The Best Forms of Donating Online for Your Church

Many churches out there still just resort to giving money or checks in a church service as their only form of giving. Just paper? Yuck, I know. 

We're currently using the regular method, but want to transition to receiving online giving asap. Churches that allow an option for online giving report that up to 15-20% of their giving comes from people who give online. Those are people that ordinarily would not have given. In other words, if you don't add an online option, you're leaving money on the table...err...i mean in the wallets still.

So what's the moral? Set up a system for online giving on your website or at your church.

ChurchCrunch.com recently posted a great article here on some of the best tools and sites that facilitate online giving. Make sure to check it out if you're going to make the transition. And make sure to check out the responses as well. They're golden and give much extra info as well.

So if I could jump in as well for the readers of Modern Ekklesia, what is your church using to facilitate online donations? In the next few weeks I hope to have an option in place for us. I'll let you know as soon as it's in place.

[image by r0b0r0b]

Are Your Goals Slowing You Down?

Most people are huge on goals. Write-them-down-or-you-won't-complete-them-stick-them-on-the-bathroom-mirror-so-you-don't-forget-them. We've all gotten the message, right? Goals can be very helpful to us. Check.

Could it be that having too many goals, though, is actually a bad thing? When the goals/responsibilities are imposed upon you it seems that the answer is yes.

Susan David, of the Harvard Business Review, published a great article called "Are Your Goals Impossible and Counterproductive," in which she seems to suggest as much. Specifically she zeroes in on two specific areas:

1. It's much more productive for a person to have less goals overall, but that are well defined and the responsibilities clear. I think this is a fairly common sense principle. People work better when they can focus better on a few things.

2. Focus on your strengths. She mentions that many organizations give feedback, evaluate, and then challenge people to focus on their weakest area. Seems that this is the wrong move, though.

She says, "No matter how much time and money is spent, it is improbable that a standout low score will become an off-the-charts strength. Instead, low scores are likely to become average. And developing low scores into average creates just that: an average leader."

This really makes me curious, then about the whole Natural Church Development methodology and principles. In NCD, they evaluate churches based upon 8 quality characteristics and then challenge the church to focus on the weakest one.

So which one is right? Perhaps it's different when dealing with an organization, but personally, I think it's much more effective to add people to your team that have complementary gifts and strengths. I would rather focus on the things that I do best, and let people that have strengths in areas of my weakness jump in and help in those areas.


What do you think?


[image by kimmychau]

The Secret of Thriving Organizations

Organizations typically deal with employees in one of two ways:

The first kind hires employees for very specific tasks and gives them lots of rules. Do this. Don't do this. Never do this. Be careful about those. Make sure you never forget about that.

The second does almost the complete opposite. They merely tell them what the goal is. And they share some parameters that delineate what they should not do. Outside of that, they're free to use their creativity to reach and contribute towards the goal.

Google uses the latter theory, by the way. So much so, that they give employees permission to use 20% of their paid time to experiment and tinker with things that interest them. In other words, they are allowed to use one day per week to tinker and experiment and dream about things that aren't in their job descriptions. Little things like Gmail, Google News, and countless other features have come about as a result of giving people permission to creative creatively.

Why am I pointing all this out?

I just started reading a great book called "Winning On Purpose: How to Organize Congregations to Succeed in Their Mission." It's a wonderful read that touches upon this exact principle. Most churches are really big on rules and committees. If someone wants to do something, you take it to some committee where the dream of some hopeful usually dies.

Kind of like the government.

Anyhoo.

Here's a great quote that expresses the concept:

"What strategies and tactics should the pastor and staff use in an effort to achieve the mission? They may use any means they think best- as long as they do not violate the boundaries agreed upon beforehand...Sports commissioners and referees establish and enforce  the standards, but they do not tell the teams how to play the game. A soccer team and its captain are free to run the ball with the left leg or the right, and can even butt it with their heads. The officials do not tell them what to do or when to do it. The officials tell them only what not to do and when not to do it: no hands (except for the goalie), no stepping off the field, no abuse of other players...The Accountable Leadership strategy applies this freedom within boundaries to pastoral leadership. The pastor is the leader and is expected to lead, not merely to submit suggestions for approval. However, there are certain boundaries stated up front, such as financial policies, theological commitments,  and ethical standards. These must not be violated, but anything else is fair game" (p. 45-46).

Wow.

Imagine if all churches operated with a trust-based model such as this one? Imagine if there were accountability and leadership systems in place in which boards helped to govern, pastors led, and staff managed? I'm not through the book yet. I'll give a full review after it's done, but so far he seems to be making  a compelling statement for churches using a slightly different organizational structure.

Actually, it's not that different or new. Growing churches have long been using these systems already. But for some churches. Yes...it's new and very different.

So what do you think about this system and model? Why do you think more churches aren't using it?

[image by thevisionsofkai]

What to Ask When Trying to Learn From a Pastor

In this post, entitled "One of the Best Ways To Learn Leadership," I wrote about the principle of taking leaders you admire and want to learn from out to lunch on a regular basis. Today I had a question about what kind of questions I usually ask during those meeting times. Thanks Chris Jones for asking me about this.

Here are some of the top questions I ask:

1. What do you do for evangelism? What's your evangelism strategy? Some churches go really big on Easter, Christmas, and usually a few other days in the year. I want to know about that. One pastor I spoke to has had great success in doing a big outreach during Mother's Day.


2. What do you do for assimilation? How do you treat and respond to first time guests? Some churches send out cards, some call the people, some bake bread and deliver it. I try to understand how they contextualize this process for their area and people they're trying to reach.


3. How do you get people involved in ministry? What process do they have to go through?
In some churches you have a chance to be involved in ministry once a year during a nominating committee process. In other churches they encourage you to be involved the very next week. I want to know what kind of metric they have in place for people to be involved in leading a team or just joining a team. 


4. What is the organizational structure of your church like? How are decisions made in your church? The second question will reveal most of what you need to know. Either decisions are made through some kind of boards or committees or they're made by the pastor and his staff, or maybe just the pastor. I want to know if they have teams of elders and deacons and how they function and what their purpose is.


5. Do you do small groups? What's your small group philosophy?
I want to know if they use affinity groups or cell groups? Are the semester-based or do they meet through the whole year? Do they meet in homes or at the church? How effective have they been?


6. Do you have a stewardship system in place?
What do they do to facilitate giving in the church? Do they do online giving? What do they use for that? How many are giving online?


7. Do you have a discipleship system in place? What's your strategy for helping the people to become spiritually mature?

Those are some of the main questions I ask about. In short, I just try to be really curious and have an open mind that's ready to learn. To read the post I reference click here.

What about you? What questions would you add to the list to ask a leader if you had one hour with them?


[image by amanki]

Technology That Makes A Difference

As everyone knows Haiti has had a devastating earthquake affecting about 3 million people. So what do people do to help?

In the past you could mail in checks to your favorite charities or you could always try and volunteer.

But I've been pleased as I've seen the response from various organizations that have adapted with technology to the times. The Red Cross, for example, is receiving donations via text message. To send a donation you could text "haiti" to 90999 to donate $10. In fact, I read on the Mashable blog that over 3 million dollars has been raised through text messages. It will be applied to your  cell phone bill. Most charities, of course, have had online donations for a while which greatly increases the likelihood of people giving.

And this, of course, greatly increases how churches and organizations can respond to help. In the midst of such a horrible tragedy, the good news is how people have been able to organize, volunteer, and donate via the use of technology.

I wonder what new technology exists, that we have yet to embrace, that could increase people's capacity to participate and help?


[Image by deanj]

Are You A Twitter Holdout?

Are you still holding out on Twitter because you think it's just some cute passing fad? Here's a wonderful piece by David Carr in the New York Times called "Why Twitter Will Endure." What's nice about the article is that he goes a little deeper beyond the surface showing some really effective ways to use Twitter, all from the perspective of someone that was a cynical holdout.

I wrote a post on Twitter a few months ago called "How Twitter Is Helping Me Simplify My Life," in which I touch upon a few of the points that David Carr mentions. And in this post, "The Value of Twitter Vs. Facebook," I give some reasons on why I think Twitter is actually somewhat better than Facebook.

So if you've still been holding out for whatever reason, you really ought to at least give it a closer look.

[word cloud above using the words from this post on wordle.net]

Modern Ekklesia's Top 10 Posts of 2009

Here are the most popular posts of this year:

10.  Trends in the Biggest Churches In North America 

9.    Confessions of An Internet Addict

8.    Top Mistakes When Dealing With First-Time Guests

7.    Three Principles For Effective Communication

6.    How Much Is Too Much In Church?

5.    Communicating For a Change: Book Review

4.    Engaging First-Time Guests So They'll Want To Come Back: Part Two

3.   To Suit Or Not to Suit

2.   Why do People Leave Church?

And finally...here's the most popular post of 2009:

1.   My Problem with Pagan Christianity


So what do you think of the list? Are you surprised? Any that you thought would be on there that wasn't?

Thanks for all your participation and dialogue this past year. I think it's been an enriching experience. Especially for me.

See you next year!