1.  A Reminder

Dear Pastors, Staff and Church Members:

Read our newly released eBook, Transform Your Community Forever in 6 Months.  It’s short, but contains a powerful plan of action for revitalizing your church from the outside in!

Click here to download:

Transform Your Community Forever in 6 Months

2.  A Preview

Hard to believe but our blog series is now in its 30th week:

• First 10 – Built the case for why the Church in America is declining in size, impact, influence and perception
• Next 10 –  Outlined some critical high-level principles that will bring your church into alignment with Biblical mandates and organizational behavior best practices
• Last 10 –  Got our hands dirty in specific steps to truly become a church where the “members are the church and the community is the customer”

Going forward our plan is to:

• address a few additional recommendations
• revisit some of our prior arguments and strengthen the case for how the church has redefined its “customer”
• begin to include videos in blog posts and launch a podcast providing coaching for you and your church

3.  A Big Idea

People are naturally inclined to put concepts into a box.  Smoke comes out of our ears if we can’t quickly process, categorize, accept or reject what we hear and read.  Even rejection is a “box” of sorts – the waste basket.

On this blog, we’ve run many important ideas by you.  We’re excited that the response has been so overwhelmingly positive – seems like no one is throwing our ideas into the proverbial “circular file”!

While diverse, all of those ideas center around a core contention – that the temptation is extremely strong today (and nearly all churches have succumbed at some level) to treat members as “customers” and largely ignore their intended customers, the community where the church was planted.  Of course, neglecting customers or focusing on the wrong ones doesn’t bode well for any organization, explaining the Church’s decline.

We’ve about to delve into another key idea that spins off of our core contention.  In these next few weeks, we’ll discuss “seekers” and “seeker” churches, evaluating them in the context of the prevailing “customer” definition.  My concern on this topic is that too many of our readers and presentation attendees see this blog as an indictment of “seeker” churches – they put our ideas into a “box”.  However, when 93% of churches aren’t growing, the issues we’re discussing extend to a much broader audience.  In fact, our take on “seeker” churches will surprise you – we have absolutely no qualms with them.  They play a critical role in the Kingdom landscape, but they’re not the whole answer…

It’s your turn…

What’s your feedback on Transform Your Community Forever in 6 Months?  The title sounds ambitious but after reading the eBook do you see how your church could potentially have that degree of impact?