Blog – Motion Worship – Video Loops, Countdowns, & Moving Backgrounds for the Christian Church

How to Jumpstart a Sermon-Based Small Group Curriculum

As a teaching pastor, creating sermon series that will serve your congregations is an important part of your job description. From finding the right scripture, narrowing in on salient themes, and constructing messages that will build meaningfully week after week, the time and intention that goes into crafting these series shouldn’t have to end after everyone leaves the sanctuary for Sunday brunc...

Creating Sermon Series for a Multi-Generational Audience

As a pastor, one of your primary goals is to engage with your congregation and make sure everyone feels like they are gaining something valuable from attending services. But creating sermon series that appeal to a wide range of ages can be a daunting task. It's easy to slip into creating messages tailored toward the adults in attendance, but how do you create something that engages your youngest m...

How to Motivate and Reward Church Staff Without Promotion Opportunities

The church can be a great place to work when its at its best; the environment is comfortable, the people are friendly, and the mission is meaningful. But for many small to mid-size churches, there often isn’t much “upward mobility” or room for improvement. Most churches have two, maybe three “levels” on their organizational chart. Without room for promotions, it can be tricky to make sta...

Debriefing Church Events and Services for Maximum Impact

As a church, it’s important to have an active calendar of events and services. Whether it’s a holiday celebration, community outreach program, or weekly sermon series, churches are continually innovating ways to reach their communities with the gospel. But what happens when the big event is over? How do you ensure that your next event will be even more successful than the last? The answer lies...

How To Run Successful Church Staff Meetings

Most of us have experienced staff meetings, for better or worse. Standing meetings have the potential to be your staff’s favorite time of the week, or it can feel like black hole on their schedule every week. Staff meetings don’t have to be torture, but it requires intentionality on the part of the person or persons running the meeting. Here are a few ideas to help you turn your meetings into ...

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How to Reduce Staff and Volunteer Turnover

When you’re trying to develop a solid culture and further the mission of your church, losing staff and volunteers in droves can be Demoralizing. Not only is it frustrating, but it costs you time, money, and productivity that sets everyone back. Before we talk about strategies for retaining and developing your people, it’s important to understand the reasons why people leave in the first pl...

Why Young Adults Are Leaving Your Church

Many churches are struggling to attract and retain young adults in their congregations. Many of these young adults— college-aged through mid-twenties— grew up in youth groups and fell away from the church and potentially their faith during college or shortly after. This mass exodus has been felt in churches across the country, leading pastors to strategize how they can better reach this slippi...

5 Ways to Make Guests Feel Welcome on Sunday Mornings

Whether you call it “Hospitality Ministry,” “Guest Services,” or “The Greeting Team,” making the effort to welcome new faces and established members alike sets the tone for how our congregation experiences Sunday mornings. Hospitality is more than window-dressing; it’s a value that matters to God. In both the New Testament and the Old, God urges people to extend hospitality not j...

Why You Should Talk About Labor Day At Your Church

If you lead a church, you’re used to making time in your services to speak into various national and cultural holidays. Beyond the major Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, many of us in the United States recognize and celebrate holidays like Memorial Day, MLK day, or the 4th of July. One holiday that seems to fly under the radar in most churches is Labor Day. Frequently this is tr...

Keeping the Church’s Post-Easter Momentum Alive

One of the best church weekends of the year - Easter - is immediately followed by one of the most difficult weekends of the year. For several weeks (or months), you and your team spend hours planning, organization, and executing tasks for Easter services, only for all the momentum to come to a screeching halt when it’s all over. We get it - Easter takes all your focus and energy, and by the t...

How to Make Your Church More Accessible for Disabilities

Did you know that 1 in 4 American adults have some sort of disability? That means that it’s more than likely that someone you know, someone you work with, or someone you attend church with is living with a disability. Becoming a more accessible church is about more than just your building. It's about cultivating a community of belonging that sees, esteems, and includes all people. In Genesis ...

Circumvent Common Easter Sunday Disasters

Easter Sunday is one of the biggest weekends of the year for churches. While you’re putting finishing touches on your resurrection celebration, it doesn’t hurt to incorporate a plan for how to manage any potential fail points. Securing a few precautionary measures will help you feel confident to tackle any last minute issues or demands when Easter rolls around and elevate your peace of mind so...

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Church Leaders: How to Be Seen as an Effective Leader

It’s one thing to work on your appearance as a good leader – it’s another to actually demonstrate it through action. It’s this discrepancy that leads to so many leaders appearing to be incredible from an outside perspective, but to have so many negative reviews from current or former employees. An effective leader isn’t someone who centers control of all things to themselves and opera...

Churches: Creating a Positive Feedback Culture Among Staff

We throw around the terminology, “plateau” a lot, but the truth is, plateaus never exist for long in a church. Quality in production, ministry, and other areas of your church is usually traveling in one direction - forward or backward. For a short season, your church may seem to plateau in some way, but the problem with plateauing is that after a while, things shift. Staff members leave or ...

7 Tips for Facilitating Successful Online Meetings

Just like the rest of the world, people in ministry are holding a lot of meetings online these days. Almost everyone can agree that there are plenty of pros and cons to these virtual calls. We might miss gathering together and might be struggling with “zoom fatigue” but still appreciate the flexibility connecting remotely affords. Whether you love it or hate it, online meetings are a very real...

Pastors: Dare to Trust Your Creative Teams

Hey there, lead pastors. You are a visionary. You’re a big-picture thinker, overflowing with great ideas - more than you know what to do with. And more than that, they’re not just great ideas, they’re inspired ideas. Bringing all of those ideas into reality? A whole other story. Of course, you do have a team. A group of smart, aligned, competent leaders each blessed with their own spec...

5 Tips for Improving Church Security

It doesn’t matter where your church is located. Anyone who has worked in ministry for more than a few years has a story or two about a security issue - someone trying to break in, equipment being stolen, etc. Regardless of your budget, there are things you can do to improve your church’s security moving forward - all of which are worthwhile to consider. 5 Tips for Improving Church Securi...

Key Qualities of Great Ministry Leaders

As someone who works alongside church staff and leaders all the time, I understand how challenging and intimidating it can be to simply get started. That first church plant. That first job in leadership. Whatever it is, that first step can feel like your scaling mountains just to begin. And then it finally happens. You’re running a ministry, or in leadership in some capacity. You make a paych...

6 Ways to Keep Christmas Visitors Coming Back

Around holidays like Christmas and Easter, churches can expect packed attendance, full of faces both familiar and new. While it’s exciting to see new people in our rows, how can churches create a Christmas Eve experience that goes beyond a “one-hit wonder” and entices newcomers to come back for more? Ideally, the message of the gospel does the compelling work of winning hearts, but organi...

5 Strategies for Managing (and Preventing) Christmas Ministry Burnout

Christmas is one of our busiest seasons for those in ministry. That’s just the way it is. For many churches, the Christmas season means a month of events, service opportunities, and services, media, and more opportunities to celebrate advent. For this reason, Christmas is an incredible opportunity for churches. Come the month of December, our culture at large, not just the church, is ready fo...