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Today, Church Marketing Sucks published an article that I wrote called “Why your fancy website sucks.” I am very thankful to the guys over there at CMS for giving me a place to use the word “sucks” a lot in an article.

Seriously, I’m pretty honored to be included on their site as I’ve been a long-time follower and fan. It is a great resource for anyone involved in church work. I say anyone, not just those who have titles with “communications” or “technology” in them. The truth is that communication is something we all do so I highly recommend you check out their site, especially the article that I wrote.

And let me know what you think …

Last week, I wrote a guest post on churchcommunicationspro.com called “The only two things your church website needs.”  This week, I posted a follow up article called “Why church leaders must blog on their church websites,” where I drill down into more detail about blogging, what it really is, and why I believe it is one of the only types of content you really need on your church website.

Thanks again to Cory Miller for giving me an audience on his site.  Writing these articles has really made me think about some things I hadn’t thought about in a while.

I wrote a little post that’s featured on ChurchCommunicationsPro.com called “The only two things your church website needs.” Take a look and let me know what you think. I’ve got a follow up post for that site in the works which should be up sometime soon.

By the way, ChurchCommunicationsPro is run by Cory Miller, who is Director of Communications for Quail Springs Baptist Church here in Oklahoma City. Here’s a great guy and has done a pretty fantastic job of professional blogging (not an easy feat, I can tell you) and he provides a great resource for churches, especially smaller churches who don’t have their own communications resources.

Thanks for including me, Cory.

In general, churches waste more money than businesses. Please note that I said “in general.” Naturally, there are exceptions to any rule. But here’s what I’ve learned in my experience of working full-time for a couple of medium to large churches, and now full-time for one small business.

In business, there’s only one bottom line, money. Every dime you spend takes away from the bottom line profit of the business and can only be justified if spending it will result in generating more profit in return. For the most part, it’s pretty easy to measure if you’re making money. And, it’s generally pretty easy to draw a connection between the money you spend and the money you make.

But in church, there are so many purposes. Most churches would tell you that they have a single purpose. My church’s purpose, for example, is “to love all people to Christ and help them on their journey with God and each other.” But just because it’s a single statement, doesn’t mean it’s a single purpose. With a purpose statement like the above, it’s easy to make argument after argument for why we need to spend money on a certain project because it will fit our “purpose.”

I know this because it used to be my job to make these arguments and I got pretty good at it.

So, I’m not saying that churches shouldn’t spend money on stuff. They have to. And they have to do the best they can to determine what are the right things to spend money on.

I’m just saying that drawing the lines, the reports and the nice, neat return on investment graphs is much harder for churches. And if it’s harder to measure the results, then it’s easier to justify spending, even when the spending may not be justifiable.

NOTE: I think it might also be fair to say that huge businesses could suffer from the same issues that churches have in this regard.

There’s an enormous amount of dialog in the church world about worship style. Most of that dialog deals with trying to choose the one worship style that is best for a particular church or a particular service. Most likely, whether your church or service is highly modern or highly classic, you have a particular style that is consistent for that service from week to week.

I don’t hear a lot of dialog about the idea of diversity within a particular service from week to week. Why is that?

Well, that’s a rhetorical question because I can think of a lot of reasons why. I mean, it’s pretty tough to change things up every week. You have to have the right musicians, the right rehearsal schedule, and all of the other resources you need to create your experience.

So, I’m not proposing that worship services should be edgy one week and cathedral the next. But here are a few thing I have found to be effective in pushing the diversity envelope.

1. Rotating leaders. From the primary worship leader to the supporting musicians, I think it’s tremendous to rotate your worship leadership from week to week. The church where I help out does this and I love it. Not only is it great for the leaders who get rest and therefore have a better chance of avoiding burnout and staying fresh, I think it’s also great for the congregation because they don’t get attached to a personality. That way if “the one” is not there on a particular week, it doesn’t seem like a substitute, it’s just the way it is. Why not?
2. Changing instrumentation. Why not vary up the instrumentation from week to week. The same musician lineup will produce about the same sound. Why not make small changes from week to week and even try something way out of the box and uncomfortable every once and a while.
3. Using different songs. Probably the simplest form of diversification is just picking different songs. If you follow #1 and use different worship leaders, this will most likely happen automatically as each leader has a bent in a different direction. It’s tough to balance the use of different songs with the congregation’s need for consistency, but it’s a balancing act that I think is well worth the effort.

I just finished leading a worship service yesterday where I played piano and led the singing. The only other musicians were an acoustic double bass, aux percussion and two other vocalists. That’s it. The sound was dramatically different from what I’m used to and it was difficult for me. It stretched me and made me a bit uncomfortable.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, trying to determine if that’s a bad thing, and I don’t think it is. I believe that God works on us when we are outside of our comfort zones in so many ways. I don’t see why worship would be any different. I pray that yesterday’s service was as much a stretch for our congregation as it was for me, and that God can somehow use this element of diversity for his glory.

Most of the time, I judge the success of worship services by how good I feel about them. I just wonder if that is the right standard to be using. If it’s not, then no matter how I feel, I can never know the true impact of a service, so I shouldn’t worry about it. I should just do the best I can, humbly, to worship God and edify a community of believers.

Craig Groeschel of Life Church fame clearly summarizes one of the most significant lessons I have learned over the past couple of years in his “Developing Leaders: Part 5” post on the LifeChurch.tv Swerve blog.

I don’t really have anything to add to it, just read it. The concept he describes is very simple, yet I have found it to be a very hard thing to reckon with. I believe it applies to church work, family, or pretty much any area of life. It’s an area I know I will spend the rest of my life struggling to improve.