July 16, 2025 • 17 mins
Ready for a thriving fall ministry launch? In this episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, we break down the three must-do steps that will set your ministry up for a successful new season—whether your summer’s winding down or you’re just starting to plan ahead.
Your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu, are passionate church consultants with years of experience helping leaders revitalize and grow healthy congregations. If you’re new to the show, you’ll hear practical insights and real-world strategies you can apply right away.
Here’s what we cover in today’s episode:
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[02:00] Why now is the perfect time to set your sermon calendar for the fall
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[07:24] Proven tips for recruiting and organizing your volunteer teams
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[11:09] How to refresh and refocus your church’s strategic ministry projects
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[15:29] Bonus tip: How to actually make time for planning (and stick to it!)
Relevant Links & Resources:
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Explore the Healthy Churches Toolkit: healthychurchestoolkit.com
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Dive deeper with the companion article: malphursgroup.com/299
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Connect with us for more tips and resources: The Malphurs Group on Facebook | Twitter
Ready to lead boldly into the new ministry season? Hit play and let’s get started!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
It's summertime. Let's get ready for that fall ministry launch right now on
the Church Revitalization Podcast.
And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J.
(00:21):
Mathieu. Welcome to the Church
Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my friend and co host,
A.J. Mathieu. A.J. it's as we're recording this, it's
July, and depending on where you live,
you know, it could be school right around the
corner. Where I live in Tennessee, my kids go back
(00:43):
to school the first week of August. Crazy. Earlier every year.
Yeah. We are just mere weeks away, a couple of weeks away from
the beginning of the school year.
So your mileage may vary on that. Right. Like your school where you
live might not start till September.
So that being said, it's still a good time, whether it's
(01:06):
in a few weeks or in. In a month and a half
to start thinking about the fall. And it kind of creeps up on you. I
mean, I think we get to summertime and we think
we got all summer to get ready for the fall. And then before you know
it, between vacation and, you know, fourth of July and all
these things, you get behind the eight ball and then you go, oh, we
(01:27):
gotta. We got some work to do. So we're going to give you three things
today that will set you up for
a great fall season. And there are things that you really need to do
now in advance of the
fall season being upon you, because when, once you get into the swing of the
school year, you're not gonna have time to do this stuff. Yeah, yeah, let's
(01:49):
dive into it. Keep the episode moving at a good pace. Scott,
the first one is set your sermon calendar. So maybe you're already
great at this. This could be just one of the things that you just have
as a strength and you're always looking kind of long term. Or maybe you're
like the Church Revitalization Podcast and you're spirit led
on what the topic's going to be.
(02:12):
Well, I don't want to brag, AJ but we are about to be very good
at planning very soon. That's true.
Yeah, we are. Yes. Both of us are booked up
for almost all of September and October.
And so if you're hearing a episode from us during those
months, it was recorded probably tomorrow.
(02:36):
But yeah, so you can. But this is a great time to be thinking. You
Know, I mean, this, you know, I mean, a lot of times there's a sense
of kind of renewal, rejuvenation, relaunch, all
of the re that you want to apply to the fall. You know, it's kind
of like this, a fresh start that we get every year that
has ended up becoming part of the rhythm of church
life, matching up with the rhythm of home life and school life.
(03:00):
But yeah, we. What are, what are we going to. What are we going to
do? We feel like it's like this homecoming thing. Everybody's back engaged,
and what word does the God have? What does the God does God have for
us to bring to our church? You know, kicking off
whenever your time happens to be. But this is a
great time to be thinking about that. Maybe a few different
(03:21):
miniseries or something that are going to happen in the first few months of the
year. Uh, but yeah, let's, you know, put some prayer time into that. This is
a great time to do it. Maybe you've got a vacation still coming up. Yeah,
yeah. So I, you know, this is. We have a,
A workshop in the Healthy Churches Toolkit on creating
an annual preaching calendar. So if you go to
(03:42):
malforsgroup.com no, just go to healthychurchestoolkit.com
Healthychurchestoolkit.com Sign up free for seven days. You can
watch that workshop. We also have a,
a resource to help you with this planning. And so I don't
want to spoil that workshop for you because we, we go into in depth on
how to put this together really well. And for those of you who, who
(04:05):
maybe have a harder time thinking this stuff through, you are kind of winging it.
Like you finish a series then, or you get towards the end of the series
and go, I don't know what we're gonna do next. There really is a lot
of value. Let me take a step back.
One of the reasons why AJ and I can, you know,
develop these podcasts, sometimes we'll do a few at a time, but for
(04:27):
the most part we're. We do them kind of as they come out
within a, Within a week or two. When you hear it is when we
recorded it. But it's just the two of us who are coordinating it. And so
it's easy to do. When you start talking about church,
it's a different situation. You've got volunteer teams that are
involved. You've got a worship leader, you know,
(04:49):
who's involved, and that, that's whether you're a small church or a large church. And
of course, the larger you are the more people it involves and it's a real
disservice to them to not plan ahead. So with
that being said, having having a clear preaching
calendar makes the quality so much better for everybody else for
their planning. It's a gift to them and a gift to
(05:11):
yourself because you know you're going to be, you know, people are going to be
pounding your door, needing to meet with you or whatever. And if you've not been
planning ahead, you're, you're going to be behind and you're going to be going on.
What are we doing next week? What are we, what series are we doing next
when this one's done? So take the time now when things are less busy,
less hectic in July and look
(05:31):
at what are we doing in the fall. Even if you did create an annual
preaching calendar, now would be a good time to blow the dust off of that
thing and make sure you're clear on what's coming up. What are those
big Sundays that are, that are coming up? Obviously we
have, in the States, at least we have
Labor Day coming up. That's something you have to plan around
(05:55):
the Halloween weekend. You have to plan around Christmas time. You have to plan
around when, when it always kind of creeps up on people. When does Advent
start? You're like, oh, no, we didn't get the candles out. Like you
got all that stuff. Like, now is a good time to be sure you've
got all of those things thought through. So there are no surprises.
The tool in the toolkit will help you plan them.
(06:17):
Yeah, you might be thinking, my team is, they're just great. You know,
I mean, we come up with this stuff and they're, they always pull it off
and they're ready to go. And they might all be thinking to themselves, it would
be nice if we had a month notice instead of, you know, a week
notice. I mean, your worship director planning music, your
children's ministry director planning coloring pages that match
(06:38):
the sermon theme, your small group in Sunday school,
teachers developing perhaps sermon based study
guides, which you can also get in the toolkit in the blink of an
eye. So, yeah, you might think your team just
performs great because they do, but they might
really love some more notice. Yep, yep. So that'd be the first
(07:00):
thing. So set your sermon calendar, review
your sermon calendar. Kind of wherever you have been at in your level of
preparation, either create something that you haven't created or just,
you know, now is a good time to look at the rest of the year.
Maybe you had done an outline before but now you can maybe color in some
more detail. So no one is immune. No matter where you're at in this
(07:21):
process, now is a good time to kind of relook that over. That'd be number
one. Second thing would be to recruit some volunteers for any openings
that you have. Maybe you like to
ignore that and you're like, if I don't say anything, hopefully they'll
just come back and they'll keep doing it. But if you have
a healthy volunteer recruitment system in your church, and we've talked about this
(07:42):
for many times over the last two months here on the podcast. Review
back a couple of episodes. We talk a lot about volunteer recruitment and
engagement. But there could be some people that
sure would love a break. Perhaps maybe they need to move into a
different area of ministry. This is not a great fit for them. Be thinking about
that now. Let's figure out how we can recruit some more people. And we
(08:04):
also have some great tools for you in the toolkit for this. And as I
said previous episodes and. Or
you might be thinking, well, yeah, we've got every. Everybody's is
full. We don't have any openings right now, but do you have enough people to
give those people a break? So you probably do need some more people. Even if
you, if you think you're fully staffed, you might only be half staffed
(08:26):
because you're working them to death. So this is a great time
to be looking at how we can recruit more people.
Maybe work on some training, maybe do
some coaching, maybe just touch base and say, how are you doing?
Are you doing okay in this role? The bane of sort of
volunteer team
(08:48):
development is that is
assumptions. Like you're assuming that the
people who. Or I, I don't want to make that assertion. You
may be assuming that the people who volunteered in the spring are
going to volunteer again in the fall at the same
level of commitment. That may not be true. And
(09:11):
so you want to be sure you've got all of those key
volunteer roles set. Using Planning
center is really helpful. You don't have to just be scheduling from
week to week. You can, you can schedule multiple weeks out. You can roster your
teams multiple weeks out. You could ask
your team right now, hey, if you know dates in the fall that you're going
(09:33):
to be out of town, do you mind to go ahead and block yourself out
so I know when you're not available. And you might discover in that process, I
don't have enough volunteers to cover all of the slots for the whole
fall. So spending a little time again
Maybe you have already done some of this, but. And like AJ Said, maybe,
maybe you already are fully staffed, but that doesn't mean
(09:55):
you aren't going to have gaps. And so you might need to recruit. The best
way for you to know is to actually know. Pull out your plan,
start scheduling, start asking people to block off and
look at all of the positions that you have. Are the seats full? Do you
have enough for healthy rotation, preventing burnout, et cetera?
Don't make the mistake of just winging it with this, because, again, this is what,
(10:17):
what. Lots of times AJ staff are afraid if I start
paying, looking at this too closely, I'm going to discover that there is a hole
and I'd rather just not know. Yeah, it's like an avoidance
tactic that is not serving you well. Lean in,
look at your numbers, see if you've got holes in your.
In your pipeline, and go recruit those
(10:39):
volunteers. Yep. And use the tools in the toolkit to help you. Yeah,
absolutely. Yeah. My wife just got an email yesterday asking if she was going to
be coming back as a. As a Bible study table leader in
women's ministry for the fall. So. So they. It's almost like they
listened to our episode before we even film that.
Perhaps they're just kind of doing something. Okay. Yeah. The team
(11:02):
has decided, you know what, this is a good time to make sure we're ready
for the fall. Now is a great time to do this kind of work. Yeah.
Great minds think alike then. All right, so the last point that we've got for
you today is this is a great opportunity to refresh any of
your strategic projects. We hope that you are always thinking about
the future, that you always have some forward progress
(11:23):
in. In making your church a more efficient
and effective and healthy environment. And so you
should be hopefully always working on one or more
strategic initiatives to improve discipleship, evangelism,
engagement. And this is a great time to just make sure that you've
checked in on those things. How are they doing? When are we. When do we
(11:45):
think we're going to be finishing up something? What's going to be the next thing
that we launch after that? So, yeah, man,
strategy projects. This is a great time of year to reevaluate that.
Probably have been in a lull for that a lot of times. Something
that's been making, you know, progress throughout the kind of
school year, US school year, summertime, people go on
(12:07):
vacation. We're like, yeah, we probably won't be doing any meetings for a couple of
months. So now we want to get re engaged and
reevaluate where we are and where we need to go. Yeah, you know, I'm. I'm
actually. Typically for us, there's
maybe a little bit of a lull in
working with churches and strategic envisioning in the summertime, but that wasn't true this
(12:28):
year. And I'm kind
of. I'm excited. I've got several churches that I've personally been working with
that are starting the implementation process here in
the next week and. Or two. Week
or two. And that's good. It's good timing. It's really
good timing. I think a lot of times churches think the summer's not
(12:51):
a great time for strategic planning, and it is hard to get a team together
and find dates that work for a majority of people. That does make it more
difficult. But it's so great for. For implementation because you
kind of hit the implementation cycle right when
fall is going, and it's just. It's. It's perfect anyways. That being
said, you don't have to be going through strategic
(13:12):
envisioning like a whole strategic planning process. We
recommend something we call Strategic refresh with churches each year.
It's just to go through your plan and update it. What. What
are we tackling? Um, a key to our approach is
you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew in that first year. You really
should select things you can manage in 12 months so that you have
(13:36):
margin and energy to take on something new in the subsequent 12
months. But that only works if you get into that rhythm of selecting new
projects and taking on new things year after year. But that's how you really
change and that's how you really win. So we actually have a workshop on
this in the toolkit as well, on creating annual ministry plans. And
you could watch it now. It doesn't matter that it's summertime and not January,
(13:58):
but. But there's some key principles in that workshop on
how do we select new projects? What kinds of things should we be doing? How
do we update our plans? And we have even have a template for that where
you can go through and. And fill in and update your plans. I would really
encourage you to do that. July is a great time to go. How
are we going to improve by 1% or 2%? And one clarifying point
(14:20):
AJ I want to make is these are projects
above and beyond the normal operation of
ministry. We know you're going to have your events. We know you're going to
have your. Your groups and classes and Sunday
morning and all of the Things that are, you know, doing church,
so to speak. Strategy projects are about improvement.
(14:42):
How are we going to improve? It's a special task
group. However, you arrange that working on a specific project to
improve in a particular area related to your vision. So
maintenance is important, but if you're going to move towards your vision, you got to
move beyond maintenance. And you can only do that when you sort of set key
goals and ways to improve. And so that's. That's what we're talking. You go, yeah.
(15:05):
It is nearing the end of summertime, and you signed up
for this amazing leadership position. So stay ahead of the church.
Make sure that you're planning ahead, but you're looking at your sermon calendar. Make
sure your volunteer teams are all ready to go, and. And
make sure that your strategy projects are staying on pace or ready to
maybe start something new. Thanks for being here. Before you say bye.
(15:28):
Yes. Bonus tip related to this. Okay. Okay.
I. I would encourage you, if you're listening to this and
you are hearing any of these three things or all of these three things
and thinking, I really should do that right now. Unless you're driving, then
pull over and then do this right now. Look at your calendar and
schedule the time you're going to work on that. Don't just
(15:51):
say, that's a good idea. I should do that. Yeah. Right now. Roll over
or stop what you're doing, look at your calendar and block off
a whole day if you need to and say, I'm going to do some fall
work. And I won't tell you how exactly to do that, because
personalities are different. But, you know, if it's
me, I need part of that day by myself to sit with a piece of
(16:13):
paper and just start making some notes. And. And then I need part of that
day with AJ to verbalize. Cause I'm. I am a.
He knows. And podcast listeners know I'm a verbal processor. I have
to work my ideas out verbally. And then I'll. And you. You know,
aj, I'll go, oh, that was dumb. That's a stupid idea. Like. But I. Sometimes
I don't know it's stupid until I say it out loud to someone else. And
(16:33):
I go, oh, that's really dumb. So however that needs to
look for you, don't just say you're gonna do it. Don't just think, oh, yeah,
that's a good idea. Make a time. This is what I'm doing. It is a.
That is valuable advice. Yes. I have been getting better at that. I've got
things on my calendar that I put weeks or months in advance
to make sure that I did something that needs to be done at the right
(16:54):
time. I have one of those today, actually, that, that I'll be working on. So,
yeah, great advice. Hey, everybody. Links to
this week's Show Notes are below in the podcast
app that you're using or on YouTube, down in the description. If that's
where you're joining us today, we're glad that you're there. Links to the toolkit will
be available, or if you click into the Show Notes, we've got other resources
(17:16):
that you could also check out in alignment with the things that we've talked about.
Thanks for being with us, everyone. We'll see you again next week.
It's summertime. Let's get ready for that fall ministry launch right now on
the Church Revitalization Podcast.
And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J.
(00:21):
Mathieu. Welcome to the Church
Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my friend and co host,
A.J. Mathieu. A.J. it's as we're recording this, it's
July, and depending on where you live,
you know, it could be school right around the
corner. Where I live in Tennessee, my kids go back
(00:43):
to school the first week of August. Crazy. Earlier every year.
Yeah. We are just mere weeks away, a couple of weeks away from
the beginning of the school year.
So your mileage may vary on that. Right. Like your school where you
live might not start till September.
So that being said, it's still a good time, whether it's
(01:06):
in a few weeks or in. In a month and a half
to start thinking about the fall. And it kind of creeps up on you. I
mean, I think we get to summertime and we think
we got all summer to get ready for the fall. And then before you know
it, between vacation and, you know, fourth of July and all
these things, you get behind the eight ball and then you go, oh, we
(01:27):
gotta. We got some work to do. So we're going to give you three things
today that will set you up for
a great fall season. And there are things that you really need to do
now in advance of the
fall season being upon you, because when, once you get into the swing of the
school year, you're not gonna have time to do this stuff. Yeah, yeah, let's
(01:49):
dive into it. Keep the episode moving at a good pace. Scott,
the first one is set your sermon calendar. So maybe you're already
great at this. This could be just one of the things that you just have
as a strength and you're always looking kind of long term. Or maybe you're
like the Church Revitalization Podcast and you're spirit led
on what the topic's going to be.
(02:12):
Well, I don't want to brag, AJ but we are about to be very good
at planning very soon. That's true.
Yeah, we are. Yes. Both of us are booked up
for almost all of September and October.
And so if you're hearing a episode from us during those
months, it was recorded probably tomorrow.
(02:36):
But yeah, so you can. But this is a great time to be thinking. You
Know, I mean, this, you know, I mean, a lot of times there's a sense
of kind of renewal, rejuvenation, relaunch, all
of the re that you want to apply to the fall. You know, it's kind
of like this, a fresh start that we get every year that
has ended up becoming part of the rhythm of church
life, matching up with the rhythm of home life and school life.
(03:00):
But yeah, we. What are, what are we going to. What are we going to
do? We feel like it's like this homecoming thing. Everybody's back engaged,
and what word does the God have? What does the God does God have for
us to bring to our church? You know, kicking off
whenever your time happens to be. But this is a
great time to be thinking about that. Maybe a few different
(03:21):
miniseries or something that are going to happen in the first few months of the
year. Uh, but yeah, let's, you know, put some prayer time into that. This is
a great time to do it. Maybe you've got a vacation still coming up. Yeah,
yeah. So I, you know, this is. We have a,
A workshop in the Healthy Churches Toolkit on creating
an annual preaching calendar. So if you go to
(03:42):
malforsgroup.com no, just go to healthychurchestoolkit.com
Healthychurchestoolkit.com Sign up free for seven days. You can
watch that workshop. We also have a,
a resource to help you with this planning. And so I don't
want to spoil that workshop for you because we, we go into in depth on
how to put this together really well. And for those of you who, who
(04:05):
maybe have a harder time thinking this stuff through, you are kind of winging it.
Like you finish a series then, or you get towards the end of the series
and go, I don't know what we're gonna do next. There really is a lot
of value. Let me take a step back.
One of the reasons why AJ and I can, you know,
develop these podcasts, sometimes we'll do a few at a time, but for
(04:27):
the most part we're. We do them kind of as they come out
within a, Within a week or two. When you hear it is when we
recorded it. But it's just the two of us who are coordinating it. And so
it's easy to do. When you start talking about church,
it's a different situation. You've got volunteer teams that are
involved. You've got a worship leader, you know,
(04:49):
who's involved, and that, that's whether you're a small church or a large church. And
of course, the larger you are the more people it involves and it's a real
disservice to them to not plan ahead. So with
that being said, having having a clear preaching
calendar makes the quality so much better for everybody else for
their planning. It's a gift to them and a gift to
(05:11):
yourself because you know you're going to be, you know, people are going to be
pounding your door, needing to meet with you or whatever. And if you've not been
planning ahead, you're, you're going to be behind and you're going to be going on.
What are we doing next week? What are we, what series are we doing next
when this one's done? So take the time now when things are less busy,
less hectic in July and look
(05:31):
at what are we doing in the fall. Even if you did create an annual
preaching calendar, now would be a good time to blow the dust off of that
thing and make sure you're clear on what's coming up. What are those
big Sundays that are, that are coming up? Obviously we
have, in the States, at least we have
Labor Day coming up. That's something you have to plan around
(05:55):
the Halloween weekend. You have to plan around Christmas time. You have to plan
around when, when it always kind of creeps up on people. When does Advent
start? You're like, oh, no, we didn't get the candles out. Like you
got all that stuff. Like, now is a good time to be sure you've
got all of those things thought through. So there are no surprises.
The tool in the toolkit will help you plan them.
(06:17):
Yeah, you might be thinking, my team is, they're just great. You know,
I mean, we come up with this stuff and they're, they always pull it off
and they're ready to go. And they might all be thinking to themselves, it would
be nice if we had a month notice instead of, you know, a week
notice. I mean, your worship director planning music, your
children's ministry director planning coloring pages that match
(06:38):
the sermon theme, your small group in Sunday school,
teachers developing perhaps sermon based study
guides, which you can also get in the toolkit in the blink of an
eye. So, yeah, you might think your team just
performs great because they do, but they might
really love some more notice. Yep, yep. So that'd be the first
(07:00):
thing. So set your sermon calendar, review
your sermon calendar. Kind of wherever you have been at in your level of
preparation, either create something that you haven't created or just,
you know, now is a good time to look at the rest of the year.
Maybe you had done an outline before but now you can maybe color in some
more detail. So no one is immune. No matter where you're at in this
(07:21):
process, now is a good time to kind of relook that over. That'd be number
one. Second thing would be to recruit some volunteers for any openings
that you have. Maybe you like to
ignore that and you're like, if I don't say anything, hopefully they'll
just come back and they'll keep doing it. But if you have
a healthy volunteer recruitment system in your church, and we've talked about this
(07:42):
for many times over the last two months here on the podcast. Review
back a couple of episodes. We talk a lot about volunteer recruitment and
engagement. But there could be some people that
sure would love a break. Perhaps maybe they need to move into a
different area of ministry. This is not a great fit for them. Be thinking about
that now. Let's figure out how we can recruit some more people. And we
(08:04):
also have some great tools for you in the toolkit for this. And as I
said previous episodes and. Or
you might be thinking, well, yeah, we've got every. Everybody's is
full. We don't have any openings right now, but do you have enough people to
give those people a break? So you probably do need some more people. Even if
you, if you think you're fully staffed, you might only be half staffed
(08:26):
because you're working them to death. So this is a great time
to be looking at how we can recruit more people.
Maybe work on some training, maybe do
some coaching, maybe just touch base and say, how are you doing?
Are you doing okay in this role? The bane of sort of
volunteer team
(08:48):
development is that is
assumptions. Like you're assuming that the
people who. Or I, I don't want to make that assertion. You
may be assuming that the people who volunteered in the spring are
going to volunteer again in the fall at the same
level of commitment. That may not be true. And
(09:11):
so you want to be sure you've got all of those key
volunteer roles set. Using Planning
center is really helpful. You don't have to just be scheduling from
week to week. You can, you can schedule multiple weeks out. You can roster your
teams multiple weeks out. You could ask
your team right now, hey, if you know dates in the fall that you're going
(09:33):
to be out of town, do you mind to go ahead and block yourself out
so I know when you're not available. And you might discover in that process, I
don't have enough volunteers to cover all of the slots for the whole
fall. So spending a little time again
Maybe you have already done some of this, but. And like AJ Said, maybe,
maybe you already are fully staffed, but that doesn't mean
(09:55):
you aren't going to have gaps. And so you might need to recruit. The best
way for you to know is to actually know. Pull out your plan,
start scheduling, start asking people to block off and
look at all of the positions that you have. Are the seats full? Do you
have enough for healthy rotation, preventing burnout, et cetera?
Don't make the mistake of just winging it with this, because, again, this is what,
(10:17):
what. Lots of times AJ staff are afraid if I start
paying, looking at this too closely, I'm going to discover that there is a hole
and I'd rather just not know. Yeah, it's like an avoidance
tactic that is not serving you well. Lean in,
look at your numbers, see if you've got holes in your.
In your pipeline, and go recruit those
(10:39):
volunteers. Yep. And use the tools in the toolkit to help you. Yeah,
absolutely. Yeah. My wife just got an email yesterday asking if she was going to
be coming back as a. As a Bible study table leader in
women's ministry for the fall. So. So they. It's almost like they
listened to our episode before we even film that.
Perhaps they're just kind of doing something. Okay. Yeah. The team
(11:02):
has decided, you know what, this is a good time to make sure we're ready
for the fall. Now is a great time to do this kind of work. Yeah.
Great minds think alike then. All right, so the last point that we've got for
you today is this is a great opportunity to refresh any of
your strategic projects. We hope that you are always thinking about
the future, that you always have some forward progress
(11:23):
in. In making your church a more efficient
and effective and healthy environment. And so you
should be hopefully always working on one or more
strategic initiatives to improve discipleship, evangelism,
engagement. And this is a great time to just make sure that you've
checked in on those things. How are they doing? When are we. When do we
(11:45):
think we're going to be finishing up something? What's going to be the next thing
that we launch after that? So, yeah, man,
strategy projects. This is a great time of year to reevaluate that.
Probably have been in a lull for that a lot of times. Something
that's been making, you know, progress throughout the kind of
school year, US school year, summertime, people go on
(12:07):
vacation. We're like, yeah, we probably won't be doing any meetings for a couple of
months. So now we want to get re engaged and
reevaluate where we are and where we need to go. Yeah, you know, I'm. I'm
actually. Typically for us, there's
maybe a little bit of a lull in
working with churches and strategic envisioning in the summertime, but that wasn't true this
(12:28):
year. And I'm kind
of. I'm excited. I've got several churches that I've personally been working with
that are starting the implementation process here in
the next week and. Or two. Week
or two. And that's good. It's good timing. It's really
good timing. I think a lot of times churches think the summer's not
(12:51):
a great time for strategic planning, and it is hard to get a team together
and find dates that work for a majority of people. That does make it more
difficult. But it's so great for. For implementation because you
kind of hit the implementation cycle right when
fall is going, and it's just. It's. It's perfect anyways. That being
said, you don't have to be going through strategic
(13:12):
envisioning like a whole strategic planning process. We
recommend something we call Strategic refresh with churches each year.
It's just to go through your plan and update it. What. What
are we tackling? Um, a key to our approach is
you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew in that first year. You really
should select things you can manage in 12 months so that you have
(13:36):
margin and energy to take on something new in the subsequent 12
months. But that only works if you get into that rhythm of selecting new
projects and taking on new things year after year. But that's how you really
change and that's how you really win. So we actually have a workshop on
this in the toolkit as well, on creating annual ministry plans. And
you could watch it now. It doesn't matter that it's summertime and not January,
(13:58):
but. But there's some key principles in that workshop on
how do we select new projects? What kinds of things should we be doing? How
do we update our plans? And we have even have a template for that where
you can go through and. And fill in and update your plans. I would really
encourage you to do that. July is a great time to go. How
are we going to improve by 1% or 2%? And one clarifying point
(14:20):
AJ I want to make is these are projects
above and beyond the normal operation of
ministry. We know you're going to have your events. We know you're going to
have your. Your groups and classes and Sunday
morning and all of the Things that are, you know, doing church,
so to speak. Strategy projects are about improvement.
(14:42):
How are we going to improve? It's a special task
group. However, you arrange that working on a specific project to
improve in a particular area related to your vision. So
maintenance is important, but if you're going to move towards your vision, you got to
move beyond maintenance. And you can only do that when you sort of set key
goals and ways to improve. And so that's. That's what we're talking. You go, yeah.
(15:05):
It is nearing the end of summertime, and you signed up
for this amazing leadership position. So stay ahead of the church.
Make sure that you're planning ahead, but you're looking at your sermon calendar. Make
sure your volunteer teams are all ready to go, and. And
make sure that your strategy projects are staying on pace or ready to
maybe start something new. Thanks for being here. Before you say bye.
(15:28):
Yes. Bonus tip related to this. Okay. Okay.
I. I would encourage you, if you're listening to this and
you are hearing any of these three things or all of these three things
and thinking, I really should do that right now. Unless you're driving, then
pull over and then do this right now. Look at your calendar and
schedule the time you're going to work on that. Don't just
(15:51):
say, that's a good idea. I should do that. Yeah. Right now. Roll over
or stop what you're doing, look at your calendar and block off
a whole day if you need to and say, I'm going to do some fall
work. And I won't tell you how exactly to do that, because
personalities are different. But, you know, if it's
me, I need part of that day by myself to sit with a piece of
(16:13):
paper and just start making some notes. And. And then I need part of that
day with AJ to verbalize. Cause I'm. I am a.
He knows. And podcast listeners know I'm a verbal processor. I have
to work my ideas out verbally. And then I'll. And you. You know,
aj, I'll go, oh, that was dumb. That's a stupid idea. Like. But I. Sometimes
I don't know it's stupid until I say it out loud to someone else. And
(16:33):
I go, oh, that's really dumb. So however that needs to
look for you, don't just say you're gonna do it. Don't just think, oh, yeah,
that's a good idea. Make a time. This is what I'm doing. It is a.
That is valuable advice. Yes. I have been getting better at that. I've got
things on my calendar that I put weeks or months in advance
to make sure that I did something that needs to be done at the right
(16:54):
time. I have one of those today, actually, that, that I'll be working on. So,
yeah, great advice. Hey, everybody. Links to
this week's Show Notes are below in the podcast
app that you're using or on YouTube, down in the description. If that's
where you're joining us today, we're glad that you're there. Links to the toolkit will
be available, or if you click into the Show Notes, we've got other resources
(17:16):
that you could also check out in alignment with the things that we've talked about.
Thanks for being with us, everyone. We'll see you again next week.
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