[This is a guest post from our friend Michael Gonzalez. Michael is a follower of Jesus, writer, and everyday missionary. He spends most of his time teaching pre-school aged children and serving as a grassroots leader in his community. He currently lives in Philadelphia, PA with his wife Alicia, their three kids, Eva, Mia, and Michael.] God met me in a …
Leadership in a post-Christian culture demands alterations to common conceptions of ministry. One “rule” I’m encountering more often is the methodology to grow churches. There seems to be two predominant ways to build resilient or growing communities. The first is to build excellence in the service and programs. The second is to use the same effort of excellence, but in the direction …
In my last blog, I encouraged churches to form non-representative leadership teams for three reasons. Often in constituency representative teams “the priority of the ‘good’ of the constituency displaces the overall good of the organization [church].”[1] “the leadership team may or may not be composed of people who actually have gifts related to leadership.”[2] “inevitably one constituency is deemed more …
This year my husband Tom and I are celebrating Thanksgiving twice. At the beginning of October we had the privilege of sharing Canadian Thanksgiving with friends in British Columbia. We loved not just the enjoyment of rich food and fellowship but also the times of reflecting on the many blessings in our lives. We came home with a warm glow. …
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – good advice from Winston Churchill Looking at the results and making decisions based on how it affects those results is called being pragmatic. It is a process of dealing with things sensibly, realistically, based on practical considerations as opposed to theoretical ones. So should we be pragmatic about church planting? This tends …
Luke 10:1-24 has an incredibly diverse range of wisdom and brilliant insights. Perhaps if it was the only portion of scripture that we had, it’s diverse range of wisdom would still be more than sufficient to help us understand so many realities of the Kingdom of Heaven and service to the King of Heaven; but let me paraphrase one insight …
We here at V3 are excited to partner with Tom Mauriello and Reliant to offer this free webinar on Creative Ways to Fund Your Church Plant. Missional churches and church planting present unique challenges and opportunities with their funding needs. Does your fundraising model align with the mission? We’ll explore the methods and models we can approach funding and fund …
In a previous post I discussed a guaranteed method to reduce workloads for overwhelmed pastors and church planters: reduce the number of monthly worship services. In this edition, I ask a related question: do worship services have expiry dates? Or does what we have now work great? In terms of expiration, high church liturgies don’t update or shift much at …
We at The V3 Movement are pleased to announce Specialized Coaching beginning this fall. We hear from many of our friends, church planters, and practitioners that they would like to have a coaching resource from the V3 Movement outside of our learning cohorts and we are happy to be able to offer this now. This coaching is available to everyone …
We jump back into the question of holding space and self-care without sacrificing the ethos of the pastoral office. As pastors we help shoulder the burden of trauma carried by members of our community. The cost of this work can be overwhelming. Yet, to do this work well we must take care of ourselves without feeling the guilt of our …