Month: October 2019

2_05: Todd McMichen – Get ready to receive an alpaca: a generational look at generosity

2_05: Todd McMichen – Get ready to receive an alpaca: a generational look at generosity

By |

Breakthrough ideas with Todd: 

  • 74% of churches have online giving, but they only receive about 15% of their income through digital avenues.
  • 90% of our personal wealth is contained in our assets not in liquid cash – what if your church had a way to enable generosity in this way?
  • What happens if you’ve got one alpaca too many?
  • What does a generous human being look like?
  • What would it be like to have a church filled with generous people?
  • Lifeway Generosity is turning every smartphone into an offering plate.
  • Your members are giving above and beyond dollars every single week to somebody… why not the church.
  • The outside the church around generosity has completely changed from 20 years ago.
  • So 20 years ago as leaders in the church we have been afraid to talk about money because that’s a personal private matter, that’s changed.
  • Millennials are very generous, and they are socially generous.
  • if the church is going to catch up, we have got to be more confident in socializing generosity.
  • If a millennial is in worship on Sunday morning and you’re welcoming them, and you go through the entire worship service, and you’ve not told them the power of a dollar given to your local church, the difference it’s making, you’re turning them off.
  • Any time we’re about to pass the plate, anchor the moment in what your people can become by giving and tell a story of what the giving is doing.
  • The millennial generation doesn’t see different types of generosity differently. So serving generosity is equal to financial generosity.
  • 84% of millennials, on average, are giving to nonprofits. And when they give, they give almost $500 annually, and they give to three different nonprofits.
  • The millennial generation is generous. They’re just not giving in ways the church has readily acknowledged and accepted easily.
  • Every generous church we find is led by a generous pastor
  • We didn’t learn how to raise money and disciple people in their generosity in seminary. Here’s what to do.
  • Sometimes exegeting somebody’s life situation and helping them understand how generosity affects their relationship with Christ is as important.
  • What would you do if you had to cut 25% out of your budget next year?
  • Every first time givers was at some time a first time guest. Hospitality impacts generosity.
  • You can’t turn on joy across the congregation 30 seconds before the offering plate passes, joy starts in the parking lot.
  • Those churches that really welcome people well, seem to be some of those churches that are overflowing with generosity
  • When a church raises this budget 5% in advance, they start the fiscal year out, it’s behind, but everybody’s spending.
  • Instead of creating a 105% budget, what if you did 98%? It changes the game for you. So you’re not actually spending less, it’s just a completely different way of thinking and feeling about it.
  • There is a massive problem that pastors are unaware of. Total giving has flat-lined or a little bit up, but the number of givers is on dramatic decline.
  • Attendance is going down, but giving is staying the same.
  • We are going to lose 10 million givers in the Boomer generation. You can’t stop that from happening. You don’t know it’s happening.
  • Should a pastor know how much someone gives or doesn’t give? And how do we disciple the key donor?
  • The number one missing ingredient in the budget process is a yearly goal.

Breakthrough resources in this episode: 

Generospitality eBook

LifeWay Generosity

The Genius of Generosity by Chip Ingram

Webinar: Your Most Welcoming, Generous Christmas Yet!

Todd McMichen has served local churches for over 30 years in a variety of roles from small rural congregations to church plants to mega-churches. His generosity roots rise from leading multiple capital campaigns for two churches where he served as a staff member, raising over $35,000,000 for their visionary projects. Since 2000, Todd has been a well-established stewardship coach, generosity leader, author, and conference speaker. He now serves as the Director of LifeWay Generosity & Digital Giving. Todd is a graduate of Palm Beach Atlantic College in West Palm Beach, Florida and Southwestern Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, Theresa. Visit Todd’s blog at toddmcmichen.com or follow him on twitter @toddmcmichen.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

2_04: Todd Wilson – Church Multiplication & Your Sweet Spot Calling

2_04: Todd Wilson – Church Multiplication & Your Sweet Spot Calling

By |

Breakthrough ideas with Todd: 

  • What’s the difference between a church plant and a church that’s planted to be a church-planting church?
  • Imagine if somebody offered you a job where you’re 100% in your sweet spot
  • What does it mean to work 100% of my time in your sweet spot?
  • God made the world with sweet spots. They’re everywhere. You can’t go anywhere without them. What would it even mean to be in the sweet spot of calling?
  • What are the common elements of all sweet spots?
  • Every sweet spot God created has three common things. There is a design, there’s a purpose, and there’s a position.
  • Who am I created to be? That’s a design question.
  • What am I made to do? That’s a purpose question.
  • Where am I supposed to do it? That’s a position question.
  • If you can answer the position, design and purpose questions in an integrated way, you’ve found your sweet spot of calling.
  • You’ve got a ministry job, but do you have a vocational calling?
  • Over 90% of people in vocational ministry don’t know what their calling is.
  • We start conditioning our kids from the time they’re born, to focus on doing. Not on being. We skip the being.
  • People have spent their whole life on the doing and the going part, and not focused on the being part. And all of a sudden, they’re realizing, “I don’t really know who I am.”
  • And we have to treat ourselves kind of in a mystery. We’ve got to be the investigator. Our life is the laboratory that we’re investigating.
  • What we’ve got to do is go back to looking more at the ingredients that God has built into our DNA. Rather than just assuming the way that our family, our culture, our journey, our school, our church has put those ingredients together for us and kind of mandated the packaging,
  • The question is, are we going to look at it in a fresh way and discover what is there and how the integration of those things bring us to life?
  • What would you need to be doing that you’d want to spend the rest of your life doing it?
  • Does your church even want to multiply what you’re producing?
  • We are all called to be disciples who make disciples wherever we are.
  • If you feel called to go half-way around the world to dig water wells somewhere you still have to not lose sight of the primary reason you’re there is to be a disciple who makes disciples.
  • The core purpose of the church is disciple-making.
  • The truth in the American church at this point is we have embraced a programmatic approach to accumulating cultural Christians.
  • We are ignoring the primary calling in our churches of biblical disciple-making Jesus’ way opting instead for a programmatic accumulation that relies on our secondary callings.
  • Jesus gave us a model for three years with 12 leaders. The way He’s changing the world is through one on one disciple-making or small group disciple-making relationally.
  • Right now the average nominal operating system in the US church how do we add disciples? We add them programmatically.
  • We can’t get where we need to be on our mission to see church multiplication happening if the church doesn’t get back the Jesus-style or relational disciple-making as the core thing in the church.
  • Jesus could have chosen for three years to go and do big stadium revival events and drawn the most people in the world to do preaching and He could have added people that way. But he didn’t.
  • But what Jesus did was give us a model of reproduction. A disciple who makes a disciple who makes a disciple who makes a disciple.
  • What program in the history of the world has ever reproduced itself on its own? Programs do not reproduce.
  • When you have a programmatic form of addition you will always hit the next plateau.
  • Programs will always hit a plateau and you’ve got to figure out a programmatic strategy to break the programmatic barrier.
  • Multiplication is not something you do immediately. It is the outcome of reproduction four generations in the future.
  • 93% of US churches are not reproducing. Only 7% are.
  • What would the impact to the human population be if 93% of adults didn’t have kids? Because we only have 7% of churches reproducing right now.
  • 75% of the church plants that are being planted are not turning around and planting more churches.
  • Only one in four church plants is planting churches.
  • We have a double problem right now that’s keeping us from multiplication We don’t have enough churches that are reproducing and the kids that we are reproducing are cutting off the reproduction the first generation.
  • Churches have to wrestle through their paradigm of success. We have embedded so deeply in the operating system of the church a formula for success which is rooted in the wrong kind of addition
  • This journey of calling, I think it is so important for leaders of all ages to see themselves as the mystery investigator with a mystery to be untapped.
  • Your calling is something that’s a life-long discernment, you don’t all of a sudden arrive and have it perfectly, but every day, you got to
  • Who doesn’t want to live 100% of the time in their sweet spot, so what is your sweet spot?

Breakthrough resources in this episode:

Exponential

The Church Multiplication Challenge

Discipleship.org

More by Todd Wilson

Outreach Magazine’s Reproducing 100 List

The Five Most Important Questions an Organization Will Ever Ask by Peter Drucker

Todd Wilson is the founder and CEO of Exponential (exponential.org), a national non-profit ministry whose core focus is distributing thought leadership through conferences, books, podcasts, software, and small group learning communities. Todd is also the co-founder of discipleship.org, Passion for Planting (church-planting.net), Made for More, and the Multipliers Project.

Todd received his B.S. in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University and a master’s degree equivalent from the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. He spent 15 years serving in the Division of Naval Reactors on nuclear submarine design, operation, maintenance, and overhaul. After a two-year wrestling match with God, Todd entered full‐time vocational ministry as the Executive Pastor at New Life Christian Church where he played a visionary and strategic role for several years as New Life grew and implemented key initiatives such as multisite, externally focused, and church planting.

Todd’s passion for starting healthy new churches continues to increase, and he now spends most of his energy engaged in a wide range of leading edge and pioneering initiatives aimed at helping catalyze movements of healthy, reproducing churches.

Todd lives in Manassas, Virginia, with his wife Anna. They have two grown boys, Ben and Chris, and two beautiful daughter-in-laws, Therese and Mariah.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

2_03: Daniel Im – Should You Stay or Should You Go?

2_03: Daniel Im – Should You Stay or Should You Go?

By |

Breakthrough ideas with Daniel: 

  • What does it look like to live your life with our hands wide open saying, “Lord, here we are?”
  • Every leader, every pastor, goes through those seasons where restlessness clouds every conversation. What do you do?
  • A lot of leaders that come to those seasons of the restlessness, but how do we know if it’s really time to take the next step?
  • Does unsettledness come as a result of prayer and scripture? Or should unsettledness drive you to deeper times of prayer and time in the Word?
  • It is less critical where your feet are and more important as to where your heart is.
  • It doesn’t matter if we stay, and it doesn’t matter if we go, because we know that we are in God’s hands and that He is a good Father.
  • What would it look like to submit to the Lord rather than trying to lead our lives on our own?
  • Bigger and better opportunities aren’t necessarily always from God.
  • Sometimes God calls us to minister in obscurity for however long He wants, and sometimes He brings us out of that obscurity
  • Regardless of the attendance barrier that you want to grow or breakthrough, you need to move from doing to equipping.
  • You need to move from being a learner to a leader to a multiplier regardless of what barrier you want to breakthrough
  • The tendency that we have in the West is to copy and to model our ministries off of others rather than looking in the mirror and saying, “Okay. Who do we have here?”
  • Every church is unique. So what does it look like to look at yourself in the mirror, to look at your church in the mirror?
  • Church culture is simply the result of consistent decision-making around shared convictions.
  • It’s one thing for the pastor to have values. It’s another thing for those values to be shared within the organization and for us to make consistent decisions around them.
  • Discipleship is not “Here’s another program,” or, “Here is another study.”
  • How are you moving your entire church toward making disciples that make disciples that make disciples?
  • There are a lot of books written that call churches to mimic “Here’s what we do at our church. Just do this.”
  • What are the micro-shifts that will lead to a macro-change?
  • Close to 40% of America is a part of the gig economy, changing the way that we look at work, life, and love.
  • “You are what you experience” is a lie that’s risen to the surface because of Instagram and because of our culture.

Breakthrough resources in this episode:

The Next Right Thing by Emily P. Freeman

The Pastor by Eugene Peterson

No Silver Bullets by Daniel Im  

You Are What You Do by Daniel Im  

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership by Ruth Haley Barton

Daniel Im is the Senior Associate Pastor of Beulah Alliance Church. His latest book is You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love. He is also the author of No Silver Bullets and co-author of Planting Missional Churches. He co-hosts the New Churches Q&A Podcast, as well as the IMbetween Podcast. Daniel and his wife, Christina, live in Edmonton, Alberta with their three children. For more information, visit danielim.com and follow him on social media @danielsangi.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More