Easter’s On Its Way

It’s hard to believe but Easter is only six weeks away, coming up on Sunday, April 12th.

Easter Sunday has more potential to make a massive Kingdom impact through your church than any other single day of the year and I would like to help you make this Easter bigger than ever at your church.

Over the last 7 years I’ve coached hundreds of pastors (and held my fair share of Easter services here at The Journey) to prepare for Easter and I’ve learned that there are about a dozen simple, but not necessarily obvious, ways we can maximize our impact on Easter.

I wrote down a few of these in a brand new “How to Maximize Easter” e-book that I’m going to give you and everyone else in the CLI family next week but there’s a lot more I would like to teach you.

As I prepared the e-book I realized there was a ton of other things I’d like to share but didn’t have the space to include in the e-book.  So I talked with the CLI team and we decided to do something we’ve never done before…to really go all out to help you and your church.

I would like to invite you to join me for a very special… (drumroll, please):
“How to Maximize Easter” tele-seminar

What is a tele-seminar? It’s simply me training you via telephone instead of at a live event.

I’m doing this tele-seminar four different times over a one week period at various times throughout the day so that regardless of your time zone or work schedule you can join me.

As you may recall from my Evangelism Seminar, it’s been proven that people are most likely to come to church when they are:

1. Under tension
2. In transition
3. In trouble

With the current state of uncertainty in the US, I believe more people than ever are open and ready to attend your Easter services.  What if you could break all previous attendance records this Easter?  I’d like to help you do just that with my 90 minute tele-seminar.

Once you register for the tele-seminar that best fits your schedule, I’ll train you (and all your staff and volunteers if you gather them around the speaker phone) on “How to Maximize Easter” this year.

Here’s a taste of what I will cram into our power-packed, nuts and bolts 90 minutes together:

- How to promote Easter for maximum effectiveness
- How to mobilize all your members to invite their friends on Easter
- What to preach on at Easter (and what not to preach on…its not what you think)
- The biggest mistakes most people make in planning Easter
- How to get people to come back the month after Easter
- How to lead your staff and key volunteers to spiritually prepare for Easter
- How to do a church wide spiritual survey on Easter.
- How to get a 100% connection card completion on Easter.
- Easter and your volunteers (you may be hurting your attendance by having too many volunteers, yep, too many)
- Choosing the times of your Easter service (the wrong times can keep the unchurched away).
- How you can leverage Easter to grow your church in the fall.

You can join me for this brand new training opportunity by clicking here:

https://nelsonsearcy.infusionsoft.com/cart/store.jsp?view=1&i=51

If you’re interested, I encourage you to go ahead and register now.  Due to telephone constraints we only have room for 99 people on each call (we have 100 phone lines but I have to save one for me!).

Remember, your registration is per church - so as long as you only call in from one phone, you can have your entire staff or volunteer leaders around the speaker phone.

This tele-seminar (like all CLI events and resources) has a 100% no hassle guarantee – if after listening to the entire call you believe I didn’t give you your money’s worthy, just let us know and we’ll immediately refund your investment.  There’s really nothing to lose.

Register now at:
https://nelsonsearcy.infusionsoft.com/cart/store.jsp?view=1&i=51

P.S. I almost forgot to tell you – the investment for each church is only $39.95 BUT when you complete the tele-seminar training we are going to GIVE YOU over $120 in free resources including an entire sermon series by itself goes for $69.95.  In other words, you’ll get FOUR TIMES your investment back in free resources.

P.P.S. Will you be in prayer for all the Easter services that will be conducted this year?  Pray for your church and mine here in New York City. Pray that this Easter is one that brings the most glory to God and impacts the most number of unchurched people ever!  It’s an exciting time to be in ministry.

7 Days of Servolution

We are big fans of servant evangelism here at The Journey.  In fact, we’re trying to make a huge impact on the people of metro New York in 2009 through S.E.  We recently signed up to be a part of something that has the potential to make a big difference in your church, your community, and in the lives of a lot of individual people and their families.  It is called 7 Days of Servolution. 

We’re going to make 50,000 Servant Evangelism touches during this week.  I think it’s a great idea and I hope you will take a look, here’s more information from the folks at Healing Place Church:

“Servolution” is simply a revolution through serving.  When we serve others who are in need, who look different than us, who may be hurting or poor, we have the opportunity to start a revolution of hope in their lives.

April 3-9, 2009 Healing Place Church will be partnering with great churches to ignite a Servolution in communities everywhere. We are calling it 7 Days of Servolution – the seven days leading up to Easter weekend.  You can take all seven days to serve your community like never before, or simply pick a time during the 7 days and set out to serve people in your community in some way – an afternoon water outreach or a car prep or visiting widows or a neighborhood clean-up, or any other of a million ways you can serve. There’s no charge to participate, so what you do, how you do it and the cost involved is entirely up to you. No servolution is insignificant and there is no limitation to the potential of what can be accomplished.

You are invited to join the movement. It’s a revolution of serving others…a servolution. The troops are followers of Christ, the companies of soldiers are churches, and the weapons are towels for service. Once you have experienced the intoxication from serving someone who is less fortunate than you with every bit of energy, time  and resource you possess, you will be hooked. You’ll be a servolution junkie ready to plunge in to the movement for your entire life.

Through our lives, through our families, and through our churches God is about to touch the lives of others in ways we never dreamed possible.

Visit www.servolution.org/7days to register your church, ministry or group (it’s free). You will be given access to printed materials like posters and fliers, web graphics, promotions plans and we’ll also be posting several video teachings with practical tips and ideas for you to use as you plan. All of this is completely free.

We are so excited to see how God is going to move during 7 Days of Servolution to strengthen His Church and show His love to the world. When the Church comes together to serve, we are much more useful in God’s purpose than we could ever be on our own.

For more information about 7 Days of Servolution, contact us at 7days@servolution.org, or at 225-753-2273 ext. 223 or visit www.servolution.org/7days.

P.S. – If you’re new to Servant Evangelism, or are just looking for some help in getting started, download a copy of Reaching Your Community Through Servant Evangelism.

Q & A: Activate Webinar Follow-Up

This is Kerrick Thomas – Executive Pastor at The Journey and co-author of the Activate book with Nelson. Nelson and I recently led the Activate small groups webinar and he asked me to share my reply to this follow-up emails:

Thanks so much for offering this webinar on the Activate small groups system.

We like this system and have serious intentions to work it in but would like some reassurance on a couple questions like this:

Does the semester-based small group system enable people to simply hop around from group to group between semesters without ever going deeper or committing to life-transformation?

Thanks so much for offering any additional insight on this that you can.

I’m glad that you found the webinar useful and am excited that you guys may be moving to the semester-based option for small groups. And thanks for the question.

A couple of quick thoughts. At the end of every semester the groups end. So, everyone signs up for a new group each semester that will study a new topic with a new group of people. However, there are a couple of traditional assumptions about spiritual growth and small groups that we believe are a little off base when it comes to thinking that this model won’t lead to real life-transformation and real life-changing relationships.

1 – It’s easier to remain stagnant in your spiritual growth when you attend the same group with the same people month after month and year after year. What you are doing is staying in a comfort zone. And whether you are speaking physically or spiritually – you don’t grow stronger unless you get out of your comfort zone and add stress to the environment.

For instance – a body builder doesn’t do the same exercises on the same body parts every day. No, to experience muscle growth the body builder must work out all the different muscle groups and then do different exercises on each muscle group. Then the body builder must also take time off to rest his entire body. All of those are physical growth principles.

The same principles apply to spiritual growth. You can just meet with the same people over and over again month after month and expect to grow. You need to (a) bring new people in the equation on a regular basis; (b) introduce new and relevant study topics; (c) and have time off when you aren’t meeting for rest (stress and release – the same principle as letting the farming groud lie fallow every few years or taking the Sabbath every week). The semester-based small group system allows for all of this.

By putting people in on-going groups of the same people – we actually keep them from deepening and growing their faith.

2 – Although you are changing groups from semester to semester – in each group you are making important and valuable relationships that will carry with you outside the group. In your small group perhaps you really click with 4-5 of the 12 people who attend. After the group the 5 of you may decide to be in a group the next semester together. Perhaps 2 of you will even decide to lead together.

That’s an example of close personal relationships developing within the safe social environment of the group and then continuing outside of the group where real life is done and even perhaps to another group.

Whereas if you force the group to stay together in the hopes of everyone developing deeper relationships, it’s not going to happen. Not all of the 12 people are going to click. And after a while the group will dwindle down to those who do click. You’d probably end up with no more than 5-6 in the group after a year. That’s what typically happens in the most successful of on-going groups anyway.

The semester-based model allows for those valuable relationships to form and then move outside of that initial group. And if I’m in that group and had a good time but didn’t really connect with anyone. That’s okay. When the group ends I can sign up for a new group, get plugged in and take another shot at it.

I hope that makes sense and helps answer your question. Let me know if there is anything else at all that I can do for you!

God bless…

Kerrick

PS – For even more information about how to implement semester-based small groups at your church, check out the Small Groups Intensive.

I Love Church Planters!

I’m honored to be a part of an incredible lineup of speakers today at the ChurchPlanters.com Conference near Atlanta.  There is something exhilarating about being in a room full of people who are so passionate and driven by God’s call on their lives that they are stepping out to start new churches all over the country.  I love to think about how many lives God will change through the faithfulness of the church planters I am with today!

I’m talking today about one of my favorite topics: the importance of building healthy systems to manage a growing church.  The biggest of all the reasons why I love church planting is because it is effective: church plants reach more people than existing churches.  However, without the right systems in place, even the most passionate and gifted church planter will struggle to lead a growing church.

If you don’t mind, please take a moment to pray for me and all of us at this conference (speakers and attendees).  Thanks!

For more information on church systems, click here to download my FREE “Healthy Systems, Healthy Church” Report.

P.S. I will be leading the LIVE One-Day Launch Conference in the Baltimore area on Tuesday, March 17 (my only one for the year).  Click here to find out more or to Register Now.

What Do Guests At Your Church Experience?

If you have read Fusion or listened to the Assimilation Seminar, you know that we send out a brief, 30-second survey to each of our First Time Guests every Sunday.  It provides good feedback to leadership and helps to reinforce a positive Sunday experience to the guest.  And from time to time, these surveys remind me of why we take such care in how we treat the new people God sends our way each week.

Here’s a response I received this week from a first timer at The Journey last Sunday:

What did you notice first?
How happy the band was!  It was great.

What did you like best?
The message.  I liked how the pastor moved quickly and really analyzed text, bringing in lots of examples. Having us write along was great too! I’ve never seen that before. It kept me with him; it felt like being in class, but better!

Overall Impression?
Loved the message itself. It was great. Also, when I’ve went to new churches in the past, everyone makes such a big deal about you being new (meaning well, no doubt), and I’ve felt like I had to explain WHY I was new. Also, I felt a pressure to promise I’d be back and/or to say that I liked the service after. I didn’t feel that on Sunday; I just felt close to the Word. I felt welcomed but in a very relaxed, not forced way. No one was “in my face” and that’s one of the main reasons I can’t wait to come back next week. : )

How can we pray for you?
I’m about to make a big decision with regard to an amazing opportunity to go to Ecuador this summer. I’m just not sure what I should do. I see SURE reasons that I should and SURE reasons that I shouldn’t. I’m confused! The opportunity came out of nowhere, so I didn’t have a chance to think about it before the offer was on the table. Thanks for praying about it.

This young lady’s responses confirmed a lot of what I shared a while back in a series of posts about “What First Time Guests Want” – here are the links:

• What First Time Guests Want #1
• What First Time Guests Want #2
• What First Time Guests Want #3

If this is what First Time Guests want, what are they getting at your church?

P.S. – As a reward for your faithful readership of my blog, I’d like to give you $50.00 off The Assimilation Intensive.   Just enter ‘AssimilationBlog’ and click apply code to receive your discount.  You need to hurry, this offer won’t last long!

Q & A: Moving to Semester-Based Groups

This is Kerrick Thomas – Executive Pastor at The Journey and co-author of the Activate book with Nelson.  Nelson asked me to answer the following question about moving an existing small group system to the semester-based groups that we recommend:

The question I have for you deals with our groups that have done really well.  Five or six of our small groups have been going strong for a full five years.  They have invited people in and are still active.  They have never gotten stagnant.  How do you best get these groups to buy into breaking apart each semester?  Most of these groups have met every week for 5 years.  There are strong relationships there and I am afraid they will be hesitant to break apart and join a new group.  Do you have any suggestions?

First of all – when it comes to groups ending – we never use terms like “break apart” or “split up” or even “multiply.”  Groups just come to an end naturally because we are on a semester-based system.

If I were trying to convince already existing groups to join this model I would take several approaches:

1- I would invite the decision makers in each group to lunch/coffee/meeting.  I would cast vision to them for the new direction and let them know why we are doing this.  To get more people plugged in, to develop more leaders, to increase the spiritual growth in the church, more friendships developed, more variety in the small group system, etc.  If you get them on your side – things will go well.

2- If you sense some hesitancy you can visit some of the groups yourself to cast the vision.

3- I would ask the leaders of the existing groups who in their group do they think would be a good group leader.  They may or may not give names.  Either way – identify people within those groups and go to them and ask them to lead one of the new semester-based groups.  Ask them to just try it for a semester.  It’s best to get two people who are in one of those groups to lead together.  Once people in the existing groups begin to leave to lead new groups the group might have less hesitancy.  Make sense?

4- If the groups are not trouble makers and there is a lot of resistance and some of them insist on continuing to meet together – continue the plan of pulling leaders out from those groups – but you might also allow them to keep meeting.  Just be sure not to promote their group and make sure no one new signs up.  It’s the philosophy of not fighting an unnecessary battle.  Just move forward with the new system and make sure no one knows about the old group that’s still meeting.  Usually the group will break-down after a while and get excited about checking out the new groups with the more diverse options.

Those are just my initial thoughts.  I hope they are helpful!

Blessings…

Kerrick

PS – For more information about how 100% participation is possible in your church’s Small Groups system, get a copy of The Activate Seminar.

Are you near West Palm Beach on Feb 25?

If you are within driving or flying distance of West Palm Beach, FL on February 25 then I highly recommend you attend the Fusion Seminar that my friend and CLI Trainner Bob Franquiz is hosting at Calvary Church in Jupiter, FL (one city north of West Palm Beach) from 9:00am – Noon.  This is the only Fusion seminar being offered in Florida until after Easter so its the perfect time to prepare for Easter guests.

I would bring my entire team since its only $49 per person and groups rates are available for 4 or more.  Here’s the registration link, click here.

Here’s what Bob had to say aobut the event:

Fusion Seminar Just in Time for Easter!

If you’re in the area, I hope to see you there.  Here’s the link for more info.

Have a great Monday!

Nelson

P.S. If you can’t make the event, you can pick up the 3 hour Assimilation Seminar (on which the Fusion event is based) on CD or as an MP3 download by clicking here.

Is this true about your sermons?

I heard this quote last week:

“Samson killed a thousand men with the jaw bone of an ass. That many sales are killed every day with the same weapon.”
– Anonymous

I wonder, could you replace the word ’sales’ with the word ’sermons’?

Nelson

Stewardship Intensive

t may come as a surprise to some, but one of my favorite topics to talk about with church leaders is stewardship.  I enjoy talking about money and the church because stewardship is discipleship.  Jesus himself said where your money is, there your heart will be also.

I got to spend a couple of days last week in our Manhattan office with 10 churches (coaching alumni and their teams – 32 people total) from all over the United States leading the Stewardship Intensive.  The intensive is a two-day workshop where we go far deeper than we go in the Stewardship Seminar, to outline and share the inner workings of the Stewardship System.

One of the ideas the gang really got a lot out of was the simple idea of paying more attention to how we receive the offering during each service.  Church leaders will plan every other element of a worship service down to the millisecond and not give the offering a moment’s glance.  In fact, many people don’t give at church because the offering catches them by surprise!  One simple truth: you can increase your weekly offering by intentionally giving your people notice that the offering is coming so they have time to prepare for it.

PS – The Stewardship Intensive will be available for purchase in about a month but until then, if you would like to learn more about the Stewardship System, check out The Stewardship Seminar.

ChurchPlanters.com Conference 2009

It’s hard to believe that it is almost halfway through February!  It may have snuck up on you, but it’s not too late to get your team tix to ChurchPlanters.com 2009!  It’s only $99 per person, and with Valentine’s Day already upon us, don’t forget that spouses come for FREE!

Go to churchplanters.com to check out the incredible lineup which includes Bob Roberts, Ed Stetzer, Nelson Searcy (yep, yours truly), Troy Gramling, Reggie Joiner, Tony Morgan, Ben Arment, Gary Lamb, Will Mancini, Matt Evans, David Putman, Shawn Lovejoy, Larry McCrary, Brian Bloye, and many, many more.

On February 23-24, 2009, we will come together at Mountain Lake Church outside of Atlanta, GA for what will undoubtedly be the best ChurchPlanters.com conference to date.  As it does every year, this event will sell out so reserve your seats today!

Go to churchplanters.com to register and to find out all the details.

I’ll see you there!

Connecting with New People

I have shared before (click here for “How to host a Newcomer’s Reception”) that we love hosting regular Newcomer’s Receptions at The Journey.  Not to overstate the obvious, but connecting new people are vital to any growing church.  These receptions are a great time to meet new people and give them an extra opportunity to connect with the church.

Yesterday’s reception at The Journey was no exception.  I got to meet over 100 new people to our church and we all really enjoyed the time.  The success of these gatherings got me thinking that I’d like to share a little more information about how we do it.  Here are a couple of the emails we use to communicate with people about the Newcomer’s Reception:

• Last Chance email
• RSVP email

Are you doing a Newcomer’s Reception?  Why not put one on the calendar and give it a shot?  Have a great week!

For more in-depth information on connecting new people to your church, click here to buy The Assimilation Intensive.

Are You Preaching for Action or Knowledge? (A Quote)

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One in a Million

Looking for a mission trip for your church this summer? I want to invite you to bring a team to New York City this summer for a Servant Evangelism Mission Trip!

The Journey has launched our ONE IN A MILLION project to touch the lives of ONE MILLION New Yorkers through Servant Evangelism in 2009 and I want you to be a part of it!

God has blessed our church tremendously through Servant Evangelism since 2002.  We’ve made hundreds of thousands of touches during that time, leading to literally hundreds of people coming to our church and taking the step to follow Jesus and be baptized, all through Servant Evangelism.

What does it look like?

We simply serve New Yorkers with an act of kindness, like handing out free granola bars, along with an invite card to The Journey.

What would it look like to do one million servant evangelism touches in one year?
How many people could come to Christ in New York City?

The results will be incredible and this trip is sure to create a great deal of momentum in your church as well!

We can’t do it alone and we want you to help reach people for Jesus in New York City!

We’re looking for teams who will come to NYC and serve with The Journey Church for one week (Saturday – Friday). We have secured affordable accommodations throughout the months of June and July for incoming mission teams at the David Dean House in Brooklyn, NY. However, space is limited and weeks are already starting to book up, so I would like to confirm your group as soon as possible!

Are you wondering about the investment?

When your team comes to NYC, each person will receive six nights of quality accommodations at the David Dean House, breakfast each day, linens and all of your ministry supplies for the entire week. The total investment is just $500 per person!

We believe that your team members will find this cost to be well worth the investment and I guarantee that your team will have a blast while making an incredible impact on the people of NYC!

What’s the next step?

If you want to bring a team to NYC this summer, contact Mark Rouse at mark@journeymetro.com or give him a call at 212-730-8300 x 211. He can provide you with more details about your trip and answer any questions that you may have.

We look forward to hearing from you soon and serving with you this summer!

PS – If you contact Mark about this Servant Evangelism Mission Trip, he’ll give you a FREE copy of my Servant Evangelism resource!!