Christian tragedy
LEADERSHIP Archives - Page 95 of 111 - Church Executive
Make sure your staff has a chance at a dignified retirement
Retirement. We all hope one day to do it. As church and ministry executives, you likely want to make sure you can offer your employees a competitive, robust retirement plan at a reasonable cost to your bottom line. But how do you know if your current plan is on the right track, or, if you don’t have one yet, how to choose the right one? “Establishing employee benefits is a very important consideration for any church or ministry and its employees,” says Dixie Beard, director of business development at GuideStone Financial Resources. “But before rushing into establishing an employee retirement plan, it is important to establish your ministry’s objectives, such as meeting your moral obligation to employees, evaluating your cultural environment and establishing cost parameters.”
Read More >Leadership systems are in motion in large churches
Every leadership system has a capacity limit, a point beyond which it can no longer effectively function. When the activity level of the congregation significantly increases or decreases, leadership systems hit their limits. A senior clergyperson assumes a particular leadership role that is highly effective in a church with weekend worship attendance of 700. The clergyperson is surprised to discover that the leadership role begins losing its effectiveness when the church adds an additional worship service and now hosts 850 in weekend worship.
Read More >Employees need appreciation in churches too
We even have a special month for pastor appreciation (October). Gary Chapman and Paul White has written The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace (Northfield Publishing/Moody Publishers), and Church Executive asked the authors to apply their concepts to the church. Dr. Chapman is the director of Marriage and Family Life Consultants Inc. in Winston-Salem, NC, and has served as senior associate pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in that city for 40 years.
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New year brings renewed Bible engagement
There’s a renewed focus on the Bible in churches these days, as biblical literacy is making a comeback in congregations and publishing houses in the U.S. “What’s really encouraging to me is that deep Bible engagement within the congregation is eminently doable,” says Paul Caminiti, vice president of church and Bible engagement for the publishing firm Biblica. “But people today realize that we’re in trouble and that we’ve not given the Bible its due,” says Caminiti, himself an expert in this area. “There really is a Bible engagement vacuum in the church. I’ve watched lives transformed when pastors treat Bible engagement like a varsity sport. I’ve watched congregations transformed when instead of little camp fires, a big Bible engagement bonfire is built in the middle of the church.
Read More >Language changes translations
“Every generation needs to go back to the source and put the Bible in the English idiom for themselves.”
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Who says small, rural churches can’t grow? Not Shannon O’Dell
Ever tempted to think “we’re just a country church of 30 souls, we’ll never grow much larger”? Or you’ve thought, “There’s no way we will ever see our church at 3,000 people.” Don’t tell that to Shannon O’Dell, senior pastor of Brand New Church in the small, rural church of Bergman, AR. O’Dell tells about his experience of raising up a church of 30 to 3,000 over just six years in Transforming Church in Rural America: Breaking All the Rurals (New Leaf Press, 2010). He talks about “the rules” about the rurals — “the unspoken but clearly understood values that permeate American Christianity’s beliefs about churches in the boonies.” Bottom line, he says, is “forget the rules.”
Church Executive shared some questions with Pastor O’Dell:
Describe the area in which the church is located; what is “rural” about the area? Bergman, AR, population 407, just got a Dollar General! There are no major employers in this town, but a great school and wonderful people. The Klu Klux Klan is headquartered just a few miles from our campus, but has no impact on slowing down the love of God to every race in our community.
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