As iServe pastor, Mari Beth Poor oversees the “on the mountain” ministries that enhance the overall experience of people attending Sunday worship services at Mountaintop Community Church. These include guest services, student ministries, children’s ministry, and worship and media. She also leads the church’s “off the mountain” community efforts and global outreach.
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Depending on the culture and style of your congregation, your sanctuary might look more traditional or more modern — there are many ways to express the beauty of Christian worship. Despite these differences, however, there are some common design elements that are useful in creating an engaging sanctuary, no matter what your worship style might be.
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The aisles that guide your congregation to a higher power could lead to slips, trips and falls if you’re not careful. Falls are one of the leading causes of unintentional injuries in the U.S., according to the National Safety Council. Those injuries accounted for about 8.8 million visits to the emergency room in 2013 — a nearly 500,000 drop from about 9.3 million visits to the emergency room in 2011.
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While churches might have to be run like businesses, there are specific needs and flexibility which non-CMS financial management applications just cannot provide. For some, the leading secular accounting software might be the answer — but we suggest otherwise. Here’s why.
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In this series installment, Paul Gage — who has consulted more than 500 church capital campaigns, with results exceeding $1 billion — focuses on the second phase of a campaign: Organization. According to Gage, the three most critical components of this phase are Prayer, Presentation and Preaching.
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Mark Kitts served as a founding pastor before establishing People Driven Software, which merged with Elexio Church Software. Today, Kitts is Elexio’s Lead Software Architect. Here, he talks about how church management software helps churches with financial management.
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As Part 2 of this “Designing Worship Areas” series begins, let’s reiterate a primary concept from
Part 1: Every church is different. Having restated that precept, let’s now look at the traditional worship space and the elements through which it contributes to a person’s worship experience.
Church members not only look for spiritual leadership from their pastoral staff, but they also have expectations that donations made will be widely used. Often, they expect leadership to provide financial reports produced from a reliable accounting package, verifying their trust.
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Anyone with resources — whether believers or not — will only give generously to what they understand and value. If your givers can’t articulate the result, or if they don’t fully support the outcome that their gift is meant to achieve, they won’t give much. Typically, they won’t give consistently, and they certainly won’t give lavishly or at great sacrifice.
Clearly communicating vision provides both the roadmap and the destination for the generous heart.
I recently conducted a small Facebook test. Survey participants were asked to answer three questions about giving. Here’s what I found:
• 96% of people consider themselves to be generous
• 80% of those same people want to be more generous than they currently are
• 92% feel held back by a lack of money
These findings represent a strange tension between who we are, who we want to be, and our perceived lack that stands in the way.