Blog - Page 240 of 302 - Church Executive

Standing in the middle of a movie theater lobby is usually no big deal (and certainly not a spiritual moment), unless it is the first Sunday morning of Promiseland, a new ministry to children in the early days of Willow Creek Community Church. Launching a ministry to kids in an out-of-the-box, rapidly-growing, already-influential congregation was a big deal; even bigger than I realized at the time, Willow Creek church in South Barrington, IL, about to surpass the 2,000 milestone in its third year, presented a brand new approach to “church” with fresh thinking from top to bottom – except when it came to children.

Picking a fight with the IRS: The politics issue

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First Amendment, freedom of speech, IRS, political activity

March 1, 2012 at 9:00 am.

From the founding of our country until 1953, churches and their ministers enjoyed complete freedom to address social, moral, Biblical and political issues. Churches have enjoyed exemptions from federal income tax in every income tax law enacted since 1861 without any restrictions on the political activities of the church. But in 1954 all that changed. As part of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson added a new condition to the tax exemption for all nonprofit organizations: no political activity. This amendment to the Code prohibited all nonprofits from doing anything that would support or hinder a candidate for elective office. (For purposes of this article, I will use the prior sentence as the definition of “political activity.”) This amendment was added at the last minute without any discussion or hearings.

Churches might not own their websites

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artist, copyright, graphic designers, TECHNOLOGY, webmasters, websites

March 1, 2012 at 9:00 am.

Think you own the new website that you just paid a vendor to create? Consider the following scenario. First Baptist Church hires a Web developer to create a new website. The developer designs a website with a new contemporary look that the church is proud of, complete with great graphics and content. A few months later, the church sees that the new website of Trinity Christian Church in the next town over has much of the same graphics, artwork, and even some of the same text and other content. First Baptist discovers that Trinity hired the same developer to create its website, and the developer simply re-used much of the same stock material. Was the developer permitted to do so? If First Baptist did not enter into a contract giving ownership of the website content to First Baptist, the developer was fully within his rights to re-use the same materials.

More effective churches

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Communication, congregation, LEADERSHIP, management, stewardship

March 1, 2012 at 9:00 am.

The Willow Creek MOVE study follows on from the REVEAL survey in finding

Best practices and role models: four churches, four sizes

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congregation, LEADERSHIP, stewardship

March 1, 2012 at 9:00 am.

First Baptist of Orlando is a role model of the strategy Becoming Christ-Centered, which senior pastor David Uth summarizes in a statement he routinely makes to his 6,000 congregants:

Being humble is one of the most critical traits of a great leader

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adminstrator, leaders, LEADERSHIP, manage, pastor, staff, stewardship

March 1, 2012 at 9:00 am.

When church administrators work at building their team or merely conduct a meeting they must “compel the process,” says management consultant

Patrick Lencioni, and when it doesn’t happen it is more often because “they have a misplaced sense of humility.”

Lencioni, president of The Table Group that specializes in organizational health and executive team development, is a favorite speaker at church conferences. He has authored nine books with more than three million copies sold, and the latest one is The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012). Church Executive asked Lencioni to apply the advice in his book to pastors and executive pastors of churches as well as to companies: We don’t hear much about humility in business? Being humble is one of the most critical things a great leader must be. But being humble means that leaders know that they are not more important than the people they lead. They are servant leaders. However, even servant leaders need to understand that their words and actions are, in fact, more impactful than those of others.