God is doing miracles through online outreach. Here’s the reality: Church attendance is not decreasing; it’s decentralizing. Digital channels do not compete with physical attendance, they partner with it. A discipleship pathway will serve you in making digital disciples.

A “Discipleship pathway” is the intentional route, steps, and paths in your church to develop missionary disciples for Kingdom impact. It is the engine for the effectiveness of your mission. The goal for a discipleship pathway is never to get someone through it; the goal is to get individuals to own it. As long as the church owns the pathway, the only possible response for an individual is consumption. When something is ours, a shift happens inside of us, and we tend to approach it in a fundamentally different way.

Our world desperately needs disciples who not only call themselves Christians, but who reflect Jesus. The accountability factor is what takes a micro-shift from the individual level to the church-wide level and where you can begin seeing discipleship as a system from a thirty-thousand-foot level. When a micro-shift is made at this level, your church will embark on a new trajectory to both spiritual and numerical growth.

25 years ago Starbucks made a shift. If Starbucks had only focused on the what, without making an intentional shift to the where and when, they would not have experienced the widespread success that they have. After all, people do not just go to Starbucks for the coffee; they also go to relax, read, work, and have conversations. This micro-shift led to a macro-change in the coffee-drinking culture. What if you could make a similar micro-shift as a church leader that would result in a macro-change in your disciple making culture? What if this micro-shift would set your church on a trajectory to both spiritual and numerical growth? Would you consider it?

The simple truth is that strategy is what takes us from where we are (point A) to where we want to be (point B).

Go through each one of these items and ask yourselves how are we doing on this? Close the gaps. Remember, intentionality is the key to becoming a welcoming church.

Your First Impression is the greatest impression you can ever make for a newcomer. Here are 5 easy ways to make a great first impression.

Unless you overlay accountability onto the micro-shift we described in Starbucks, Micro-Shifts and Discipleship, all you have is a solid lesson in a discipleship class. Our world desperately needs disciples who reflect Jesus.

Imagine if 75% of your church were actively engaged in the discipling of pre-Christians and Christians? What a day that would be.

The average person has no idea what next steps to take to connect into this congregation and what the destination (being a part of the church) might look like. It’s up to us as leaders to create clear and obvious next steps for them.

I’ve asked a similar question to pastors who have seen their ministries and churches grow over the years … “what is one reason you can think of as to why your ministry grew?” Their answer shocked me.

We don’t want to create any barriers for people to come to Jesus Christ and we want to do our best to be a church that is in the community and for the community.

Belong, believe, become are three popular words that summarize a value system and a process of discipleship. Perhaps your church makes use of them in a slogan or value statement. The words and their order are important but not nearly as important as getting belonging right.

Just like we encourage churches to do when they’re live, we also encourage you to do this EVERY SUNDAY online; Preach the gospel and invite people to respond.

Change should be the one constant in your church and ministry.  Pastors are in the business of change. 

People come to church for many reasons, but they only stay for one – that they’ve made good friends.  If we transformed our children’s ministry into something that facilitates the building of these friendships we would keep far more of our kids and families from falling through the cracks.

People are already coming to your church and what they are looking for is a sense of belonging; do they want me here?  And the overwhelming answer should be YES.  So here are some things you can do starting this Sunday that won’t cost you anything.