Lead Well

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash John Maxwell famously said that leaders are readers. I’ve taken that to heart and become a voracious reader.  Every year I set a goal to read a certain number of books. I’ve gone all the way to 36 but have settled between 20 to 24. This year, instead of focusing on quantity, I focused on subjects that interested me and read a few pages every day. Somehow, I still got 20 books in. For this post, I broke the books into categories. Each book has an affiliate link to Amazon so you can easily make your list for next year. Thanks for your support! What I read in 2022

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash Come Christmas time a question I see asked over and over is, “What is a good Christmas movie to show at my church?” Whether it’s for simple service for the Sunday after Christmas, a part of your midweek service, or a family movie night outreach, trying to find the right movie for your audience can be tough. We have to consider language, content, message, and several other factors not to mention complying with copyright laws. I’m not going to cover the legality of showing movies in your church, but you should check with your media/ worship pastor at minimum or a lawyer to make sure it’s ok to show. You don’t want Disney coming after you because you decided to show “The Santa Clause” and broke their copyright. With all these factors in mind, here are five movies you can safely show in your church. I’ve vetted all of them and shown most of them in my own ministry. 5 Movies to Show in Church this Christmas

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash Over the last several weeks, I’ve posted about planning for next year. You can read about calendar planning here and budget planning here . If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may realize that just putting dates on a calendar doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Early one September, I was going through my to do list for the week and a calendar reminder popped up. “ K-Team Starts ” Uh-oh. I wasn’t ready. I needed to send out invites, advertise to kids and parents, buy materials, and everything else. What's worse is I had spoken with several parents about it already. They were excited for it to begin. And here I was looking at not just an event, but a whole class. One that I had done nothing to make it happen. That’s when I decided to implement this one simple planning trick to make sure something like this never happened again.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Budgets, love them or hate them, you need to have one to effectively manage the resources God has given you and your ministry. The churches I’ve served in have been on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to budget planning. One of them didn’t give me a budget at all. If I needed something, I had to ask my lead pastor. Most of the time this worked because he would say yes.  However, while I served there, the global recession hit, and we entered a spending freeze for 2 years. I didn’t have a budget and the answer for buying literally anything was almost certainly going to be no. It became impossible to plan and very difficult to minister. On the other side of the spectrum, one church required me to put almost every purchase into its own category. I had income and expense line items for over 20 categories. Many of which were legacy categories my predecessors used that I had no plans for. In addition, I had to painstakingly plan out each c...