Here to Lead

Running a little special on the blog this week.  If you purchase Docs & Forms (which is basically a collection of every document, form, system and strategy used at Oak Leaf Church) between today and September 12, I’ll give you any other product for free.  Choose from…

• Start Strong:  Curriculum for your a core group or launch team
• Long Live the Sermon:  How to Write a Bible-Based, Gospel-Focused Sermon
• From the Top Down:  My book on Church Planting
• Theology 101:  This is a four part class with a customizable student guide and leaders guide, part of a series of Bible classes
• Start Here: An eight part class with customizable resources for new Christians or those wanting to learn more about Christianity
• Introduction to the Old Testament:  This is a four part class with a customizable student guide and leaders guide, one of the foundational classes at our church.
• Group Leader Training:  Practical training for children, student and adult small group leaders, with customizable materials.

After your purchase, just send me an email and let me know what you’d like for free, and I’ll send you the instant download link.

A team gets hot towards the end of the season and makes an unexpected run into the playoffs.

A series of product launches lead a company into market domination.

A church experiences an unexplained jumps in attendance.

The bell curve of life and leadership is really a series of smaller bell curves.  A little win + a little win + another little win leads to huge momentum.  In Good to Great, Jim Collins calls this the flywheel.  Momentum in church comes from the blessing of the Holy Spirit combined with effective leadership.  It’s hard work, and you usually don’t experience a breakthrough without the build up.

If you look at our attendance trends over the past couple of years, you would notice that attendance often grows and declines with the season.  While there are stand-alone high days (like Easter), and certain spikes or declines attributed to specific events (move to the movie theater or staff member leaving), it’s helpful to look at the year from the perspective of seasons.

Two of our prime growth seasons are the first of the year (January) and back to school (August to Labor Day).  Chances are, your church has a pattern of growth as well.  And if you are smart, you will consider when you kick off a new series or plan a new initiative.

But if you’re smarter, you’ll consider the series or season before the initiative, and the series or season that comes after it as well.  If you’re doing a series on the Gospel, why not lead up to that with an entire series on evangelism or inviting?  Why not use one entire series to leverage the next one?  Instead of just advertising the coming series, let’s connect what’s coming to our people, and inspire them to invite.  Not just with an announcement or a video or by providing an invite card, but with a sermon series designed to communicate the Biblical imperative of evangelism.

And why not plan the series that immediately follows an evangelistic series around Bible reading, prayer, or other next steps? Instead of looking at one series, consider what comes before it and what comes after it.

My friend Vince recently launched a church in Las Vegas, one of the most unreached cities in the world, and he’s doing a great job. Verve is flat out reaching people for Jesus and Vince is a great leader.

You have the opportunity to learn from Vince and Verve in an event they are hosting called Vault. It’s a church planting lab where you will learn how to start a church that will actually reach lost people. It’s October 18-20 and it is only $100.  You might even win that back at a Blackjack table.  I am going to this event, not as a speaker, but as an attender.  I think you should go too.

Church planters are generally known more for their passion than for their professionalism, but a dose of class isn’t a bad thing. Here are a few tips on how you can stay classy.

• Don’t preach the same sermon series as a church in your area, unless it’s organized and planned.  Either  you or the other church will look like thieves.
• Don’t put road signs in front of another church or at a place where the church meets. It looks like you’re competing.
• Don’t put your church road signs right next to other church road signs.  Again, it appears to people in the community that you’re competing.
• If you are inspired by a design idea, get permission to use it and then change the colors, fonts or wording.
• Don’t use phrases like “not your grandmas church” or “the way church should be” – that’s mildly insulting to lots of great churches.
• Tuck in your shirt from time to time.  Grown ups and professionals will take you a little more seriously.
• If you’re going to visit a church and want a tour, let someone know you’re coming in advance.  We love meeting church planters and will give you a personal guide.
• Don’t ask for discounts on everything.  Grace is free, but some things cost money.

What would you add to this list?  How can we do a better job of being classy?

I borrowed an idea from my friend Tadd Grandstaff and put a new display in our lobby this weekend.  We have three main volunteer areas in our church (family ministry, guest services, and production) and we created small cards for five different volunteer areas in each ministry.  The card has a short description of the opportunity and contact information.  If someone is interested, they can just grab a card, and a bunch of people did that over the weekend.  Here’s a picture of the simple wall display (metal to match the look of our building; simple clips to hold the cards), and a closer look at three of the fifteen cards.

I updated the resource tab above with several new resources that may interest you.  And in case you’re wondering, all the proceeds from these resources are going to church planting.  So not only will you get field-tested, practical stuff used in a real church, you’ll help start churches at the same time.  Here you go…

Theology 101 is a four part class that you can fully customize and teach to people in your church.  Topics include The Word of God, God the Father, God the Son and Salvation.  The $29 instant download includes the leaders guide, student guide, as well as original Word, InDesign and layered Photoshop files so you can fully customize it for your setting.

Start Here is another class, an 8-part class for new Christians or those interested in Jesus.  It’s our next step for new believers.  The $29 download includes Word and PDF versions of the Leader’s Guides, PDF and InDesign versions of the Leader’s Guide, as well as all the layered graphics.

Introduction to the Old Testament is the third class, a 4-week overview to the Old Testament.  You’ll cover the Torah, History books, Poetry and Prophets and give people a general overview of the Old Testament.  The $29 download includes Word and PDF versions of the Leaders guide, the PDF and InDesign layout of the student book, as well as all the Photoshop files so you can customize the class for your own church.

Group Leader Training is a three-week training module used at Oak Leaf Church to train children, student AND adult small group leaders.  The first two sessions are for all group leaders, and the final session is “breakout” style.  The $49 instant download includes editable versions of the student and leaders guide, original InDesign and Photoshop files, Keynote presentations of the general sessions, and video of Michael teaching the first two sessions.

Long Live the Sermon is a 50-page PDF that will guide you through the key ingredients of a Bible-based, Gospel-focused, Life-changing sermon.  You’ll learn how to write such a message in this $9 instant download.

Docs and Forms 2.0 contains our budget, bylaws, employee handbook, evaluation forms, systems, charts and strategies. You get the original Word files (and other original file formats) so you can change and customize them easily and quickly for your setting.  It’s church organization in a box for $79.

Start Strong is a 79-page curriculum for core groups and launch teams.It’s got Bible studies and practical talks that you can lead with for your group. It’s a $29 instant download.

These resources aren’t just for church planters, either.  We’re seeing a ton of great, established churches benefit from this stuff.

This year, we are focusing on growing our church, and part of that focus is being much more intentional welcoming guests.  Every week is someone’s first time at Oak Leaf Church, and we don’t want to take that for granted.  That’s one of the reasons we looked to improve our gift for first time guests.  After a lot of discussion, we settled on this.

This is a simple 4″ mailing tube (we purchased from Uline), wrapped in a full-size label sheet (11×17, cut down to size).  We ordered the tubes and printed the labels ourselves, and a team of volunteers stuck them all on the tube. You can experiment with different tube and label sizes.

Inside the tube is a rolled up t-shirt, a bunch of invite cards, a card for a free drink at our coffee shop, a kids invite card complete with a custom Oak Leaf silly band, and some candy.  Of course, we can change things up and add different things whenever we want.  If we had the money, we’d love to include a USB drive with some audio and video content.  The entire gift costs us about $7, but we think this is a great investment and a cool way to appreciate first time guests.

During our welcome video, we thank all our first time guests for attending and let them know that we have a special gift for them in the lobby.  We’re introducing this weekend, and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

If someone who wanted to be a pastor came to me, I would recommend that he read these books.

• What is the Gospel
• Doctrine
• Dug Down Deep
• Vintage Church
• The Reason for God
• Spiritual Leadership
• The Next Generation Leader

You’ll notice that most of these are theological books.  That’s where we need to start, and in my opinion, many pastors need to return.  There’s nothing wrong with business books or books about the Christian life.  But our view of everything will stem from our view of God.

As pastors, we need to wrestle with the deep truths, not just look for creative sermon illustrations.  We need to know God and lead our people to know God.  Titus 2:1 tells us that we need to teach what accords with sound doctrine.  Doctrine isn’t bad – it’s important!

On a side note, I’m on a bit of a personal mission to recover aspects of theology into the  sermon and bring it back into modern worship music.  But that’s a whole different story.

I am pretty excited about this resource.

Long Live the Sermon is a 50-page PDF that will guide you through the key ingredients of a Bible-based, Gospel-focused, Life-changing sermon.  You’ll learn the keys to writing such a message and walk away with a simple outline that will frame your message.

In 1536, John Calvin said this of ministers: “Their whole task is limited to the ministry of God’s Word, their whole wisdom to the knowledge of his Word: their whole eloquence, to its proclamation.”  There is little that I do every week that is more important than preparing a sermon – and this is something that needs our focus.  We gotta stop downloading other people’s messages and focus on feeding our people from the pulpit (or cool looking table).

This instant download is just $9.  It includes the PDF booklet as well as a 15-minute MP3 where I walk through the key points.

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If you’ve been following or listening for a while, you may know that I’m pretty fired up about church planting.  That’s because I believe that the church was established by Jesus and is God’s only plan for taking the Gospel to the world.  And because I believe that starting new churches is the most effective way to grow the kingdom here on earth.  If we want to grow the universal church, then we need to start thousands of local churches.

And I am absolutely convinced that the overwhelming majority of those churches need to be in major cities.  Large urban areas are obviously centers of population.  Take a look at the studies and you’ll see that more people are living in the cities than in the suburbs, small towns and rural areas in our country.  And look at the projections and you’ll learn that trend will increase.  Cities are where the people live, and cities are where the influence lies.  Not to mention cultural diversity.  If we want to reach the world, we need to adopt Paul’s strategy in the book of Acts, planting churches in major metropolitan areas.

Above my desk, I hung up a map of the United States.  I put pins in the fifty largest cities.  My dream is to build a coalition of churches passionate about this and directly plant churches in those cities.  I don’t know exactly how it’s all going to work, but I believe it’s going to happen.  It’s a thirty year plan and I’m dreaming now.  Through coaching and internships and funding and training and sending, I want to empower and equip teams to go to these cities to start reproducing churches.

Just like churches need to place a disproportional amount of emphasis on evangelism because our natural desire is to go inward, I believe church planters need to disproportionately focus on urban areas.  We need to go to New York, DC, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Baltimore.  We need to run into the city, where it’s more expensive and where the crime is higher but the opportunities are greater.  We need to leave the comforts of the suburbs filled with people who look like us and speak our language.

I am absolutely sold out to the local church.  I am absolutely convinced that church planting needs to be our focus.  And I believe that we must focus on the cities.