Church Relevance’s church conference calendar has been updated to include current pricing and includes several new additions.
To view it, visit: ChurchRelevance.com/resources/church-conference-recommendations/
Archives For Kent Shaffer
Zondervan’s Theologian Trading Cards offer an incredibly novel way to learn theology and church history. Creator Norman Jeune III came up with the idea to imitate baseball cards at seminary while listening to students discuss theologians as if they were baseball players.
The result is 288 trading cards featuring important figures in church history including heretics and philosophers.
Each card features the theologian’s name, lifespan, short biography, and quick list of significant contributions that influenced Christianity. If you want a quick yet thorough lesson on church history, these cards will be one of the better options if not the best.
There are 15 teams used to categorize the theologians. It’s a mix of fun novelty and useful classification, which helps users understand the big picture of each theologian’s role (good and bad) in the Body of Christ. Team names include:
- Athens Metaphysicians (philosophers)
- Avignon Crusaders (medieval)
- Berlin Aggiornamentos (contemporary)
- Cantebury Monarchs (english reformers, anglicans, puritans)
- Constantinople Hesychasts (orthodox church)
- Geneva Sovereigns (later reformed church, early reformers)
- Jerusalem Resourcers (contemporary)
- Los Angeles Knights (fundamentalists, evangelicals)
- Munich Monks (hermits, monks, mystics)
- Munster Radicals (radical reformation, anabaptists)
- Orthodoxy Dodgers (heretics)
- Serampore Preachers (missionaries)
- St. James Padres (church fathers of the patristic era)
- St. Pius Cardinals (roman catholic primarily from post-reformation)
- Wittenberg Whistle-Blowers (early reformers, later lutheran church)
And if that’s not enough, there are even a few blank cards for you to create your own trading cards.
This post features a review copy and Amazon affiliate links.
The 9th edition of the biannual Top 200 Ministry Blogs is out!
We’ve received great feedback on how to improve the list, and we’ve made a few tweaks to improve the quality and reduce confusion.
- We changed the name from “church blogs” to “ministry blogs” for clarification.
- We more clearly defined what a ministry blog is: “A ministry blog nurtures or challenges the way ministers think about the gospel, the Great commission, ministry methodology, and the cultures they are called to reach. It is a bit more than just a faith blog or one that explores how to live a good Christian life.”
- We added the following criteria: “To qualify, each ministry blog must also have published sometime within the last 3 months, be considered a blog, have an Alexa rank of <5,000,000, and be classified as Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox.”
- We weeded out the blogs previously ranked that do not meet the above criteria.
- We switched to a weighted scale for Google Pagerank. A weighted value of 15 is given to each blog as their rank (i.e., PR7 = 0, PR6 = 15, PR5 = 30, PR4 = 45, etc.). This approach gives more stable and consistent rankings, since most blogs have a pagerank of 3 or 4 now do to 2012?s Google Penguin reducing the number of blogs with pagerank of 5 or better and due to the growth of this list naturally weeding out most blogs with pagerank of 2 or less.
- We switched to sequential rankings (e.g., rank = 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) rather than true rankings (e.g., rank = 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9) for Alexa Rank and Compete Visitors whenever multiple blogs are hosted on the same domain. This approach is used due to the increasing number of blogs being hosted on sites like Patheos and The Gospel Coalition, which Alexa and Compete measure as the value for the entire site rather than the blog’s url. While this approach doesn’t prevent blogs hosted on larger sites from having favorably skewed results, it does dramatically reduce these blogs from unfavorably skewing the results of other blogs (i.e., Patheos occupies only 1 rank value rather than 27 rank values).
View the Top 200 Ministry Blogs.
With the rise of megachurches and attractional ministry models, an increasing number of U.S. churches use big events to disciple their congregations and reach new people. As with any ministry model, it comes with its strengths and weaknesses.
THE PROS: Church events can be a great opportunity for fellowship that deepens the relationships within the church. Events can reach new people in the community, particularly those who might have an aversion to weekend church services. And events often provide a low-commitment opportunity for idle church members to test the waters by volunteering and, hopefully, become active members of the congregation.
THE CONS: Of course, anyone who has ever planned a church event knows they can be expensive. They can use time, money, and manpower needed for more valuable ministry. And worst of all, too many church events keep the congregants so busy that they lack the time needed to live out the Great Commission through relationships with nonbelievers.
So what’s a church to do?
Ask yourself, “Does this event help or hurt God’s will for our church according to how we’ve been guided by God’s Word and the Holy Spirit’s leading?”
If God wants you to do it, do it.
If not, don’t.
And if it’s unclear, then judge the need for the event by (1) your church’s purpose, values, and mission, (2) the available budget, (3) the expected success, and (4) the New Testament’s example.
How to do church event planning without the stress.
ACTIVE Faith assembled a team of four seasoned church event planners, so that you can learn from their wisdom how to balance priorities, eliminate stress, promote the event, and stay within budget. A few highlights include:
Ask God to show you what He wants the end result to be for the attendees and revisit that “end” regularly to make sure you’re still on track.
Be flexible but not a push-over. You will never be able to please everyone, and you risk losing control if you try.
Enlist a diverse planning team. Specifically, surround yourself with people gifted in areas you are weak.
Click to view the full slideshow on church event planning.
Special thanks to ACTIVE Faith for supporting Church Relevance by sponsoring this post.
Some pockets of Christianity create a false theology of what a pastor should be by hijacking the biblical roles of a pastor with their own cultural ideals. It is not intentional. In fact, they often agree on the biblical definition of a pastor, but their actions and culture don’t show it. Their culture perpetuates an epitome of pastors that binds them psychologically and drives their behavior.
The Bible describes a pastor as a shepherd who feeds and protects the flock and ideally knows them by name. It is an authoritative intimacy with the congregation that feeds them spiritually with preaching, teaching, and relational discipleship while nurturing, protecting, and guiding their individual spiritual journeys.
In some pockets of Christianity, we’ve stopped empowering believers to use their spiritual gifts and created a culture where the pastor is expected to be the eloquent speaker (teaching gift), the counselor (shepherd gift), the CEO (administration gift), the visionary (leadership gift), the motivator (exhortation gift), the scholar (knowledge gift), the expert (wisdom gift), the soul-winner (evangelism gift), the buddy (hospitality gift), the prayer warrior (intercession gift), the spiritualist (discernment, miracles, & faith gifts) as well as a technologist, social media maven, marketer, sex expert, financial strategist, diplomat, comedian, blogger, vlogger, and more.
When you fail to emphasize the responsibility each church member has to own and live out their spiritual gift(s) daily, the pastor will inevitably feel the need to take the responsibility of all the gifts upon his shoulders. This is impossible and unhealthy. The eye can not be a spleen.
Studying best practices from other church websites can give you ideas that can improve online communication, avoid costly mistakes, and even yield greater spiritual fruit for the Kingdom. There’s certainly a place for such pragmatism, but only if it goes hand-in-hand with listening to and obeying God. To help give you ideas and inspiration, we’ve compiled a list of 40 Great Church Websites.
View the List Now >>
Are there any that we didn’t list that you think should be included?
As a community of believers grows, its needs new leaders raised up to handle the increased ministry needs. This is true for churches that handle growth by multiplying into new locations and for churches that keep their growth in one location.
It is the story of Acts 6:1-7. The early church was a time of growth where 5,000 men could find Christ from just one sermon (Acts 4:4). Yet we see in chapter 6, that the Greek-speaking Jewish widows became lost in the bustle of growth and were neglected. Seven men of good reputation and spiritual maturity were chosen to meet that need.
Unfortunately, raising up volunteers isn’t easy. It’s hard work. And to have Acts 6 quality volunteers takes a culture well-equipped at discipleship and cultivating spiritual maturity long before being appointed to serve.
ACTIVE Faith is offering a free ebook on “How to Maximize Church Volunteers”. It is a great primer introducing best practices of modern churches for appointing, training, and supporting church volunteers. The more you grow, the more you need structure.
Volunteer Challenges Based on Church Size
The benefit of house churches (<25 people ideally) is they have no need for volunteers to run major equipment, maintain facilities, or manage ministry operations. What volunteer needs do exist tend to happen naturally, such as greeting newcomers and watching kids.
But as a church grows, even a house church, the need for volunteers and structure increases as the ease of relationships decreases.
For example, it is said that the quality of community intimacy declines after a house church exceeds 25 people. At this size, it is less likely for everyone to take part and more difficult to know each other deeply. At around 100-230 people, we experience Dunbar’s number – our cognitive limit of being able to know who everyone is and how they relate to each other. This is a medium-sized church (51-300) that still has some relational agility but still needs structure to meet all ministry needs and appoint believers according to their gifts.
Large churches (301-1,999) often undergo intense growing pains as they learn they can no longer know everyone. It is at this size and above that we more commonly see volunteer mistakes, such as:
- not communicating volunteer opportunities
- lack of clear leadership
- lack of leadership training
- lack of accountability
- lack of volunteer appreciation
- haphazardly appointing volunteers (lack of necessary spiritual maturity, abilities, etc.)
By the time a church grows to be a megachurch (2,000-9,999) or gigachurch (10,000+), they’ve usually figured out structure and now must work even harder at relationships and love. If left to itself, structure and management become cold and sterile. You can’t systematize love and relationships; trying just seems artificial and disingenuous. It is a weird tension because you need structure, but true love is sloppy. This is non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter how structured and high performance you are, if you don’t have love, it is in vain (1 Corinthians 13).
So each stage comes with its own challenges. Regardless of what size you’re at, download ACTIVE Faith’s free ebook and think through if there is anything that your church needs to change.
Download: How to Maximize Church Volunteers (PDF)
Special thanks to ACTIVE Faith for supporting Church Relevance by sponsoring this post.
Church Relevance has compiled a list of 493 churches to watch in 2013. It is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is great place to start for ideas, inspiration, and studying ministry techniques.
And if that’s too overwhelming, we’ve also curated several much shorter lists featuring the churches best known for size, growth, influence, innovation, and church planting.
