20 years ago I was at a place in ministry where I wanted out.  It was not what I expected it to be when I started working for a church full time 9 years earlier.  Maybe you've been there.  If so you likely know that hardship like this is often the path God uses to mature us and refine our calling.  

No one likes bottlenecks. And if there's a way around, we want to know and use it.  Groupfinder is a way for people to get around typical bottlenecks associated with finding a small group.  Check out the last blog to see recommendations on how to customize it for your church.  In this blog we're going to show you how to link Groupfinder to Text-to-Church^TM, and use maps to help people find a group.

Bottleneck.  If you've been in one of the hundreds of small group webinars I've done, you've heard me talk about how I used to feel like the bottleneck to people connecting in groups when I was on church staff.  Sure, I was the catalyst in the sense of promoting, creating events, responding to cards, and meeting with people to help them connect.  But because our team was central to all of these, I felt like we were the bottleneck in the system. 

In a classic scene in the movie, The Patriot, Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin gives his sons shooting advice to save their brother, "Aim small, miss small."  It is the pivotal point in the story where Benjamin transitions from disengagement in a great cause to full engagement.  

Eight weeks ago, I did a blog post on using Workflows to help you with volunteer recruitment.  This is the time of the year that most church staff are stressed out to make sure all the volunteers needed are in place.  But, once you get them recruited and trained, there is still the challenge of getting everyone scheduled.

We released text to give in early 2017. To get an idea about what difference text to give is making in churches 2 years later, I researched giving over the past six months in five churches that have been intentional in using online and text giving as part of their stewardship development strategy. 

I'm in the process of writing another blog post on giving by text with some new statistics I'm eager to share about how texting and online giving work together.  But we've needed a blog post for quite awhile to follow-up this blog post in April, 2018 about Check Data Entry.

About this time of the year families begin to get excited about the upcoming school year.  And churches begin planning their fall launch.  At the intersection of both is Promotion Sunday!  The big Sunday when all the kids move up a grade.

Let's say the Jordans have children involved in youth sports.  Generally, they attend worship and Sunday School at 9:30 a.m. on Sundays.  But their new league plays about half their games on Sunday mornings.  So, during those weeks the Jordans attend worship and Sunday School during the 4 p.m. service on Saturday.  A great solution provided by an understanding church! 

Since February I've been blogging on ways to use Workflows to automate many of the routine but vitally important tasks related to people, communication and processes in the church. 

The other day, Kathi from Ohio asked about creating a workflow for her pastors to care for and encourage survivors after the death of their spouse. She is pretty good at  workflows and had already defined the pathway.

The conversation reminded me of many others we've had about how to handle the death of a spouse from the perspective of the database. So, let's start with that and then get to the workflow.

Today's post is a follow-up to last week's on volunteer recruitment.  The two posts work in tandem, you really need to master both to get the process down.

Last time we saw the need for a Ministry Connection Central group that simplifies church-wide communication and then auto-registers responses for specific Ministry Connection follow-up.

We then saw how to use a specific Ministry Connection group to develop a follow-up system to move those interested in connecting to their next step of registering for training. The system automates communication to ensure we are doing due diligence as staff to honor their initial interest.