My church just came through a pretty significant Generosity Initiative. The big question that many of our staff asked was “Will people actually give what they committed this time?” Because last time we did this, we had a low percentage of people actually follow through. But was it entirely their fault?
I’m exited to be teaching at the XPastor Seminar in about a month from now. If you’ve never been before, it’s not too late to sign up and I’d highly recommend it regardless of where you are in your development as an XP.
We’ve just come through our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic Church. One of the most important things that we did that I have not posted about yet is the special website. We discussed making it a separate URL but ultimately chose to make it an extension of our normal site, thisismosaic.org . So we went with www.thisismosaic.org/getloud .
I want to point out a few things about the site.
We created a lot of videos to go along with our generosity initiative. This is the last one to post here. It’s from the week that we talked about Generosity in the Bible. What does the Bible teach about generosity and what is appropriate for others to step into at Mosaic.
Here is another video we created for our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic. This one is on World Change.
Adoption and Foster Care are a big part of our story at Mosaic. Here is a video we created for our Get Loud initiative to demonstrate the kinds of stories we love to step into! Maybe you can get some ideas from it for your church.
We are continuing in our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic Church. Here is a video we used in a sermon talking about Life Transformation. The kind of Life Transformation that can happen when we choose to Get Loud for the Gospel.
When you think about a Missional Community, I find that it is helpful to think about a team of missionaries in a foreign context. What characteristics would you expect to find in a healthy team of missionaries in another country? We expect certain things of missionaries who go serve in another country. Why would we not expect the same things of team of missionaries serving locally in our context? As I think about the expectations of teams of missionaries and apply those to a Missional Community, here is the list that I discover.
Our church is out of space. I mean really out of space. The sanctuary at our largest campus is built to hold 400 people. We’re putting 550 chairs in that room, and seeing an average of 525 adults per gathering. It’s unpleasant.
A Missional Community is a group of people who orient their lives around being on mission together to make the Gospel known among a target group of people (a shared network of relationships, neighborhood, or need in their city). A Missional Community is a team of Missionaries working together for the glory of God in their local context. There are three reasons why I believe Missional Communities are the best way for a local church to live out the gospel in community on mission.
Today at 1PM EST, I’ll be interviewed by the team at Innovate For Jesus on the role of the Executive Pastor. Tim Stevens will also be on the show with me. Tim used to be the XP at Granger Community Church and now works for Vanderbloemen Search Group.
Email is like a visit to the dentist. You don’t really want to go. You’re a little nervous about what you might find, but at some point, it just has to be done. It’s painful to open your inbox after only a couple hours of meetings to find dozens of new emails dying for a response. It doesn’t have to be this bad. But here’s the deal – to quote Smokey The Bear, “only you can prevent forest fires”. With each new crop of interns that come through our church, I share some simple tips for making e-mail less painful for those around you. These are rules I try to live by. I thought I’d share them with you in hopes that together, we can reduce the volume in our inbox, and the length of the emails in it. (Plus I wanted to link to this article in my own e-mail footer, maybe you should too!)
We all know that our churches need to serve our communities, but let’s be honest, that can often degenerate into offering things at your buildings, and hoping that people will show up and “be served”. A few years ago, we took this to a whole new level with Mission Serve:Local. It has grown each year and last Saturday, over 600 people who call Mosaic Church home fanned out into the community to serve in over 50 projects, then returned for lunch together. Here is a full post about it. Having promoted this event for several weeks, we wanted to celebrate it right away, the very next day at all of our services with a video. That meant having one of our video people do a super fast turnaround on a video by editing all of the content in just a few hours. It also meant sending our story team around to multiple projects to capture video and pictures. I think it turned out well. Check it out.
English and Spanish versions available on Amazon in Paperback and Kindle E-book.
Phil Taylor
My name is Phil. I spent 20 years pastoring (mostly executive pastoring) and now I serve churches all over through consulting on buildings and brands at Plain Joe Studios and coaching Executive Pastors. My wife and I have three kids and one grandchild. I’m into running and kayaking.
