St. Mary Immaculate Parish in Plainfield, IL, located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, had a problem that many congregations are all too familiar with: The church and campus buildings had roofs that leaked and needed replacing. In the face of tough economic times, the congregation came up with a unique way to raise the funds. Their “Raise the Roof” campaign helped put a new roof over their heads and also got parishioners personally involved. St. Mary Immaculate Parish is a congregation of some 27,000 members in Plainfield, part of the Catholic Diocese of Joliet, IL. The church building opened in 1993 following a devastating tornado that hit the area in 1990, and other buildings followed as the church has grown during the past 20 years.

I remember meeting a single mom and her two sons after a church service one weekend. The eldest did not have a disability but the younger son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder with Psychomotor Retardation at the age of three. As I grew to know this mom, she shared that they had been asked to leave many churches because of her youngest son. The churches didn’t know how to care for him and instead of learning how to serve these families, they excluded them. In 2008 the UPI Health News published that 14 percent of children in the U.S. had special needs. The article stated that one in five families have a special needs child. The extra care needed to meet the demands of special needs children can be overwhelming for a family, and to be excluded from a place of worship can be disheartening to say the least.

Steve Gladen has been pastor of small groups at Saddleback Church since 1998, where he oversees more than 3,500 adult small groups. There he “loves seeing a big church become small through true community developed in group life,” says the flyleaf to his new book, Small Groups with Purpose: How to Create Healthy Communities (Baker Books, 2011). In managing the group program, Gladen uses software he developed with the church’s IT department, and one he plans to share with other churches. “I sat down with our CIO and white boarded what we needed and it was provided. We hope to have it available to the public in late 2012.”

Gladen was off to South Africa, where he was teaching a two-day small group training to pastors in Johannesburg, within hours of responding to questions about the Saddleback group program for Church Executive.

One surprising area of emerging legal issues is in regards to social media. The use of such sites by churches is so prevalent in today’s society, it is hard to believe that, not so long ago, most people had never heard of Facebook or Twitter. (Though, shockingly, there are still some people out there now who don’t know what a “Tweet” is!) However, over the past year lawsuits have been filed against churches which are centered specifically around the church’s (or the church’s employees’ or volunteers’) usage of these social media forums. Your first thought probably mirrors ours, which was “Huh?”

Like many churches, Spring- Well Church, Taylors, SC, has experienced the challenge of winning the unchurched while struggling to reach our financial potential. Since our launch in 1995, many attendees have been inconsistent with their tithes and offerings. This has caused us to be an under-giving church. Our weekly giving has historically been sporadic at best and completely unpredictable. We came to the conclusion that handing out offering baskets or placing giving boxes in the back of the auditorium was not enough. We needed to provide new ways to give that matched the culture and lifestyle of those in our church.

Our mission at Church Executive is to help you manage the business component of your church so you may have more time to focus on your role as a spiritual leader. By making better business decisions, you can improve your church’s effectiveness as well as its financial health. In that spirit we present On the Go, a publication designed specifically for your youth ministry leaders. We have partnered with Leisure Group Travel, the leading publication in the group travel and tour industry, to put together a package of information that you and your youth ministry leaders will find invaluable.

Already this year disasters have come in many forms: heat, fire, flood, wind, tornado, hurricane, earthquake — you name it, this country has had it. But two observers of disasters hitting the U.S. believe we aren’t having more than the usual. “Thanks to technology and engineering, we have more people living in more vulnerable places. Our infrastructure is aging and more vulnerable,” they say.

The affair started across the room in a Sunday school class when the pastor’s wife received a text from a handsome member of the congregation. The text was a simple, “What a pretty dress, you look beautiful today.” This compliment brought something alive in her she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She began trying to remember the last time her husband – pastor of a large church – had given her a compliment. Thus began a six-month affair before its discovery. It is one of dozens of stories that therapist Trudy Johnson can tell about the pressures of serving the church, not as the pastor, where the strains and stresses might be expected, but of the wife of the pastor.