By: New Life Christian Church

The coronavirus has changed the way we do life these days. It has put a lot of our lives on hold as we’ve been trying to figure out what we can and cannot do. While it may still be confusing, we do not have to let the virus impact making memories with our families this summer. Here is a list of activities you can STILL do that will create some family fun. (Because hours, capacities, and amenities are constantly changing due to changing regulations, be sure to check out a sites web page or call before heading out.)

Check out the local monuments and museums. There are plenty of places in the DC area that you can go and visit…a lot of them outside (here are 10 of them).

Sample random Ice Cream shops. Ice cream is always a nice treat for families. Whether it is a small, family owned shop or a place like Dairy Queen or Baskin Robbins, go for a random visit, surprise the kids and create fun memories. You may even discover a new favorite flavor!

Explore nature. Visit nature parks or go on a hike with your family or friends. Here are a list in the DC area and some lesser known ones in the Virginia area.

Sidewalk chalk driveways. Spice up your driveway with some sidewalk chalk.

Help a family in need in your community. Look through your community website or even the community Facebook Group to see who needs help and support. Also, the Next Door app is a great option as well to find those in your community who need help.

Movie night(s). Summer is one of the best times to watch movies. However, most movie theaters are still closed or opened with limited seating and showings. So instead of going to the theater, watch a movie or 10 at home! Make a movie night where you make popcorn, grab some candy and flip on one of the stream services or go to Redbox and rent a movie.

Camp in your backyard. No matter what size yard you have, you can always get a tent out there and go camping with your family. Grab some snacks, some sleeping bags and other fun items you can have include to have a fun family camp out in your backyard.

Create a cooking competitions. Chopped on the Food Network is very popular. Do a version of this in your home or come up with other rules to do a fun competition for your family to come up with a good time together.

Crafts. Crafts are great to get your kids busy and productive. It could be simple coloring (which you can easily download from the web  or from our KidZone page!) or you can get a little more creative with buy some crafts from Michael’s or Oriental Trading and do them with your little ones.

Family game night. There are lots of games you can play with friends or family. You can play online games or some of the classics. The idea is simple, get some snacks, break out some games and get ready for a fun night of laughs and bonding together.

Slip and Slide in your yard. Break out the water hose and put some slip and slides down and have fun in the yard. You don’t even need to get an actual Slip and Slide – there are plenty of DIY version you can find online. Make your own from items from your local home improvement store. It’ll be fun to do it together.

As you can see, while the pandemic may have us down and concerned, that doesn’t mean there aren’t creative ways we can still have fun and make positive memories with our families.

What else would you add to this list? Have you tried or are planning on trying any of the ones listed above soon? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to here how you are making this summer one to remember! 

Source: Summer Family Fun Ideas during a Pandemic

The post Summer Family Fun Ideas during a Pandemic appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: The Biggest Challenges in Churches

The post The Biggest Challenges in Churches appeared first on Passion for Planting.

This is a post written by Rich Birch. Rich the founder of Unseminary and is a member of my Speaking Team. You can book Rich to consult with your team or speak at your next event here.

By Rich Birch

If approached incorrectly, online church might actually be a distraction for your church.

Church online can stunt your church’s impact if you don’t manage it correctly.

Church online can stunt your church’s impact if you don’t manage it correctly.Click To Tweet

Before you send me hate mail or decide that you’re no longer going to read my posts, please know that I have been involved in church online since 2009. Over the years I’ve spent an incredible amount of time, effort, and money on making online church work, and I speak from a place of experience with both failure and success in this area.

We spent several years trying to figure out how to connect live video (or at least simulated live video) to a chat room so that we could minister to people digitally.

A funny thing happened in 2015 when Mark Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook developed Facebook Live. This innovation, undoubtedly, made it much simpler for many churches to provide an online church experience to their guests, which was great because too many of us were spending too many resources trying to develop our own online platforms.

While I’ve heard some interesting stories about churches that made somewhat of an impact, for many churches online church can become a distraction to our calling to build local churches where people meet face-to-face.

Before your church jumps headfirst into church online or if you’re questioning whether your current investment of resources is worth it, here are five reasons why I believe church online might be a distraction to your church’s vision.

For many churches, online church can become a distraction to our calling to build local churches where people meet face-to-face.Click To Tweet

1. Does it move people towards community?

At its core, the tension within church online is achieving the movement of people from anonymity to community.

When we first started playing with the church online world, we had chat rooms where users could make up their own usernames.

At the time I remember struggling with how we were going to help someone with the username “FancyBear213” become a fully devoted follower of Christ. If someone couldn’t even identify themselves with their own name and profile picture, how were we going to move those anonymous contacts into community with each other and get them plugged in?

Now granted, the folks at Saddleback Church have done an incredible job developing online community groups. You should study them and learn from how they are making that happen. Even so, most churches experience online groups as an anonymous mass.

I’ve also seen churches count the attendance at church online in the same way that we count heads on Sunday mornings. However, there is a significant difference between counting IP addresses or “seven-second watch-times” and the people who come in person and actively participate in our communities.

I’ve written so much about how difficult it is to move people from sitting in a seat to plugging them in. This is a struggle we’ve all shared.

How much more difficult is it then to move someone from the anonymous space of their phone or laptop to connecting with others in “real” life? There isn’t a clear path, and investing time, effort, and energy at this point would be a waste of your resources.

At the same time, there are people attending your live services today, the old-fashioned Sunday morning crowd sitting in rows, who also aren’t plugged into community.

Work harder at what could be a real growth opportunity in your “IRL” services.

2. Online tends towards amalgamation

In the end, there will probably be one or two very large online church presences.

There aren’t hundreds and thousands of online retailers; there’s Amazon. There aren’t thousands of places to stream shows and movies; there’s Netflix. There aren’t hundreds of incredibly popular, niche search engines; there’s Google.

The same is bound to happen with church online.

The drive of the internet is to reward a few very large content and community providers. The network effect takes over and those providers with the largest communities win in the end.

Over time, some churches will figure out how to use this medium for outreach, but chances are it’s not going to be your church or my church. The contenders could be churches like Saddleback, or North Point, or Life.Church. These churches are indeed doing incredible work already, but the reality of it is online media tends to amalgamate into one or two very large, dominant leaders.

The way that Amazon, Netflix, Google, and a myriad of other online sectors have narrowed down to one or two leaders will also happen with church online.

The way that Amazon, Netflix, Google, and a myriad of other online sectors have narrowed down to one or two leaders will also happen with church online.Click To Tweet

On a Sunday morning sometime soon, take the opportunity to scroll through different online church experiences. What do you notice?

They’re all very similar; they’re not differentiated from each other. Over time, what happens in an undifferentiated market is some player ends up becoming more dominant through significant differentiation.Every other player in that market offers a “commodity offering” while a single player or two stand out with above-average differentiated offerings and gain the majority of the mindshare.

Today we might not see a clear leader, but I believe that over time one will emerge.

Instead of focusing on how you can outdo some other large church on the other side of the country, consider how you can attract people who live within the vicinity of your church to come and attend.

In fact, the act of trying to differentiate online could take you away from the value of reaching people in your own area.

Instead of focusing on how you can outdo some other large church on the other side of the country, consider how you can attract people who live within the vicinity of your church to come and attend.Click To Tweet

3. On-demand beats scheduled live every time

One of the secrets of the church online movement is that most online churches have exponentially fewer viewers of live broadcasts than on-demand services.

Ask a church how many people view their video for longer than five minutes on a Sunday morning and ask that same church how many downloads their podcast receives.

You’ll find that the on-demand content of churches outperform live scheduled content at a rate of at least five to one, if not 10 to one.

Of course, it’s no surprise this is happening.

The internet is moving towards more time freedom and away from scheduled content. We’re used to binging content rather than waiting for new content to be released every week.

In fact, “long form live video” on Facebook—the clear leader in live video—is considered five minutes long. Typically anyone trying to engage in a Facebook Live environment will warn you not to go beyond 60 to 90 seconds in a live video (whereas most online church experiences range from 60 to 90 minutes!).

These forms don’t fit the style of what’s happening in our churches. I think that trying to leverage a live format rather than an on-demand style is distracting.

You already have a significant, on-demand audience downloading your podcasts, so instead of trying to develop an entirely new schedule of live content, how are you leveraging what you already have to increase numbers at your services?

On-demand content of churches outperform live scheduled content at a rate of at least five to one, if not 10 to one.Click To Tweet

4. Churches are “family ministries”

Churches have consistently grown on the back of family ministries as they provide an opportunity for parents to attend with their kids.

There is a well-worn path of providing excellent age-appropriate programming for both parents and children as a way to make an impact and see your church grow.

As Carey Nieuwhof has said, “Very few church people are lying in bed tonight wondering how to parse a Greek verb but they are lying awake at night wondering about their kids and how they can raise their family.”

Church online, on the other hand, is tending towards a solitary adult experience.

Facebook does not allow anyone under the age of 13 to view any videos, which eliminates a significant market. Nearly half of all people who become Christ-followers did so before the age of 13.

So imagine a church online experience where there are no ministries available to individuals under that important age! For the most part, churches haven’t figured out how to develop church online where the family attends together. These experiences are solitary, lonely ones rather than shared experiences for the entire family.

Just as it would be strange to have a church where there was no kids’ ministry, church online seems to be saying it’s okay for you to come by yourself.

This is a distraction from the purpose of developing community and connection within our churches.

Your church needs to continue to invest in and understand how you can attract families to attend your church together.

Families in your area are looking for a church like yours. The question is how are you developing ministries that ultimately draw them closer together within the community of your church?

Families in your area are looking for a church like yours. The question is how are you developing ministries that ultimately draw them closer together within the community of your church?Click To Tweet

5. We are a gathered community

The word “church” literally means gathering. I’m waiting for the day when virtual reality replaces the act of gathering physically.

In the same way that Second Life rose and fell from popularity, I’m still waiting (in vain) for Oculus Rift or other virtual reality environments to offer the same experience as gathering together.

In the same way that Second Life rose and fell from popularity, I’m still waiting (in vain) for Oculus Rift or other virtual reality environments to offer the same experience as gathering together.Click To Tweet

I’ve even seen attempts to do communion or baptisms online. In fact, I’ve been a part of crafting some of those experiences.

The truth? They fall flat compared to the live equivalents.

There is something about the gathered body of Christ worshipping in the same room that transcends. In a western world with such an emphasis and focus on the individual, church online offers the opposite of what it means to be a community.

Church online focuses on people being separate from each other, whereas the physical church focuses on the literal gathering.

Church online focuses on people being separate from each other, whereas the physical church focuses on the literal gathering.Click To Tweet

You could invest a significant amount of time, effort, and energy figuring out how on earth to have an online gathering in a way that is appropriate and feels connected, but it’s just a distraction. You already have people attending your church.

Consider this: how are those in-person interactions maximizing the sense of togetherness and experience of something transcendent?

Years ago, Christian television featured men sitting at desks talking into microphones. What they had done was transform an old format, radio ministry, to a new medium.

However, they merely replicated their radio ministry to a moving picture format. Similarly, the notion of a schedule-based video format feels like a stale representation.

Yes, your church should be thinking about how people connect seven days a week with your ministry.

I do believe that you should leverage social media as a way to stay in front of people consistently, but I also encourage you to examine how others in the medium connect with their audiences and build a community around those connections.

What you won’t see are scheduled, live videos once a week where you feel as if you are sitting in an audience. You experience much more intimate and interactive approaches.

If:Gathering is paving the way on this point. Jennie Allen and her visionary leadership of this group hint towards what the future of church online will look like.

This organization is a collection of live events, apps for your phone, books, videos, and incredible social media all working to see people grow closer to Jesus, which is the ultimate goal of all this connection.

I think the future of online engagement as a church will look more like If:Gathering than what we tend to see in the church online world today.

Finally, I believe that it is right to wonder how we can use digital platforms for engagement; however, church online itself is not the answer.

It’s asking the right question and it’s pointing in the right direction, but I don’t think it’s the answer. It’s a stage between knowing there’s a problem of connection and needing to figure out how to best resolve it.

I think the future of online engagement as a church will look more like If:Gathering than what we tend to see in the church online world today.Click To Tweet

A whole strategy to position your church to grow

Church online is only part of the equation.

Whether you’re a church that isn’t growing, has plateaued, or whether you wish your church was growing faster than it is, I’d love to help you break through. That’s why I created the Church Growth Masterclass.

The Church Growth Masterclass is everything I wish I knew about church growth when I got into ministry more than 20 years ago.

Naturally, I can’t make a church grow. You can’t make a church grow. Only God can do that.

But I believe you can position your church to grow.

You can knock down the barriers that keep you from growing. You can eliminate the things that keep your church from growing and implement some strategies that will help you reach far more people. That’s what I’d love to help you do in the Church Growth Masterclass.

In the Church Growth Masterclass I’ll show you:

The 10 reasons your church isn’t growing
Why even committed church-goers aren’t attending as often as before
How to tell if your church leaders are getting burned out
The 5 keys to your church better impacting millennials.
What to do when a church wants to grow … but not change
5 essentials for church growth
5 disruptive church trends to watch—and how to respond
How to increase church attendance by increasing engagement.

The Masterclass includes a complete set of videos that you can play with your team, board or staff, PDF workbooks that will help you tackle the issues you’re facing, and bonus materials that will help you navigate the most pressing issues facing churches that want to reach their cities today.

You can learn more and gain instant access to the course today.

What about you?

Who do you think is using online tools, social media, live video, and other ways of connecting online to build true community and move people closer to Christ?

I’d love to hear your response below.

The post 5 Reasons Church Online Might Be a Distraction to Your Church’s Vision appeared first on CareyNieuwhof.com.

Source: 5 Reasons Church Online Might Be a Distraction to Your Church’s Vision

The post 5 Reasons Church Online Might Be a Distraction to Your Church’s Vision appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Welcome back to our monthly All About Multisite podcast! I’m chatting with a group of multisite ninjas and answering your questions about the ins and outs of launching new campuses. Our group is as follows:

Natalie Frisk is our family ministry expert. She is a key leader from The Meeting House. This church has 19 (!) locations and is doing all kinds of great stuff, including a killer kids’ & youth curriculum that they give away for free. Natalie’s a lot of fun and will have so many great insights around leading in a thriving multisite church.

Greg Curtis is our guest connections and assimilation expert. He leads at Eastside Christian Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the country, and literally, is the “go to” source for getting people to stick and stay in the church. (Eastside has assimilated something like 1,500 people in the last 18 months!) His coaching practice around assimilation is amazing.

Ben Stapley is our communications and service programming expert. Ben is one of the most helpful leaders I know. His day job is the Weekend Experience Director at Christ Fellowship in Miami, but he does so much to help other leaders with the “big show” part of church world.

And I, Rich, have been involved with 14 different campus launches over the years and enjoy helping churches that are thinking about multisite.

We are here to answer your questions about running a multisite church and are excited to be here today with our eleventh episode.

Open Question: Where
do you find new volunteers to help fuel your ministry area?

Natalie – I have a couple of different answers for that in our context. One is we literally raise them up. Luckily in kids and youth ministry we can start kids when they are young. And two is invite your friend, bring someone along with you. Greg – We have an ongoing process that through our steps they meet a ministry leader and sign up right then. What benefits us every month in assimilation ministry is they’re experiencing the environment they would serve in.Ben – I hit organizationally and then departmentally. We’re training for our teen nights, so for us that will be two birds with one stone where it’s going to be a training and recruitment time, high energy, high fun. The other tip is maybe every other year do a teaching service on volunteerism, giving back.

Question 1: What
should we expect as we look to the future with our expansion? What advice
should we consider as we look to mergers in the future?

A third of all new campuses are happening because of a merger. Ben advises to understand where your church is and how they are perceived in the local community before going down this road. How will other people perceive you when you reach out to them? Make the potential partnership a clear win-win where you are helping the other congregation and allowing them to learn from you even if they don’t merge with you. It will be a helpful journey for the church either way for the pastor and the congregation so they don’t have to feel threatened.

Having distinct clarity in as many areas as possible is important so that leadership from both churches come to the table and says they are all in this together. There are so many things to consider when it comes to a merger. Natalie warns that when you’re merging with a church that has been around for a long time there will be a lot of sacred cows that need to be sacrificed, even in the children’s ministry. Everyone needs to come to the same place, in everything from children’s ministry to security and all parts of the church.

Greg describes an 8 to 12 month process his church uses for
mergers:

Have a conversation with the pastor, which is always initiated by the pastor. The conversation is very candid and does not gloss over the difficulties ahead.Buy in from board. Eastside has had experiences where the pastor is all in, but the board not so much and the congregation voted against merging. An interest meeting that is open to the entire church. The church members all come for dinner in their fellowship hall and we show videos of other churches that we’ve been able to reboot with this process and we share our vision.Read the book Better Together by Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird. It covers the area of the spiritual, social, political, and fiscal issues.Preview Service. Greg’s church sends their team over to the other church to do a worship service and includes all assimilation elements so the church can experience what would happen if they did merge with Eastside.The church has to vote. Determining the vote goes well, how many volunteers and staff will you need for critical mass for this campus? Greg’s group starts with 3 full-time staff: campus pastor, weekend experience director, and associate pastor.They have a final service and celebrate a mutual legacy.Construction phase. Installing audio/visual equipment, etc.Launch.

Question 2: Do you
have a tool you could share with our listeners?

Greg offers a link to Climbing the Assimalayas: Becoming Sherpas in People’s Journey to Connect. This PDF gives advice on connecting with guests and helping them connect and grow into the volunteer program at your church. With the assimilation follow up checklist in the PDF, Greg converts it into a checklist form on his computer and during meetings they check off what they’ve done. They are then able to see what still needs to be tackled and can make a plan for each item left.

Natalie offers help for home churches and making them kid friendly, as a lot of families are struggling with their kids being happy about going to home church. She offers three documents: Family Friendly Home Church Purpose, Family Friendly Home Church Sample Models, and Family Friendly Home Church Supply List.

Ben offers a link to the Bumper Checklist. The bumper is the 30-60 second video that usually plays before a message. It introduces the topic and practically speaking, it allows production teams to reset the stage in the dark. Great bumpers are a significant financial investment from you’re creative department. So you’ll want to make sure they’re as effective as possible. Here is a checklist to do just that.

Rich shares the link to 6 Dirty Secrets about Multisite Churches That (Almost) No-one is Talking About. If your church is thinking about doing multisite, this could be the kind of resource you could use with your team to get them thinking about multisite. Or if you’re already doing multisite, you could also use it with your team to flesh out some problems you may currently be having.

Contact us at our websites:www.themeetinghouse.comwww.curriculum.churchwww.eastside.comwww.gregcurtis-assimilation.comwww.cfmiami.orgwww.benstapley.info

Got a question for us? Record it and send it to rich@unseminary.com

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Source: All About Multisite // Mergers & Rebirths Plus Free Downloadable Resources For You!

The post All About Multisite // Mergers & Rebirths Plus Free Downloadable Resources For You! appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Rich Birch: Are you leveraging your first-time guest gifts effectively enough to move people from being guests to fully connected members of your church?

I hope so, because this is an important piece of the connection timeframe; in fact, it’s a critical point in the eight phases of moving anonymous guests towards full community.

Everyone loves getting gifts upon arrival somewhere, whether it’s at a home or when visiting somewhere new. These guest gifts are not solely a gesture of kindness; they also help us collect vital contact information so that we can follow up with those that visit our church for the first time. At the most basic level, we should follow this approach:

We introduce the offer of a gift during our services (maybe we post it on the screens or in the bulletins).
We offer the gift as a way to thank first-time guests for their visit, and we ask them to fill out a contact card when they accept their gift so we can stay connected with them.

When done well, this is a way to both acknowledge and thank the guests who come. Think about it this way: we can all remember a time when we went over to a friend’s house when we thought we were supposed to show up, and while our friend invited us in, it was obvious that they didn’t expect us at all. As a church, we don’t ever want our guests to feel as if they are unexpected. The first-time guest gifts are a way to show people that we both expected them and that we’re thankful they’re with us.

…

Source: 7 Best Practices of First-time Guest Gifts at Your Church – unSeminary

The post 7 Best Practices of First-time Guest Gifts at Your Church – unSeminary appeared first on Passion for Planting.