The metrics that matter most in ministry are true conversions, maturing disciples, and selfless acts that advance the gospel message. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to truly measure this in just one church let alone tens of thousands of churches.

Instead those who study churches rely on metrics like weekly attendance, growth rates, subjective opinions, scope of influence, and church planting efforts as hints to gauge if a church is successful. The underlying flaw with this is sometimes exceptional churches have humble results in terms of size, growth, and influence while sometimes unhealthy churches know all the right formulas to give the appearance of spiritual success.

It is an imperfect way to measure churches. And no church is perfect. Regardless, these metrics are our most reliable, efficient, and accurate way to gauge churches in research studies.

One of the wisest things a pastor can do outside of studying God’s Word is learn from other churches. Ministry is a busy vocation, so it is important to use your limited time wisely when looking for churches to study.

Click here to continue reading and see the top churches in America to watch in 2012.

QUESTION:

While I love my ministry job and my church, I am becoming increasingly “burned out” and depressed with what I do. Currently our church is having some pretty major financial difficulties, which makes this a good opportunity for me to resign.

I have always felt a unique calling on my life to serve with some sort of humanitarian organization. I see ministries like Feed the Children, Samaritans Purse, Hope for Haiti, Hello Somebody, and Sevenly and I have such a strong desire to do what they are doing. I know that you have very unique ministry, so I am hoping that you could offer me a little bit of advice about how I could begin a new career with an organization like those that I have mentioned.

-  Anonymous

ANSWER:

There are really two questions here:

1. Should I resign from my current church?
2. How do I begin a new career with a humanitarian organization?

I will answer the 1st now and the 2nd tomorrow (click to read it).

#1 :: Should I resign from my current church?

Pray. Pray hard.

Philippians 4:6-7 (ESV)
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

This requires a delicate answer, and no one can truly answer it except for you and the Holy Spirit. Understand that you are not alone. Many ministers feel burned out. Many ministers are depressed. Many nonprofits are having major financial difficulties.

Don’t leave because it is tough (unless God tells you to go).
The pursuit of the Great Commission when done right is never easy. There will be many trials, but we are to be joyful about these challenges because they test our faith and mature us (James 1:2-4).

Don’t leave if the burnout is because of you doing too much (unless God tells you to go).
However, realize that the pursuit of the Great Commission when done right will not produce burn out and depression. Burn out is what happens when you give of yourself more than you fill yourself with the spiritual refreshment of a relationship with God (i.e., personal prayer, Bible study, and worship - not work related). This burnout may be from trying to do too much in your own strength rather than trusting God to show up. This burn out may be caused by you overcomplicating God’s calling for you by adding too many details, tasks, and requirements. If this is the case, cut programs and any of the fluff that is not Biblically essential to your mission, do you best, and trust God to show up.

Leave if the source of the burnout is out of your control (unless God tells you to stay)
Unfortunately, burn out sometimes is caused from abusive relationships from church leadership or from self-destructive management systems. If this is the case and you have tried to mend the relationships or repair the systems to no avail, your effectiveness in ministry may be quenched by leadership above you. Ideally, you leave as soon as possible. However, sometimes God calls people to challenging circumstances like this for a variety of reasons. Be sensitive to the Holy Spirit amidst the frustrations.

Leave if the burnout is because you are called elsewhere
You mention feeling called to serve a humanitarian organization. Is it a passion, a romanticized dream, or a calling? If a calling, is the timing now or in the future? If now, then your burnout may be because you are not supposed to be working at the church. Pray hard about this. If you have to, cut distractions out of your life to heighten your sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.

There are many more possibilities that could be written, but I do not want to distract from the most important thing - pray and follow Gods leading.

You should also check out Anne Jackson’s book Mad Church Disease (ebook).

I will answer the second question tomorrow.

How would you answer this first question? Leave a comment to help Anonymous out.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

Skylark Audio Video is cleaning out their warehouse and offering some great deals on church audio, video, and lighting equipment.

The sale only lasts 48 hours (through December 29th) and while supplies last, so be quick to call 888-365-7770 or email info@skylarkav.com to get the special deals on this gear.

Year End Sale Special Deals

Aviom A-16II Personal Mixer
only $500

Aviom 16/o-Y1 A-Net Card for Yamaha Consoles
only $700

Aviom AN-16/o v.4 16-Channel Output Module
only $900

Sennheiser EW300 Series Wireless Microphone System
only $800

Sennheiser EW300 Series Wireless In-Ear Monitor System
only $800

Chauvet LED Par56 56-24B Lighting Fixture
only $150

Chauvet LED COLORado Batten 72 TOUR Lighting Fixture
only $700

Chauvet LED COLORado 2 Lighting Fixture
only $950

Over the past year, I have taken on side projects to help fund Open Church. A few months ago, I was given the providential opportunity to join the team at Skylark Audio Video to lead their rebranding and ongoing communications.

Formerly known as AVi Worship, Skylark Audio Video was founded in 2005 by recognizing churches’ need for more attentive care and financially responsible audio, video, and lighting systems without compromising high-end performance.

Although young, Skylark is one of the few church audio video companies that LifeChurch.tv (Edmond, OK) chooses to work with. While popular among multi-site churches, Skylark also helps church plants take their first steps and 100-year-old landmarks overhaul their church audio while still preserving their historic character.

4 REASONS WHY I JOINED SKYLARK

What I appreciate most about Skylark is their emphasis on high performance, frugality, relationships, and the client’s best interests.

1. High Performance Technology
   If you are going to get a church audio, video, and lighting system, you need an AV company that stays current, knows their stuff, and can turn all the talk into reality. While you should never base your decision solely on an AV company’s technical prowess, you should never choose one that lacks it.
2. Frugality
   This is where Skylark really stands out. Some churches think they need the most expensive equipment or to build everything now for the future. What they don’t realize is they can almost always slash their expenses without sacrificing tech quality by choosing more reasonably priced gear and designing the church AV system for scalability and add-ons when needed. The opposite is also true. Penny-pinching to the extreme costs more in the long-run because cutting-corners leaves you with gear that can’t perform until you upgrade. Skylark gives each church advice on where to spend and where to save in order to meet their goals.
3. Relationships
   Skylark regards their clients as friends and family. We work to understand how your church operates and then customize their approach to mesh with your team. The goal is to create less work for you and your organization. When the focus is on relationships and not a business bottom line, it is much easier to ensure each church is happy, taken care of, and using Skylark for years to come.
4. Your Best Interests
   Making your best interests Skylark’s top focus doesn’t make sense to some businessmen. It means spending more time. It can mean sacrificing some paycheck to get you the best solution (not the priciest one). But Skylark does audio, video, and lighting because they love it, and they learned quickly that focusing on your best interests is Skylark’s best interests because it keeps clients coming back, and it helps the cause of Christ.

Before I joined the team at Skylark, Marcus Walker (the founder) and I had several conversations to determine if we were a mutually good fit. I asked, “What values unify your team and drive their performance?” And I love his answer.

We don’t say what are values are. They just are. What unifies us is the constant pursuit to be better than we were on the last job. The quest to learn more and do things better unifies us. We love our job. We are doing what we love and getting paid for it, and it actually means something.

FREE CHURCH CONSULTING

One of the ways Skylark serves churches is by offering free audio, video, and lighting consulting. No strings attached. You need a church AV system that meets your goals, fits within your budget, and works for your facility. We would love to start a conversation to identify what is the best solution for you.

Call 888-365-7770 to get started.

Updating the Top Church Logos list is long overdue.

In 2007, there were 20.
In 2008, there were 33.
Now 2011’s update has grown to 77 top church logos.

It is a testament to how churches globally are increasingly embracing and understanding good design. The bar has been raised and some previous “top church logos” have been dropped. In 2008, having a clean logo with a good professional font was good enough to make the list. Now 3 years later, a church logo must be clean, well-balanced, scalable, appealing, professionally executed even in its subtleties, and downright subjectively better than most other church logos (some exceptions apply).

Here’s a peek at some new additions this year:

To see all 77 top church logos, visit: http://churchrelevance.com/resources/top-church-logos

Two weeks ago I had the privilege to spend the morning with the team at the Techology Show discussing the story behind Open Church. You can watch the video here.

And here are some highlights:

Open Church helps Christians globally equip each other with ministry ideas and free downloadable resources.

HOW OPEN CHURCH BEGAN

• Prior to Open Church, whenever I’d work with different groups on global Church collaboration projects, a question that we would wrestle with is how can we go further than what has been done before? How can we get past dogmatic differences. How can we get past politics and red tape?
• I also saw the importance to have an unaffiliated, independent entity that doesn’t have an agenda other than to collaborate and resource the global Church. This way people do not have the excuse of not participating because they do not like the megaorganization or church celebrity behind it.
• How can we take this even further? Let’s put barriers and parameters on leadership to limit egos and greed and strings attached. Let’s keep things impartial among contributors.
• I wanted to help other ministries do this, but I couldn’t find a group that had the right corporate culture, bandwidth, and desire to pursue it.
• So in fall 2010, I was working with tech startups, and I felt clear direction from the Holy Spirit that I needed to start Open Church because: (1) it is the right timing and (2) by doing it now before any tech startups were profitable, people would say, “Look what God did!” rather than “Look what Kent did with his money.”
• I spent the next 6 months phasing out of the tech startups getting LifeChurch.tv’s blessing since I spent the previous couple of years helping them with various initiatives.

THE DNA OF OPEN CHURCH

• We have a big core value of impartiality which has changed everything. Most best practices in marketing, fundraising, and website user interfaces are highly based on partiality. We want to be sure that we are not being partial and unintentionally pushing away some subculture of the global Church.
• However, in some ways we are partial. We do have high benchmarks of quality acceptance. We evaluate content for quality, theology (gospel, Great Commission, & 2 love commandments), no bipartisan politics, no slander, and no self promotion.
• The impartiality comes among contributors. Open Church is a place where the village pastor in Malawi is treated the same as Billy Graham.
• On a base level, we want to reduce inefficiency. If we provide a $300 resource to 10,000 users, the global Church just saved $3 million which can be used for orphans, widows, or creating more resources to give away.
• We also want to increase access to quality resources. This will raise the quality benchmark for future resource creators.
• Ultimately, the vision for Open Church is much bigger than just distributing free resources and articles. Long term, we want to come alongside and not strip cultural strengths from a people group but help them create resources for their culture by their culture in whatever medium works best.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

• It is no longer just the big megaorganizations that can give away stuff for free. Some of the best church graphic design is coming from church plants. So you can have a 1 month old church plant that can impact the global Church. Churches no longer have to wait 20 years to be influential. They can start resourcing and influencing the global Church in their first week.
• My prayer for the 3rd generation of megachurches is that they are focused on collaboration without credit. It takes letting ego go, but it also takes letting control go and trusting in God to take care of things.
• Sometimes our systems are holding us back from being the best that we could be because we are too focused on avoiding embarrassments or avoiding mistakes or doing things to a certain level of excellence. But the Bible is pretty messy and sloppy. You need to find the tension between stability and scalability. You can’t be so rigid that you hold yourself back.

For more discussions that intersect technology and theology, be sure to check out the Techology Show.
For more on Open Church, visit OpenChurch.com.

Compassion International is helping solve the water crisis with a new water filtration system called Water of Life.

A gift of $55 will provide a child and their family safe drinking water for life. More specifically, it gives:

• Compassion’s Water of Life system (provides over 1 million gallons of clean, safe water)
• Education on improving hygiene and sanitation
• Support for improving community water and sanitation sources where needed

The investment is something well worth considering. You can make it happen at Compassion.com.

Is modern youth ministry contrary to scripture?

That is the core question of Divided the movie, an hour long youth ministry documentary film by Philip and Chris Leclerc. It is backed by The National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, so naturally the film is biased towards youth being integrated into a church service rather than in silos of age segregated classrooms.

Divided the movie leads with George Barna’s 2002 research that around two thirds of young people are going to leave the church.

We’re losing about 40% of them by the end of middle school and another 45% by the end of high school. In other words, we are losing them way before college.
- Ken Ham

For now, you can watch the free documentary online at DividedTheMovie.com. If you are a pastor, youth minister, or children’s minister, I recommend watching it regardless of your theological stance or methodology. It presents some very good thoughts that run cross current against the mainstream Western church system of how to disciple youth.

With that said, Divided the movie has also received its fair share of controversy and criticism, specifically that it is too one-sided. So watch the documentary then balance it out with a few key thought leaders that have already weighed in on the discussion:

Mark Oestreicher // The Youth Cartel:

>> Let’s start with that straw man thing. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, the idea is that it’s easy to tear down an idea or set of ideas if you construct a fake version of the idea in the first place. That approach is employed throughout the film.

>> Throughout the entire film, the “experts” (who are all from an extremely right wing edge of the church; there’s not even a moderate interviewed) are there to offer soundbite, emotionally packed, fear-tinged, support of the film’s points.

>>  There was no genuine journalism. What there seems to have been is a well-funded donor with a pre-determined set of agenda items.

>> I want us all to talk about this stuff, because I think it’s massively important. I applaud the filmmakers for taking a risk.

Walt Mueller // Center for Parent/Youth Understanding

>> My feeling about the film after one initial viewing - that this is an extremely biased film that was not made as a result of Philip Leclerc’s stated desire to embark on a fact-finding journey, but rather that the film was conceived and made with a bias and agenda that existed long before the first clip was ever shot.

>> Divided is a not so much a documentary as it is a promotional piece for the National Center for Family Integrated Churches.

>> Divided is a film that asks some very good questions and addresses some issues in youth ministry and the church that must be addressed. There are things we need to repent of in youth ministry.

>> Viewers need to remember that what they are seeing and hearing in the film is mediated. Sadly, it’s mediated in an imbalanced manner.

>> I believe that the film asks good questions about age-segregation in worship. It just shouldn’t happen. I’ve been trumpeting that for years and so have many others in the youth ministry community. But again, there are times when we can separate from each other to be nurtured in age-appropriate ways.

Tim Challies

>> What Leclerc does is what so many documentarians do: he chooses his representatives very, very carefully. He chooses the intellectuals of the FIC to represent his view and chooses the young and foolish to represent the other side. It’s hardly subtle and not at all fair. He builds his case on a cliche.

>> I think we need to see it for what it is. This is a movie that heavily promotes a very obvious agenda. It does not take long for us to learn that Leclerc is a member of a Family Integrated Church and that he has been for many years. This then casts doubt on this journey he is taking. Is it a true journey to learn a better way to do church? Or were the questions answered long before the film shoot even began?

>> Perhaps my biggest disappointment with the film, then, is it lumps all non-integrated churches together.

>> It majors on the minors, making family integration the pivotal and central doctrine for the church. It identifies a genuine problem but attempts to solve it in a way that elevates methodology instead of the gospel message.

Personally, I think it is a great documentary because it covers unchartered ground. It challenges status quo thinking and gets viewers to ask questions.

Yes, it is very biased, but what documentary isn’t? (rhetorical sarcasm) I’d rather have the bias be blatant than a cleverly subtle approach that hoodwinks my worldview. I, too, wish it had a balanced panel of experts. But as with any documentary, it is the viewers’ responsibility to balance it out by researching other facts and perspectives.

What’s your opinion?