Discover how to leverage technology in your church

You need ideas for something—an event, a Lenten theme, new online outreach, a new ministry. And you need help coming up with ideas. So you decide to hold a brainstorm session. But during that session, people are pretty quiet. They’re just not saying anything, or the ideas they do share are too specific or narrow. Where’s that big idea you’re looking for?

People are full of ideas, whether they tend to think analytically or creatively. In the right environment, they’ll truly be themselves and let you know what’s going on inside their minds. So in a brainstorm session, establishing the right tone is essential to getting ideas flowing. Here’s how to create that tone so creativity is stimulated and people feel comfortable sharing all their wacky, dramatic, and big ideas.

In our information-saturated landscape, many have asked the question “how do we communicate well with our church’s members?” The answer to that question is, of course, multi-faceted and ever-changing. A little more than a year ago, as my church—Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois—evaluated the congregation’s communication needs, our existing communication avenues, and the time and energy we devoted to different efforts, we determined that our monthly email newsletter wasn’t as helpful as it had been in the past.

Enter The Connecting Point. Well, to be honest, it didn’t have that name or a clear direction for a while. There was a good chunk of time in the development stage when I would refer to it as “the new quarterly storytelling publication that will be available both as a hard copy and digitally.” Let’s just say that, while descriptive, the name garnered more raised eyebrows than buy-in.

I’ve always enjoyed reading the annual blog posts and articles about predictions for the coming year. There’s something fun about seeing if they come true, although I rarely see follow-up posts detailing how many, if any, actually did come true. (Spoiler alert: most of them don’t.)

In the world of technology, it seems to be the trend to make big and bold predictions. Remember when tablets were going to replace all computers? Or when smart watches would be more useful than smart phones? More often than not, technology predictions are way off base, or just too early.

Welcome to one of my favorite weeks of the year: the week between Christmas and New Year’s. At Concordia Publishing House, this is a short work-week bookended by two holidays and an extra day off. That means someone can take three days of PTO and turn that into ten days off in a row. What a deal!

We’re less than one week away from Christmas—is your social media ready?

While Christmas provides some great opportunities for your church to share the Gospel with your community, it can be a challenge to get everything done on time and still be creative. Here are three quick ways to leverage social media during the busiest time of the year.

For pastors, Advent and Lent can feel more like survival times than planning times. Midweek services, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Holy Week, Easter. . . . It can be overwhelming. Since we’re in the middle of Advent right now, you might be feeling especially crunched for time. While you’re thinking about Advent and time management, I wanted to suggest some ideas you can implement when you plan for future seasons of Advent and Lent.

The way we use our memory has changed in recent years, and daily tasks that once required us to recall information are now done by accessing digital directories or using voice activation. When I was in grade school, memory tools were of the index-card variety, each holding a different historical fact, spelling word, or basic math equation. Now memory cards hold countless digital images and files, at times doing our remembering for us.

If your ministry is on Snapchat, I applaud you! Snapchat is, in my opinion, one of the hardest social media platforms to manage and create content for, especially for churches. So the fact that you even have a Snapchat means you’re going in the right direction.

Black Friday. Small Business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. Is it just me, or are all these Thanksgiving-weekend activities getting a little hard to manage?

As is so often the case, it’s easy to let our celebration of thankfulness for all God’s good gifts become eclipsed by our relentless desire for more and better. How can your church help your members to pause and reflect throughout Thanksgiving weekend? Here are some ideas for simple Thanksgiving-weekend activities that can help your church and her members maintain a thankful spirit in the next few days.

I had only been a pastor for a short while at my first congregation. I remember trying to look up families and guessing the ages of their children. I cannot remember if it was for confirmation or something else. The church wanted to send a letter because of an upcoming class. The secretary was walking by and asked me what I was doing. I explained and said that it was hard work. I had been doing it for a couple of days at that point. She started laughing and telling me that all I had to do was ask her. All that information was kept in Shepherd’s Staff, which was our church management software (CMS).