Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this big announcement.  Thanks!

***UPDATED with a smaller video file and audio download***

I had the opportunity to talk with Dino Rizzo recently and had a great conversation about servant evangelism, the Healing Place Church, and Dino’s new book Servolution. Have a look (our conversation lasts around 40 minutes or so):

Here is the audio of the interview if you’d like to listen to or download it (90 MB file):

About Dino Rizzo:

Dino and his wife DeLynn started Healing Place Church in 1993 with the single focus of being a healing place for a hurting world. Starting with just twelve, it has now grown to over 7,000 people gathering every weekend in 18 services in 11 locations from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Maputo, Mozambique.

For two consecutive years, Healing Place Church has been listed as one of America’s Top 25 Most Innovative Churches. That innovative drive is expressed in a passion to serve the poor and hurting wherever they are, and with whatever it takes. Every week, hundreds of volunteers serve in outreaches, cooking hot breakfasts for the homeless, helping ex prisoners re-enter society, caring for AIDS orphans, giving roses to ladies working at local strip clubs, and reaching the poor through free medical and dental clinics.

Dino Rizzo also co-founded the Association of Related Churches, a group that on average plants one new church every 12 days. He is a strong believer in the irreplaceable value of the local church, in the USA and across the globe. He also believes that as believers we can do more when we are together, leveraging each other’s strengths to build the Kingdom. As a result, some of his greatest assets are deep relationships with others.

And there are no relationships that matter more to him than those he shares with his wife DeLynn and their three children.

Dino’s book Servolution is now available! Visit the Servolution website for more information.

Based on the hundreds of email responses I received, a large number of you are having difficulty getting servant evangelism going.  If you are wondering how to get servant evangelism started at your church, I think you will find this video very helpful:

I will be posting a few more videos this week, so stay tuned for my email updates about those.

Please leave a comment and let me know if you’ve found this helpful.

Keep walking in the outflow!

Steve

P.S. Look for the Dino Rizzo interview online tomorrow… it’s packed full of inspiration!

I just finished shooting the video with my response to one of the top five outreach challenges people faced. Here it is:

 
Please go ahead and leave a comment below… tell me what you think of “How to Motivate People to Do Outreach.”
 

Though I’m sure there are plenty of times when you probably feel like you’re all alone, you are not. The concerns and issues you have with trying to reach people for Christ are not unique to you or your setting—and that’s good news!

A couple of days ago I asked you (and thousands of other people like you) to share with me the top two challenges you’re facing with doing outreach in your church … and I can’t believe the response!

Hundreds and hundreds of emails from people like you came FLOODING into my inbox.

(Note: If you haven’t written yours yet, I’d still love to hear from you!)

The one thing that was and is abundantly clear is that there are an awful lot of people, just like you, who want to see their community reached for Christ—but are FRUSTRATED because they’re facing difficult roadblocks in front of them.

However, the good news is that the roadblocks you’re facing are all pretty similar. In other words, while you might feel that the roadblocks you’re facing are unique to you and your situation, chances are they’re not. There are probably hundreds of other people, just like you, facing the same situation.

Which is why I’ve decided to develop a series of video responses to the most common challenges that people like you are facing when it comes to reaching their communities for Christ.

So keep checking this blog over the next few weeks. If you’d like to know when I complete each one, enter your name and email in the subscribe form in the upper right of this blog.

However, I have even better news than that. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be unveiling a number of new and exciting opportunities that I’m confident you’re going to find incredibly helpful as you seek to reach more and more people for Christ in your community.

Wishing you outreach success,

P.S. Don’t forget, if you haven’t sent your response to last week’s question yet, send me an email and let me know the top two challenges you’re currently having with outreach… do it now. Make your voice heard!

You might have noticed that I talk about being outward-focused a lot – just look any of my blogs or books I’ve written!

The thing that you might not know about me is that when I first started out in ministry, I hadn’t the slightest idea on how to best share my faith with other people, and even more than that, I had no idea how to motivate the people in my church to share their faith. I tried just about every evangelism method that was out there, and had little success.

That all changed, of course, when God showed me how to show his love by serving people. If you have heard my story at all, you know that the church I started in Cincinnati pioneered what is known as servant evangelism. The unique feature of this church was that we literally gave up after two years of struggling to achieve ‘success’ and made a fateful decision – to give everything away! We even gave our building away! Numbers, attendance – such matrix factors no longer were focused upon. What counted was simply “How many can we serve, love, show generosity to?” It wasn’t long before scads of people were showing up.

Since the launch of the Vineyard Church in Cincinnati, I have seen a movement begin of churches and individuals changing their communities by showing God’s love in practical ways. Over the past 25 years of practicing servant evangelism, I have learned an incredible amount and developed significant resources along the way to help churches and individuals become outward focused. In fact, the last several years I have been pouring my life into church leaders across the country, leaders who desire their churches to be catalysts for change in their community by loving them into a relationship with God.

With all of the people asking me for help, I began working on a way for anyone to have access to all of my knowledge and resources on church outwardness without having to be involved in one-on-one coaching sessions.

For almost a year, I have been working on a website that will do just one thing – connect more people with the idea of becoming outward in their lives. Many people have been asking me when this will launch, people who are quite anxious to have access to these resources.

Well, the wait is ALMOST over! It looks like we are only a few short weeks away from releasing this new system that will drive more ideas your way for your local church outreach. On top of that, you will be able to access several other approaches to outreach that will be immediately applicable to your local situation.

But before I unleash this thing, I want to do one final check to make sure that this system really has everything that YOU need. So I have this one question for you…

What are the top two challenges you are having with outreach right now?

I really want to know… please take a minute to send me an email with your reply.

That’s all for now…

Wishing you outreach success,

P.S. I am dead serious about this – and I really DO value your feedback. I need to know your answer so I can make sure my web system is perfect… What are the top two challenges you are having with outreach right now? Please email me now…

Leading is a state of mind, not a pay rate nor a designation on your business card.

Once you decide you are going to embrace the destiny you have been called to, the first step forward is to embrace your current reality.  In my years of coaching coaches, the most common mistake among the leaders of leaders that ultimately leads to their undoing is the thought that they must be someone they are not.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Your heart may well cry out, “But I’m not ready to be a coach.  My life is a mess!  Just look at me.  No one would follow me or listen to me if they knew what what really going on in my life – if they could see the real me…”

To that I say, “You are catching on now!”

The real you – that’s exactly what we are going to give to them.

The first step toward coaching readiness is authenticity.
No one who coaches will make progress with a fake front.  Those around you are not easily faked out by any poker face you might try to put on at work, in life, in the office environment, etc.  People you work with are very astute.  After a month or two of working with us they have us pegged regarding the majority of our true values based on the way we respond to others, the way we spend our money but mostly the way we treat them in various situations.

There is something to be said for being wisely appropriate, being professional of course.
For example, in my organization, on business trips we make it a point to call one another “Mr.” whatever to remind ourselves that we are on our top professional behavior versus around our normal, casual behavior on the normal home front.

But in our organization we encourage one another to put no effort into playing a role with masks.  The word “hypocrisy” means literally “to wear a mask.”  The problem with wearing a mask is that this behavior is addictive.  It is form of complex lying.  It isn’t just one mask we wear, it is always many masks.  Once this falseness starts, the cycle spirals downward.  At any one time participants typically wear several masks.  People loose track of which mask they have worn with which person or group.

As leaders, if we are to be effective and to give away the gift that we can be to those we are influencing, we must be ourselves – 100% us!  That means, with wisdom and propriety, we live out our lives just as we are, just where we are, along side those we are influencing.

Cohorts Forming for Church Leadership Coaching Sessions through ServeCoach.com
I have been coaching for a number of years now, but I have never been as excited as I am right now about the current group coaching sessions we are putting together. The target of these sessions is church leaders that want to make positive changes in 2009.

Here are the topics we are offering:

Turning your church inside out — Learning to Walk in the Outflow™: Each participant will receive an Outflow Pastor’s Kit which will serve as a guideline for the monthly coach session. (Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

Starting Off Right — Church Planting Smarts:…a strategy for launching that hasn’t failed yet. (Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

Walking out your unique focus as a Leader: Each of us has a one of a kind focus that we have to contribute that only we can give away out of all of the inhabitants of Planet Earth. Discover yours and learn to walk in it. (Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

Embracing Your Church’s Unique Focus: Clarifying your church’s unique focus in the local context. (Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

The Essential “Stay Alive” and “Expand” Skill — Networking: Whether you are a new church plant, mid-way into the process of reaching your community or your story is long established, your group (or you personally) are only as effective as your capacity to connect with those around you.(Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

Communicating to Change Lives, Pt. I: Any pastor or teacher who still calls himself / herself a “preacher” is either in love with the terminology of the past or simply doesn’t understand the fullness of the comprehensive call to connect with the culture around us that God so loves. (Three Sessions — Mar-May 2009).

Cohorts are forming. First sessions will be the second week of March. Sign up now through KindnessResources.com. If you need further information or have questions, email me at steve@kindness.com. One of my staff will respond right away. I look forward to connecting with each one of you in an upcoming coaching session.

Steve Sjogren
January, 2009

Sessions are subject  to minimum participation. Coaching participants should have access to a personal computer and Skype.