members, while welcoming all with rich worship, outreach, care, and teaching ministries, then you might be starting in the wrong location. If you’re new to the area, ask others who know the local church community to share their insights. Whether they encourage or discourage you, you might learn something key to why, what, and how you should start a church.

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Chapter 4: How Do We Start a Church?

Well, they’d done it. Ken and his friends had announced their decision to start a new church. “Announce,” though, was probably a little dramatic. They’d decided to start a church and agreed to let their friends and acquaintances know of their decision. Whether anyone actually learned or cared was another matter. But as soon as they’d made the decision to start a church, Ken and his friends faced another question: what was next? Ken realized that they really didn’t know how to start a church.

Deciding

Deciding to start a church is one thing, while actually starting a church is another thing. A first step to starting a new church is indeed gaining a consensus decision to do so. Better if everyone agrees with the decision. Unanimity among your key contributors would be best. Even one holdout can reduce the commitment level, when starting a new church requires plenty of commitment. Follow a deliberative process. Hold meetings. Share in advance the purpose of the meeting to consider whether to start a new church. Let your candidate leaders and supporters prepare, pray, study, and research. Meet, discuss, and then adjourn for more prayer, study, and research before meeting again. Several meetings over a relatively extended time are generally wise, until clarity and consensus emerge. Then formalize the decision. Call a vote or make an equivalent call for final affirmation or dissent. Be sure of who’s on board and who’s not on board, and proceed only when you have a strong and clear consensus. Prayer, and God’s answer to prayer as the participants discern and share it, is the key ingredient to a sound decision.

Organization

As soon as you decide to start a church, the form of your organization as a church becomes an important question. Who, really, has decided to start the church? A few individuals? A group of friends and acquaintances? If so, then what is their status or membership as a group? Your organization form answers those questions. A solid first step after deciding, either yourself, within your leadership group, or as a body of believers, to start a church is to form the organization in a manner that federal and state authorities will recognize. For millennia, church bodies have formed simply by believers gathering regularly. Yet modern society and the state have ways that they recognize groups or associations of individuals who have agreed together to carry out a common corporate purpose. And the state expressly extends those corporate forms to churches, along with certain advantages. 

Incorporation

In short, a good first step to start your church, after clearly and firmly deciding to do so, is to incorporate it under the laws of your state. Incorporation involves completing a state articles of incorporation form, likely available online from your state’s corporations bureau. See the example form in the appendix at the back of this guide. You, as the incorporator, sign the completed form and file it with the state along with the modest filing fee. After reviewing the form for sufficiency, the state then recognizes your church as incorporated by assigning it a corporate identification number, file-stamping the articles of incorporation, and returning the articles to you while also making them available online for public inspection. If you have other founders of your new church, they may join you as incorporators, although they need not do so. The office of incorporator is largely a formality, effectively relieved and completed once the church has its first board. 

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Chapter 5: How Do We Govern Our Church?

Jen loved being on her church board. She hadn’t expected her nomination to the board. Jen generally kept her opinions to herself whenever at church. Church was a sacred place to Jen, not like other organizations of which she had been a part. She just liked being there to worship, pray, and care for the members, while sensing the presence of her Lord. Yet once Jen joined the board, she learned more of why the current board members had sought her board participation. They, too, were generally the quiet sorts who just cared deeply for the church and the desires of their Lord. Indeed, it was through their quiet and poised spirits that they discerned the Lord’s will.

Governance

Governance is important to a church. See how often, or how continuously, the scriptures address governance, in the Old Testament over Israel and in the New Testament over the church. To govern doesn’t mean to preach and teach. It also doesn’t mean to manage or administer. To govern means to guide the affairs of the church, not to carry them out but to oversee them, setting their course or direction for all to follow. Governance decides the big issues. In a church, those big issues would certainly include whether to start a church, if so what membership or directorship form it should take, whether it should associate with a denomination, and where it should locate its ministry including whether to lease, purchase, or build a facility. Governance would also include whom to hire as pastor and what form the church’s budget should take, based on the pastor’s recommendation. Governance might also include whether to plant another church, open a satellite campus, and fund and send missionaries. It might also include whether someday to close the church. The big stuff.

Boards

Churches govern through an elected board. As the prior chapter briefly references, under state nonprofit corporation laws the church’s incorporator selects the initial board, as the incorporator’s last act. The board then governs the church. The first act of governance is for the board to adopt bylaws. The bylaws will state the qualifications of board members, their terms, and their manner of election. In a membership corporation, the church’s members, also defined in the bylaws, elect the board. In a directorship corporation, the board elects directors, meaning that directors elect directors. State nonprofit corporation acts tend to call board members directors or sometimes trustees because directors govern in trust for the corporate purpose. Churches may call their directors anything they wish consistent with the tradition of which they are a part, such as elders, deacons, or council members. Elders is a common designation, with deacons serving subordinate practical roles such as preparing and serving communion or seating members at worship services. Choose the nomenclature you wish. But in the eyes of the law and public, your church’s governing board members are still directors. See the example bylaws in the appendix at the back of this guide. 

Number

The bylaws that the first board of directors adopts state the number of directors. Typically, the bylaws provide for a range such as a board of from seven to eleven directors or a board of from five to nine directors. A range gives the board some leeway to add more directors as the church grows or during an intensive period of church activity such as a building campaign. Directors may also resign, or the board may find few strong candidates in an election cycle, giving the board some leeway to have fewer directors for a time. More directors on your board generally means more experience, wisdom, and insight but less consensus. Large boards may also be harder to convene for meetings and harder to manage through efficient meetings. Choose directors wisely, and choose the number of directors wisely. Your board can always change the bylaws later to adjust the number of directors.

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Chapter 6: How Do Churches Operate?

As a business leader in the community, Dan thought his knowledge, skills, and experience could help his church be more orderly and efficient. That was why he accepted nomination to his church’s governing board. But at his first board meeting, Dan could see that churches operated differently than businesses. At least, the pastor was clearly in no position to order folks around. Still, Dan saw some similarities between what he learned about the church’s operation and how he knew that businesses operated best. He only hoped that he could be of some help to the church, even as he learned how distinctly churches operated. He surely had another good subject for prayer.

Operation

Churches are not businesses. They are instead the body of Christ, a spiritual community with one foot on earth and the other foot in heaven. In that sense, churches don’t exactly operate, at least not like a manufacturing plant or retail store. A church may be more like a divine entity in which to participate than an assembly line to organize. As orderly and efficient as a church’s board may wish the church to operate, to maintain a safe facility and manage a budget responsibly, efficiency is not a spiritual goal. Still, churches have facilities to maintain and ministries to manage. After all, wise and prudent stewardship of resources is a biblical principle. Waste and inefficiency generally have no place in ministry. To the extent that churches can operate in orderly and well-managed ways, while carrying out their spiritual mission, they generally should do so. And to some extent, members, donors, local safety officials, and even tax authorities may hold a church responsible for orderly operations justified by the church’s religious corporate purpose. Here are a few ways they do so.

Bylaws

In the view of state and IRS officials, the bylaws of a church determine how the church must operate. The IRS, for instance, examines a church’s bylaws to confirm that the bylaws restrict church operations to the church’s religious and charitable purpose, before confirming that the church is exempt from federal income tax. The bylaws will also generally authorize the church to own property, enter into contracts, open accounts, accept gifts, keep books and records, borrow money, retain employees, and conduct other financial, legal, administrative, and ministerial affairs, through its staff members under the governance of its board. See the example bylaws in the appendix at the back of this guide. Have your church board adopt bylaws that grant appropriate powers to the church and its staff members to conduct the church’s civil affairs, to operate the church in an orderly, safe, secure, and efficient manner. 

Leadership

Sound church leadership is important to a church’s sound operation. The prior chapter on church governance shows the relationship of the church board to the church’s senior pastor, operations director, or other paid executive staff member who leads the church’s operations. Some pastors are gifted administrative leaders, while others are not. Churches with a preaching pastor lacking administrative gifts may rely on a lay operations director or on an administrative pastor to lead the church staff and direct church operations. The church’s executive leader may recruit, hire, and supervise staff members to conduct adult, youth, and children’s ministries, Sunday School and other teaching and group programs, a worship director, and directors over communications, finances, facilities, and other programs and ministries. A church of appreciable size with a staff of five, ten, or more members, some or all of whom may be supporting many church members and guiding multiple volunteers, should generally have an organization chart showing the responsibilities and supervisor/subordinate relationship of each staff member. 

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Chapter 7: How Can We Manage Finances?

Burt was confident about everything in his new role as his church’s operations director, except for church finances. Fortunately, the church had a part-time bookkeeper who came in two days a week to handle most of it. She did the picky stuff like deposits, payments, payroll, and accounting. Burt only had to manage the budget. He had to keep everything on track, making adjustments as church collections went up and down, and responding to member inquiries. Still, finances weren’t his favorite thing. Indeed, just the opposite: Burt silently groaned every time he turned his attention to them. He wondered how long that would last.

Controls

Sound management of your church’s finances is critical to your church’s success. Financial management begins with a strong governance structure. In a church of any significant size, the church’s governing board should be approving an annual budget developed by the church’s executive team and supported by a volunteer finance team. The church’s executive team and ministry leaders should then stick to the budget through the year, using the budget to guide their expenditures. The church should also have bookkeeping controls for things like bank reconciliation. Governance and controls require specific policies and procedures. Having a budget does no good if no one refers and adheres to it. Even in a small church, the governing board should be approving and monitoring the budget.

Procedures

Strong governance and controls, though, are not enough. Financial procedures are also important. Sound financial management should include specific, detailed procedures on both income and expenditures. On the income side, churches benefit from clear procedures on handling collections and online giving, accepting designated funds while treating them properly, pursuing a capital campaign, building an endowment, and accepting donations of stock, vehicles, or other items. On the expenditure side, procedures should exist for authorizing expenditures, making purchases, paying denominational shares, managing payroll, and reimbursing staff members and volunteers. Financial management through sound policies, procedures, and controls is not the favorite activity of many staff members, church members, and volunteers. But sound financial management blesses the church. Consider the following financial policies and procedures. Refer to the book Church Policies & Procedures: Common-Sense Guides for Administering Churches in a Complex World for example financial policies. 

Oversight

Your church does well to have regular financial oversight by a finance committee or team of church members with financial expertise. Having an accountant on your church’s finance team can provide the church with consistent expert oversight. Bankers, bookkeepers, business owners, homemakers who manage their household budgets, and others with financial expertise can also contribute substantial budget insight. The church’s pastor or operations director and bookkeeper should present monthly or quarterly reports to the finance team for the team’s review, comment, and approval. Having one of the church’s board members on the finance team can ensure that the board remains well informed. The finance team can help the pastor or operations director, as advised by ministry leaders, develop a mission-driven annual budget for the board and congregation to approve. The finance team can also help develop and refine procedures to receive, account for, and disburse church funds. The finance team may also review insurance, financing, debt, cash reserves, and funds for capital improvements. Promoting planned giving, overseeing foundation funds, and ensuring proper computer-system controls and retention of church financial records may be other finance team roles.

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Chapter 8: How Are Churches Taxed?

Pauline had kept the books and done payroll for her husband’s business for years, long enough to be fully familiar and confident with it. With their kids out of the house and more time on her hands, Pauline had been glad to accept her church’s offer of its part-time bookkeeping position. In her orientation from the church’s departing bookkeeper, Pauline quickly discovered that the church’s bookkeeping hardly varied from her husband’s for-profit business, except for the corporate income taxes and local property taxes. Pauline took a little while to get used to the differences, but overall, the church bookkeeping was only slightly less complicated. One thing was sure: the church still had taxes to pay.

Policy

The American people and their nation and states have long respected the independence and ministries of churches. The Constitution’s First Amendment further assures that the government must not interfere with the free exercise of religion. Congress has carried that assurance and respect forward into federal laws relieving churches of income tax obligations borne by other organizations. States have done likewise through their constitutions and state laws, while also often relieving churches of property and sales tax obligations. Other ordinary tax obligations remain, such as to pay employment taxes when compensating church staff and taxes on utilities, fuel, and other goods and services in the same manner that businesses and individuals pay those taxes. Churches thus face a complex tax landscape that their administrators must navigate with care, to take lawful advantage of tax relief while paying all due taxes. Ensure that your church knows the tax landscape.

Grounds

Understanding why governments relieve churches of some taxes can help you ensure what taxes to pay and not to pay. The point of tax relief is twofold. First, the government must not interfere with or unduly burden the free exercise of religion. Taxes can interfere and burden. Taxpayers generally do less of whatever the government taxes. Thus, fundamentally, the government should not tax a church on its income from member and guest donations because the tax would reduce donations, burdening and interfering with the free exercise of religion. The second reason the government has for relieving churches from certain tax obligations is that churches provide charitable service of the sort that the government might have to otherwise provide. Tax a church that operates soup kitchens, homeless shelters, job training, transportation services, counseling services, and other ministries for the disadvantaged, and you’ll get less of those services, removing a safety net that the government may then have to provide. Keep those grounds for relief in mind when seeking due relief for your church under the tax laws.

Exemption

The way in which the IRS and state and local tax authorities relieve churches from paying certain taxes is through exemption provisions. Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3) is the primary exemption provision. Section 501(c)(3) relieves churches and other charitable and religious organizations from federal income taxes when “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes,” while satisfying other conditions. Qualifying your church as tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) also enables donors to your church to qualify for charitable deductions from their own income taxes. If the IRS recognizes your church as exempt from federal income tax, your state is also likely to exempt your church from state income tax. Most states do so. Your church may also be exempt from local city income taxes, again dependent on the city. Qualifying for tax exemption under Section 501(c)(3) may also assist your church in qualifying for exemption from local property taxes and from paying state sales taxes on purchases, depending on state and local laws. You can see the several advantages from gaining Section 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

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Chapter 9: How Do Churches Gather?

Trudie relished her Sunday mornings at church. Nowhere else did she feel the same sense of completeness, wholeness, and purpose than when she was among the body of believers, raising her hands in praise to the Lord while the congregation around her sang his praises. Trudie often felt that God had made her for worship. And so Trudie was glad that her church’s worship services were as thoughtful and orderly, but also as fresh, joyous, and heartening, as they consistently were. She hoped that nothing would affect her ability to come to her church for worship with the same sense of being in her own right place, exactly where God wanted her.

Worship

The word church derives from a Greek word signifying a gathering or assembly of believers. That’s what church members do: they gather. And church bodies especially gather for worship. The verb to worship means to give the greatest devotion or worth to something. Church members worship the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Christians live for Christ, worshiping him with their whole heart, soul, body, and mind. Facilitating frequent, orderly gatherings of the corporate body of believers to worship, while experiencing the presence of God, is a central role of churches. Some churches do little or nothing more than offer worship services. And for those churches, offering regular worship gatherings may be enough, without other ministries. Ensure that your church’s worship is at the center of all it does, if indeed it does anything other than offer heartening worship services.

Goals

Worship services have goals, whether your church articulates them expressly or not. Articulating your church’s worship goals can help the worship leader and others guide worshipful expression in a reasonably orderly fashion, safe and appropriate for everyone present. Worship services should generally prompt and facilitate open expressions of devotion to God, while ensuring that worshipers respect the order of the service without unduly interrupting preaching, speaking, prayer, or song. Churches typically employ music and congregational recitals to encourage worshipers to join in vocal expressions of devotion. Services also often encourage worshipers to stand when singing or reading scripture together, and permit or encourage worshipers to raise hands or clap in praise and to kneel in prayer. Services may at specific times also encourage approaches to the altar for prayer, kneeling, or hands laid for healing or anointing. These activities all encourage worshipers to participate not just in mind and attention but in voice, body, spirit, and soul. 

Facility

Your church should have worship primarily in mind when leasing, buying, renovating, or constructing its facility. The sanctuary or worship space generally defines a church facility. Sanctuaries can have highly traditional and elaborate designs, with elevated pulpits, secondary lecterns, choir boxes, musician stations, permanent pews, narthexes, and the like, or be spare and simple, with folding chairs set up for the congregation’s seating in a single unadorned room. Churches also often begin with spare worship facilities and gradually grow the membership and accumulate the funds for more-elaborate facilities and furnishings. Well-designed worship spaces can help congregants worship. But expensive and elaborate sanctuaries are not necessary for participatory and celebrative worship. Help your church develop its sanctuary to honor God and reflect your membership’s devotion to him. See additional insight on the two later chapters on church facilities.

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Chapter 10: How Do Churches Minister?

Teresa loved her church, not for any one thing but for all the ministries in which it engaged. And she participated in most of them. During Sunday services, she was in the booth at the back, running the computer program for the slides that showed the song words and followed the pastor’s message. On Mondays, she helped in the care ministry, Tuesdays hosted her small group, Wednesdays attended the women’s study, Thursdays attended service rehearsal, and Fridays helped deliver beds that the church gave to impoverished single mothers. Teresa kept her calendar according to her church’s ministries. She had no idea how she would have lived without them.

Ministries

Ministries are a church’s conduit through which the Spirit moves and energizes the body. Churches thrive on their ministries. Effective ministries, though, require coordinating functions, from supervision to staffing, facilities, budget, and communication. Policies and procedures can help make ministries more successful, connecting them to the church’s mission, ensuring that they serve the right people on the right terms and conditions, and ensuring that they have adequate resources and support. Ministry plans are equally vital. Some activities just happen. When they do, the outcomes can be heartening. But in most instances, successful activities need some degree, and often a substantial degree, of planning.  Ministry leaders who fail to plan as they carry out programs and activities can find themselves short of time, funds, volunteers, facilities, and outcomes. Help your church plan and manage its ministries. Ministries are the Spirit’s lifeblood.

Types

Churches can conduct a surprisingly wide variety of activities. Some are ubiquitous. You’ll see them in nearly every church. Others are common, offered by many churches. Others may be special, fitted to the specific church body or its community. Ministries, though, tend to fall into categories. First are the ministries of gathering and worship, already treated in the prior chapter. Next are the ministries of teaching and discipling. Followers of Christ should know the scriptures and grow in Christ-like character. Churches thus often conduct Sunday School programs, men’s and women’s scripture studies, and children’s and youth’s ministries devoted to education. See a later chapter on teaching ministries. Care ministries and community ministries follow. Help your church develop and administer rich ministries, several of which this chapter describes.  

Staffing

To conduct effective ministries, churches generally need to plan, staff, and budget for them. Ministries require the full support of the church. Your church board should have a role in approving and evaluating ministries. Your church’s pastoral and administrative leadership should be monitoring and assessing ministries, and recommending ministries and their budgets to your church board. Your church’s administration should be helping ministries communicate their activities, events, services, and interest in volunteer participation to the membership and community. Your church’s budget should have an account for each ministry, with a ministry leader responsible for the management of that account. Ministries thus bring together all church governance, leadership, and administrative functions. Ensure that your church is putting its whole body behind its ministries.

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Chapter 11: How Do Churches Staff?

On one hand, Bill rued the days when staff members resigned. As operations director, Bill bore the brunt of the church’s hiring process, from hiring approval, job description, and posting, to candidate review and communications, guiding the interview team, and drafting the retention letter and orienting the new hire. But on the other hand, Bill enjoyed meeting and learning about new candidates, and helping them through the process. He also appreciated orienting new hires to their exciting new ministries and watching them learn, grow, and bring fresh inspiration to the church. Through the church’s staffing, Bill could see that God was in control. 

Staff

Retaining highly qualified staff members may be the most important administrative practice in which your church engages. If your church’s staff members do not have the right skills, attitude, and commitment, then your church is unlikely to succeed in its mission. The Spirit gifts individuals in many different ways. We all have gifts for some roles but not others. The key to an effective church staff is to have the right individuals in the right places with the right skills doing the right things. Accomplishing that objective requires skill not just in recruiting and hiring staff members but also in their consistent supervision, recognition, and reward. Help your church meet its personnel needs, and you’ll have done a very good thing for your church.

Hiring

Effective hiring of staff, whether pastors, ministry leaders, or support staff, is critical to a church’s mission because of the sensitive and central role that staff play in pursuing the church’s mission. Scripture warns not to hire fools or scoundrels. To keep a strong church staff in place, draw for mentoring on past or departing staff members, support and hold accountable the current staff members, and constantly recruit and develop the next staff members. Churches, like other organizations, should constantly project staff needs, identifying potential candidates for leadership, ministry, and administrative positions. Recruiting, training, and rewarding volunteers can prepare a pool of qualified candidates. Following sound hiring practices can broaden the pool of qualified candidates, ensure rigorous candidate reviews, and assure the chosen candidates that church leadership is thoughtful in pursuing its mission. Pay attention to hiring.

Process

Your church’s executive team, including its pastors, operations director, and key ministry leaders, should evaluate the need for new personnel or to replace a departing staff member, including not just staffing needs but also budget implications. Include your church’s personnel and finance teams in the review. Present the recommendation to the church board for approval. Then appoint a search team under the operations director’s guidance. Post the job internally and externally, using general, online job-posting forums, job-posting services within the denomination, local church networks, the church website, and word of mouth within the staff and congregation. Also consider local seminaries, colleges, and trade schools with relevant programs. Help the search team review applications, winnowing them for a first round of interviews. Call back the one leading candidate or few leading candidates for a second interview before recommending the final candidate to the church board for approval. Convey a written offer contingent on reference checks. Orient thoroughly on hire. See additional detail in the following paragraphs.

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Chapter 12: How Can We Support Volunteers?

Bill looked around the church parking lot at all his friends as they busily loaded donated wares into their vehicles for their morning’s delivery. They were on their way to drop the many items off at the home of a young single mother who had fallen on hard times. Bill and his friends made runs like this one most Friday mornings, right after their scripture study. It was Bill’s favorite moment of the week, sharing good works with his friends who were all members of his church and all volunteers, just as Bill was a volunteer. Bill smiled to himself, thinking how they organized and executed this charitable work of the church all without any direct participation by any paid staff member.

Organization

Churches survive and thrive on the contributions of their volunteers. Churches typically have a core of paid staff members as infrastructure to support all church functions, programs, and operations. Depending on the church’s size, that core of paid staff members may include a full-time pastor or two plus a part-time operations director, office manager, bookkeeper, and custodian, and a handful of ministry leaders over children’s, youth, adults, care, outreach, and worship programs. But while the paid staff members hold things together, the volunteers of a church tend to provide the great bulk of the labor necessary to sustain the rich life of the church. Volunteers may form most of the worship team, run the coffee shop, carry out the care ministry, do the outreach, take the mission trips, care for the children, mentor the youth, make the hospital and shut-in visits, prepare and serve communion, greet and seat worship guests, prepare the meal for the memorial service, run the sight and sound booth, seasonally decorate the sanctuary, and do dozens of other small and large things to contribute to the church’s mission. Volunteers are the life of a church.

Distinction

A church is probably already on the decline if its volunteers aren’t manning and even leading the church’s programs. Pastors tend to rely heavily on paid staff members more than on volunteers. To properly focus on sermon preparation, pastoral care, board relations and leadership issues, and member relationships, pastors need to be able to delegate critical operations functions like finances, facility maintenance, and communications to reliable individuals. Paid staff members are reliable. They have regular hours and duties the church pays them to perform. And so, having a paid staff is all well and good. But a church can’t generally afford to pay staff members to do all the labor that a vital church community requires. Indeed, paid work is not the point of a church. Voluntary participation is instead the point. So, while paid staff members can keep the church facility open and running, they do so for the honor of the Lord and benefit of the membership, through the happy labors of volunteers. The willing participation of volunteers is proof of the church’s attraction and vitality. When volunteers dwindle, the church has not only an operational problem but a mission problem. Volunteers are the canary in the coal mine for the life of a church. 

Recruiting

Churches thus often need to recruit volunteers. Indeed, churches generally need to continually invite members to join the volunteer ranks, to keep the church’s ministries running. Whether it’s the children’s ministry, youth ministry, care ministry, greeting team, outreach team, communion team, coffee ministry, or another ministry, ministries can always use another set of helping hands. Frequently, ministries reach the point of overworked and short-staffed volunteers. Continual recruitment can be key to maintaining healthy ministries, where volunteers equitably share the happy burden of the good works. Help your church develop a culture of shared service. Regularly communicate from the pulpit and in announcements and notices that the whole membership benefits from the volunteer work of a few and that all members should contribute what they can, when they can. Regularly identify ministry leaders, while inviting members to reach out to them to share the member’s talents, skills, and interest in serving. Empower and encourage ministry leaders to make recruiting an integral and routine part of their work. Evaluate paid staff members in part on their ability and willingness to recruit supportive and skilled volunteers. For church-wide volunteer recruitment, including in new members’ classes, consider using a volunteer-interest form like the one in this guide’s appendix.

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Chapter 13: How Do Churches Teach?

Deanna peered through the tall windows forming the church classroom’s south wall, watching the solitary car or stroller occasionally pass by. Deanna had arrived early to her women’s scripture study, as was her habit. Indeed, she’d already made the coffee, pushed the tables and chairs around into the women’s preferred order, and laid out the Bibles on the tables for the few women who would not bring their own. Deanna always came early because she loved to linger around these times, stretching them out for as long as she could. Deanna loved nothing more than immersing herself in God’s word. She always had, nearly from the time she could first read.

Teaching

A rich teaching ministry can be a church’s heart and soul. If a church isn’t teaching, it’s not doing its job of discipling souls. Read the scriptures: they repeatedly emphasize teaching’s central role. How does one fulfill Christ’s Great Commission but to make disciples through scripture immersion, richly sharing, teaching, and receiving God’s word? The Christian army proceeds not with swords and guns but with baptisms and Bibles. And the Bibles are not to adorn the shelf and impress guests. They’re instead for reading and study, for pouring over and soaking up until God’s word lives in one’s mouth, spirit, body, and bones. For a Christian to live well and righteously, the scriptures need to guide every word, act, and step. Better still, every impulse and thought. The way that a church can most assuredly carry out its core mission of making disciples of Christ is to pursue a rich program of teaching that consistently reaches every congregant at every age, stage, and level. Help your church carry out its mission through a vital program of scripture instruction.

Worship

Worship isn’t the first place one looks when considering scriptural instruction. Yet the scriptural content of your church’s liturgy may be the single most-important aspect of your church’s program of instruction. Worship opens the heart and mind for a purpose, which is to receive the Spirit and Word of God. Music, in particular, stimulates the mind, body, and emotions. Congregants can carry an especially catchy tune around in their minds for days after a moving worship service. If your church’s worship music is unbiblical, congregants may carry that unbiblical message into and through the week, undermining the righteousness that worship should coax. Sound leaders look closely at the words of the popular new worship songs before they welcome the new songs into the church. But instruction should appear throughout the liturgy, from the welcome to the recitals, readings, and prayers, all the way through to the benediction. Ensure that your church’s worship leaders are giving careful thought to the instructional content of worship services. Every word and act carries its own message.

Preaching

Preaching is the first place one looks when considering scriptural instruction. Churches typically organize their services to make the message or sermon the focal point for instruction, recognizing of course that Christ is the proper focus of every worshipful moment. Jesus himself preached to crowds. He also sent his disciples out to preach. Preaching is a primary instrument for spreading the gospel. Not just worship services but also weddings, memorials, and other gatherings of the body rightly include at least a brief sermon, message, homily, or other appropriate moment of a pastor’s instruction. By appointing a pastor whose doctrine is sound, a church ensures that among all its other programs of instruction, it has the pastor’s voice as a clear voice communicating the scriptures and a consistent corrective for misguided instruction. Yet a preacher must root every sermon in the scriptures for the doctrine to remain sound. No preaching should diminish the scriptures’ central place and supreme authority. A preacher’s departure from sound biblical instruction should be a ground for discipline, especially when adversely affecting the membership’s spiritual development and maturation. Help your church select, support, and celebrate gifted preaching, while holding preachers accountable to God’s word.

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Chapter 14: How Can We Foster Fellowship?

Dan was the most gregarious person whom he knew. Or maybe he just had a bigger personality than others. Whatever was the case, Dan thrived on company. He was never happier than when surrounded by people whom he could regale and from whose energy he could draw. Dan knew that was the reason why he was so involved in church. He had gone through a couple periods in his life when he’d not been active in church, and they’d been the worst times of his life. To ensure that he had constant fellowship, Dan organized the weekly men’s scripture study, summer kayak outings, and golf league. He also gladly joined every committee, task force, and board to which the church recruited him, and showed up for nearly every church event. Dan’s extended family was church.

Society

God made humankind for society, for frequent fellowship. Stand back and watch members gather for a church service, and you’ll see, hear, and feel their happy society. You’ll see handshakes, hugs, high fives, and back slaps. You’ll hear laughter above the hubbub of happy conversation. And you’ll feel a course of energy through your veins, marrow, and soul. You’ll also feel the pull to go and greet the many members whom you know, to see how they’re doing and share your latest own doings. To be healthy, we need to care about others and to have others care about us. To live and love is to know and be known. The loss of society in isolation is the death of the soul. Even the introvert needs to stand silently aside in the midst of society. And church, conceived as a divine body, is the ultimate society. Church is the fellowship not of commerce, contract, and transaction but of the heart and eternal soul. Help your church foster the fellowship. The body must live. 

Assessment

Assessing your church’s fellowship can help you support and promote it. Observe members gather outside the sanctuary before and after a worship service. Watch them move around, congregate, and converse. Listen to the greetings and conversations for the topics, celebrations, and concerns. Survey the membership for interests and preferences. Interview longtime and new members to learn what they like and don’t like, what makes them come to church or stay away, and when they feel most connected and disconnected with the body. Examine event attendance to learn what cohorts come to what events and what cohorts stay away. And study events closely to learn what attracts and repels, and what fosters and frustrates fellowship. Then use your best insights to subtly guide activities toward greater fellowship. Assess and adjust for a year, and you should notice the difference. Foster fellowship for a decade, and you may see your church transformed.

Planning

As spontaneous as fellowship seems, churches can plan for fellowship. Fellowship naturally happens around church activities and events. And spontaneous fellowship can be the best sort, better than when forced. Yet churches can design and arrange their facilities, hire and employ staff members, and plan and implement events with fellowship in mind. Leave fellowship alone, and it still might happen on its own. But pay attention to and promote fellowship, and it should blossom under your church’s thoughtful care. Form a hospitality committee and give it a fellowship charge. Employ a part-time inreach coordinator to connect new members, and assess and promote fellowship measures. Create an account for fellowship in the annual church budget, and see that the inreach coordinator spends the funds well. Research and pursue fellowship initiatives that have been successful at other churches like your own. Do what’s natural and fitting. Don’t make fellowship a forced smile and handshake at the church door, and nothing more. Don’t announce fellowship initiatives and claim you’re a hospitable body when you’re actually not. But still be intentional. Intention counts. Quietly take the small actions that make members feel welcome, known, and at home in the body. 

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Chapter 15: How Can We Foster Fellowship?

On the few occasions that Penny wondered whether her church was actually making a difference, she would remember its mission work. Penny liked her church including its preaching, songs, membership, studies, facility, and worship. But her church’s missions programs and activities were what most encouraged Penny. She had once been a member of a church that only looked inward. That church had seemed to Penny to be lacking something essential, indeed to be missing the main point for its existence, which was to point the whole world, not just its own members, to the Lord Jesus Christ. Penny’s present church made missions a priority, locally, regionally, and around the world. And as long as it did, Penny knew that she wouldn’t be leaving.

Missions

Missions are indeed at the center of a church’s ground for existence. Christ didn’t commission the disciples to sit around tending to one another’s needs. He instead sent the disciples out to make disciples of all nations. Churches properly care for their own members. But they also properly care for the poor, hungry, weary, and foreigners, for those at the margins of society and on shores beyond. Churches have traditionally answered Christ’s Great Commission through missions activities and programs. A church without a healthy and active commitment to missions is a church without a proper fire in its soul. A church with a strong and vibrant missions program is a church that understands its true nature, world destiny, and proper role. Help your church see missions not as a luxury to pursue out of its surplus of funds and energies but instead as the spark that ignites the fuse. Seek the lost, and you will find and heal your own soul. 

Partnering

Missions work can be sufficiently challenging, complex, specialized, and expensive that sharing it with other churches and entities can certainly help. Denominations can operate sophisticated and effective missions programs, funded and supported by local churches. Your church may be small enough or lacking in staff or financial resources to operate its own missions program. Participating with your church’s denomination or regional body, or partnering with another local church or consortium of churches, may be your church’s best approach. Nonprofit organizations associated with denominations or regional or local church consortiums, or simply of Christian faith, also pursue fruitful mission work. Your church may find it wise to partner with one of those organizations to train and send missionaries out of your church. Local churches wisely partner with sophisticated and impactful mission programs designed and pursued by others. Missions can be especially complex, costly, and long-term work, of the kind that benefits from collaboration and partnership. 

Direction

Your church may be wise to employ a missions director who knows and may already have participated in missions. A director can help recruit, form, and empower a volunteer missions team of church members with missions experience or a devotion to missions. The missions team can guide and support the director, while helping the director recruit volunteers, solicit donations, and draw other resources to the church’s missions effort. A missions team can also help the director communicate the church’s missions work and its successes and challenges to the whole membership. The missions director can bring to the advisory missions team opportunities for local, national, and foreign missions for the team to evaluate against the church’s budget, other resources, and interests.  To invigorate your church’s missions program, help your church identify, retain, and empower a missions director and surround the director with a volunteer team with a passion to promote missions.

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Chapter 16: How Can We Develop Facilities?

David didn’t really know what to think of his church’s building. It was in an abandoned old factory, which was kind of neat, thinking of a church in place of where men once worked. The church was itself only a couple of decades old. Its founders had acquired the old factory building for next to nothing and then took years to slowly restore it. David appreciated that story, too. But David knew his church was ugly. And worse, the staff members who maintained it exhibited no sensitivity for design. David wished that he could take over beautifying the space, turning it into something truly special and worthy of his Lord. Maybe some day, he hoped.

Commitments

A church facility is more than a necessity. A church building also represents the membership’s commitments and aspirations. A membership that reclaims an old factory building as a worship space, for instance, admits that we are ourselves restored works in progress. A membership that builds a crystal palace honors a glorious Lord. A membership that rents a beaten-up old community center downtown to offer a church home to the transients and vagrants sees the Lord as reaching for the downtrodden and lost. And a church that develops an indistinguishable suburban facility, efficient to enter and exit for a commoditized worship experience, may conceive of faith as a convenience, luxury good, and transaction. Help your church be thoughtful of where and how it acquires, designs, and improves its facility, so that your church building reflects the best conception of the faith, not its cheapening, embarrassment, or disgrace. 

Needs

Church bodies do have space needs. Even a rudimentary gathering for worship needs a room large enough to hold the membership. A sanctuary for worship is the first need that house churches seek to fulfill when their fellowship grows beyond what the home of the leader or host can hold in a single gathering. But a worship space may quickly become only a first need, followed by an entry or assembly space outside the sanctuary, traditionally called a vestibule or narthex. Church offices are a next space need, for the pastor to prepare sermons and counsel members, administrators  to manage finances and communications, and directors to pursue ministries. Classrooms for teaching and conference rooms for meeting are a next space need, followed by a multi-use presentation, gathering, and hospitality space with an adjacent kitchen. Restrooms, custodial closets, and storage rooms for sanctuary decorations, ministry resources, and building and grounds equipment are other functional needs. Indoor and outdoor play, prayer, and reflection spaces add to the church’s ministries. A church facility can grow as complex as ministries take it. Help your church plan, design, and raise funds for all ministry needs. The following paragraphs describe in greater detail a church’s primary space needs.

Worship

The capacity and functionality of your church’s worship space or sanctuary are your church’s most important facility needs. Your church’s sanctuary should accommodate the substantial part of your regularly attending church membership. Your membership won’t substantially exceed the capacity of your worship space until you add services to accommodate that growth. People tend not to join overcrowded churches. They won’t even fill every seat. If your sanctuary is filled to 85% at regular services, your sanctuary is full, as far as your membership and guests are concerned. Plan for the right sanctuary capacity. Consider adding services once you reach 85%, unless you prefer to cap your church’s growth at a smaller size than it would otherwise accommodate. Beyond capacity, the keys to the suitability of your church’s worship space include good acoustics and sight lines, and reasonable comfort. Improve acoustics with deadening soundboards and better sound systems with professional help. Sight lines depend either on theater-style sloped floors or a raised platform for the pastor and other worship leaders, and favorable seating arrangements. Improve comfort with padded seating, preferable to plastic chairs or wood pews or benches. Decent sound systems and sight lines, and reasonably comfortable seating, may be conveniences but they’re also increasingly the expectations. They’re also a sign of your church’s respect for its members and guests.

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Chapter 17: How Can We Maintain Facilities?

Mark had as usual arrived early Sunday morning, even before the first sign of dawn’s light. And as usual, Mark went right to work clearing the light snowfall from the sidewalks, steps, and courtyards before the worship team members arrived for their pre-service rehearsal at the crack of dawn. With the walkways cleared and lightly salted, Mark turned his attention to the coffee shop indoors, where he started brewing the first round of carafes before the volunteers arrived to set up for the first service. Coffee brewing, Mark turned his attention to straightening the chairs and moving the communion tables into place in the sanctuary, while the worship team rehearsed. Then it was off to his custodial office hidden away in the back of the facility, to work quietly on scheduling the electronic door locking system for the week’s events. Sunday morning before the first service was the only quiet time Mark would have to get the facility programmed for the coming week.

Management

Facility acquisition, addressed in the prior chapter, is one subject. Facility use, maintenance, and repair is another subject entirely. Church facilities don’t run on their own. They don’t care for themselves. Just as a home, office, or retail outlet takes constant management and upkeep, so does a church facility. Indeed, as both a private workplace during the week and a public gathering place throughout the week including on weekday evenings and on weekends, a church facility can take much more management and maintenance than a home, office, or business. Facilities for churches of significant size can require round-the-clock management not only of use, scheduling, custodial services, and repair but also of member-and-guest services, safety, security, and emergencies. The church that drops the ball on facility management can not only disappoint and frustrate users but outright endanger them and jeopardize the functionality and value of the facility itself. Help your church manage its facility soundly, wisely, proactively, and efficiently.

Maintenance

Maintenance of a good-sized church facility can alone require substantial time and concentrated attention from a skilled facilities director. The church that can recruit and afford to employ a devoted facilities director who possesses current maintenance, repair, administrative, and technology skills, and is available weekends, weekdays, and weekday evenings, indeed 24/7/365, has a true gift. That’s the kind of skill and devotion church facility maintenance can take. The systems to maintain include heating, cooling, and ventilation systems with all their filters, controls, and timed settings. The systems also include electronic door-entry systems for both the inside and outside doorways with all their key fobs and authorized users for different levels and areas of access. The systems also include video and alarm security systems, monitored from a cell phone with frequent alerts. The systems also include fire alarm and suppression, electric, water, gas, and sewer utilities, electrical panels and circuit breakers, restroom plumbing, kitchen appliances, emergency generators, building custodial equipment, and grounds watering systems and maintenance schedules and equipment. Don’t underestimate the resources, skills, staffing, and volunteer hours that maintaining a church facility can take. Ensure that your church budgets adequately for facility maintenance. Help your church meet facility maintenance needs.

Repair

Facility maintenance is one thing, while facility repair is another thing. Things wear out, and things break. With all of the above systems to maintain, some of those systems are going to fail. A church must have a facilities director capable of promptly fixing broken systems or promptly securing competent repair services. When the heat or air conditioning quits on a Saturday, the facilities director had better have it repaired overnight. When the city has a sewer or water-line break or power outage in the church’s neighborhood, affecting water, sewer, and power services to the church, the facilities director had better have notices and alternative plans available or be able to help the pastor, operations director, and other ministry leaders make those plans and give those notices. When the roof leaks, a toilet gets plugged, a circuit breaker pops, or a kitchen appliance or coffee maker quits, the facilities directors better be on hand with the necessary prompt action, whether a quick fix or replacement, or soon repair. Ensure that your church budgets adequately for facility repair. Budget for incidental repairs, while building capital accounts to pay for extensive repairs and system replacements.

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Chapter 18: How Can We Deploy Technology?

Nikki had grown up in a techie household and technology-mad world. So it was natural that Nikki found a role helping her church improve its technology. At first, she just volunteered. But soon, the church had hired her, making her its part-time technology coordinator. When Nikki had started, she mostly worked on the church’s website and social media. Yet then, the office manager had her updating computer software and recommending new tablets for the ministry leaders and desktop computer upgrades for the operations, communications, and finance staff. And then, Nikki was on to helping the facilities director upgrade the church’s wifi system, electronic entry system, video surveillance system, and electronic HVAC controls. She even helped the church’s communications director install a new electronic marquee outside the sanctuary and helped the finance director configure a cellphone app for online giving. Within a couple of years, Nikki could see that her technology contributions had revolutionized the church’s operations.

Technology

Don’t underestimate the challenge, significance, and opportunity that technology presents for church ministry, or its false allure, high costs, and constant distraction. We live in a technological time. The church that doesn’t climb aboard the technology train faces getting left behind, whether because of the failure to communicate with the membership and community, failure to provide sufficient convenience and connections for members and ministry leaders, or the lost efficiencies in operations. Yet the church that rides the technology train too far and hard can lose something critical to its mission. We use technology to distort and pull resources from the world, when the invitation of Christ is instead to make beautiful things, see the world clearly, and sacrifice for a better world. Help your church find the right balance of accommodating member expectations and increasing mission reach and efficiency through technology, while keeping things beautiful, human, authentic, and real.

Members

Church members are immersed in the virtual world. They carry cellphones, visit websites, send texts, and scroll and post on social media, constantly staring at and interacting with screens. They shop online, pay bills online, and check their bank accounts online. Church members also control their home thermostats online, order their groceries online, and let their vehicles do the driving for them. They watch television shows, movies, and podcasts, and listen to radio shows and music, through streaming services. Church members naturally expect their church to offer similar conveniences, so that when away they can watch their worship service online, pay tithes and offerings online, check the church schedule online, and text message their ministry leaders. Churches face a powerful pull toward incorporating technology into their member relations. Help your church find and deploy the right membership technology tools.

Operations

Churches also face a powerful pull toward incorporating technology into their operations. An electronic church management system can record members, member relations, and membership history, offer a member directory, streamline the task of messaging members, and track member giving. Bookkeeping and accounting software can keep books and accounts, prepare financial reports, do payroll, and prepare tax payments. Church communications today generally must include websites, social media, email, and messaging. A church’s electronic systems can and generally should include entry access, HVAC controls, wifi for church members and guests, and video security surveillance. Churches also have good reasons to stream services live or on delay, requiring abundant recording and transmission technology, while also good reasons not to do so. Presentation technology in the sanctuary is common, and music and vocalist production generally requires or invites abundant additional technology. Help your church choose the technologies most conducive to pursuing its mission. The following paragraphs highlight some of the key technology opportunities and challenges for churches. 

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Chapter 19: How Can We Help the Community?

Michael didn’t want his church to be isolated, an island shut off from the world. Michael wanted his church to connect with the community, invite the community, and even be the heart and soul of the community. Michael wanted his church not to hide from the town or oppose the town but to be the center of his town. Michael wanted to live in a Christian community, not live apart from townsfolk who regarded his church as a weird or even dangerous cult. Michael wanted his church to show the community that its members were law-abiding, generous, stable, and fun people who contributed greatly to the community, indeed who were its rock and soul.

Engagement

Churches have biblical grounds on which to engage their communities. Monks may retire to their monasteries for spiritual contemplation and nuns to the convents, but even the monasteries and convents have historically been centers of learning, healing, feeding, serving, and other community life. Churches do best for their members and their communities when they actively engage the community, without compromising their commitments to the Lord but instead sharing the Lord’s love, truth, and sacrificial service. Churches rightly first concern themselves with the salvation, care, correction, provision, and healing of their members. But churches also rightly desire the same things for community members. Churches can guide, lead, sustain, serve, and redeem their communities in any number of creative ways. Don’t let your church exhibit the common fault of only looking inward. Help your church discern and pursue creative and redemptive community connections. 

Facilities

One way in which churches can regularly connect with the community, already mentioned in a prior chapter, is to permit community uses of the church facility. Community discussions, social services, job fairs, book fairs, festivals, and training events may find your church’s sanctuary, hospitality area, classrooms, and grounds conducive for these and other activities, especially if the community lacks an equivalent community center or event center. What does your church gain? Churches can be intimidating places for guests who are unfamiliar with both the membership and the facility. When a church permits community uses of its facility, the church becomes a familiar place to local residents who might otherwise never venture into a church. Church facilities can also have powerful influences on the secular mind, with the orientation of their design, artwork, and displays toward the Lord. Local residents who attend a community event at your church and who have no church home will silently consider your church their home. Some of them may begin to attend Easter, Christmas Eve, or other special services, to eventually become members. They may also recommend your church to family members, friends, and new residents. 

Services

Your church can also connect with the community through service opportunities. Some communities plan annual public service events like street clean ups, park clean ups, beach walk trash pickups, yard leaf raking, tree light stringing, flower-box planting, and other maintenance and improvement of public spaces. Encourage your church to participate. Wear t-shirts identifying your church, and encourage participating members to greet passersby and to pray publicly for the community. Encourage your church’s youth and adult groups to include community service as part of their ministries. Plan your church’s own annual or seasonal events calling all members to community service. Choose specific disadvantaged neighborhoods, groups, families, or individuals to serve, while communicating your church’s care and prayer for them. Follow up after the service with continued prayer and service support. Also join with community-service partners, whether other faith organizations or government agencies or social-service providers. Help your church connect with your community through service activities.

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Chapter 20: How Do We Recognize Success?

Peter had a quiet moment alone in his office on the final day of his long pastorate over his church. Preparing for his departure, while ensuring a smooth transition to his replacement’s leadership, had taken months of dedicated work and concentrated attention. But now, when the day had finally come, Peter found a rare moment for reflection. As the afternoon sun, shining through the tall office windows, brightly lit the surface of the office’s small conference table, Peter wondered what it had all meant, all his labors of leadership. Had his pastorate helped the church reach any particular success? Outside the tall office window, Peter could see member vehicles coming and going in the church parking lot, even though it was the middle of the week and the church had no events planned at the time. Perhaps that, Peter thought, was some indication of success. Peter couldn’t recall any dramatic death-bed salvation, miracle healing, or stunning appearance of angels. What Peter could see, though, were long, steady years of fruitful and often joyful church life.

Sacraments

Churches are such caring and concerned communities that their leaders may not often step back to consider their failure or success. Getting perspective on your church’s upward or downward trajectory can be hard when you are constantly in the good fight to sustain and nurture the body. The long view disappears deep in the trenches of the struggle. The small, nearly unnoticed comforts of living within the fellowship don’t stand up declaring their victory. Big wins can be hard to identify, while small losses can seem to mount. Yet then, at a Christmas Eve or Easter service when the sanctuary is full and the whole body has broken out in song, at an Ash Wednesday service when the sanctuary is nearly empty but prayer has saturated the air with the Spirit’s presence, and at the celebration of baptisms, weddings, memorials, and communion, the church declares its victory in full. A church measures its success in the body’s enjoyment and expression of the sacrament of his presence. 

Measures

Other measures of success, outside of the sacrament of his presence, can both help and mislead a church. Numbers can make clear and easy measures of success. For instance, by counting members, churches can easily tell when they are growing or shrinking in membership. Membership growth can certainly seem like a strong indicator of success, while membership decline can seem like the opposite. Counting numbers and tracking trends can also be important and helpful for adjusting staffing, ministries, and budgets. Larger or smaller attendance can matter to service planning and scheduling. More or less financial giving can matter to budget adjustments all the way down the line. The number of baptisms, youth confirmations, weddings, and memorials can also be clear and significant measures, as can the attendance in Sunday School and at ministry activities and events. Yet the church is a body, not a commercial or financial organization or industrial production line. Growth in church membership may indicate that the church has abandoned its gospel message for a more-popular secular or pagan stance. Decline in church membership may indicate that church leadership has remained steadfast in biblical commitments in the face of swift and widespread moral decline. Even Christ himself saw many abandon his ministry. Help your church carefully choose its measures of success, especially when the measure involves counting.

Salvation

Effectively sharing the gospel in ways that lead individuals, families, and communities to salvation is at the core of everything a church does. A church can quite reasonably measure its success in the boldness, clarity, and confidence its members express of their need for Christ, loving submission to him, and full and necessary receipt of his mercy and grace. Look for expressions of salvation in everything from the sermons of your church’s pastor to the actions of your church’s ministry leaders and the testimony of your church’s members. Does your church make regular altar calls or equivalents, and regularly see individuals respond? Does your church capture, share, and celebrate accounts of new salvation? Are children of your church’s members remaining faithful or returning to the faith after their sojourns? Help your church witness, affirm, and celebrate the salvation of members, guests, and others whom your church’s ministries reach. 

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