***Thanks to Tim in Berea, OH who sent over an ultra-optimized video file that’s only 60MB!***

Mike Slaughter shares his heart as it relates to over 30 years of solid ministry at Ginghamsburg Church at Tipp City (Dayton), Ohio. Slaughter reflects upon how his initial church growth strategy misfired. He had to get a vision from on high.

His pathway has been marked by moderate but consistent growth ever since. That same growth has been repeated year after year as he has sought to disciple small numbers of people in his span of care – never more than a dozen people at a time though. Hear how that simple approach to outward care continues to transform the lives of his leaders and his city today.

He shares thoughts on the makings of the church that is destined for outwardness that leads to health. It is an exciting perspective that will lift your heart and mind.

Here’s the MP3 of the interview you can listen to or download. It is 84MB (we’ll get this smaller soon).

Slaughter’s newest book is in the final creative stages with the publishers:
Change The World - rediscovering the ministry and message of Jesus.
Release date of January, 2010 (Abingdon Press).

About Mike Slaughter
Chief Dreamer, Ginghamsburg Church
Mike Slaughter, lead pastor at Ginghamsburg Church, is the three-decade dreamer of Ginghamsburg Church and spiritual entrepreneur of ministry marketplace innovations.  His life-long passion to reach the lost and set the oppressed free has now made him a tireless and leading advocate for the displaced children, women and men of Darfur, Sudan, named by the U.N. as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.  Under Mike’s leadership, Ginghamsburg Church has become known as an early innovator of small group ministry, the Church “media reformation” and cyberministry, with the Ginghamsburg website averaging 50,000 visits monthly from around the world.  Since initiating The Sudan Project in January 2005, Ginghamsburg has invested over $3.7 million into humanitarian relief in Darfur.  The resultant agricultural project, child development program and safe water initiative are expanding to reach a quarter of a million Sudanese refugees and villagers.  As a mentor, Mike travels globally to speak and use his “gift of irritation” to equip ministry leaders to minimize brick and maximize mission so that they may fully deploy the mission of Jesus into the world.  Mike is also the author of multiple books for church leaders.  For more information about Mike, visit www.mikeslaughter.com.

A number of readers wrote in to us, sharing their desire to reach people in their community, but were frustrated due to a lack of finances. I hope this video helps you move forward, no matter what your financial situation.

Also, you will want to check back this Thursday to watch my interview with Mike Slaughter, pastor of Ginghamsburg Church in Tipp City, OH. We’ll be talking about how it’s time to rediscover our apostolic DNA and become the church Christ intended us to be. To stay in the loop, sign up your name and email in the form on the right side of the page.

***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!

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…

Starting Off Right – Church Planting Smarts
    …a strategy for launching that hasn’t failed yet
Currently approximately 80% of all church start ups fail within a 3 to 5 year time frame.  To add to that statistic, what is defined as “success” is set as such a low mark (100 in total attendance on a good weekend – counting adults and children) – I suspect many reading this would like to see more momentum than simply that after such an enormous amount of input as is required in a church plant.  

After planting four churches personally and directly coaching over 50 churches with just 3 failures from that group, our strategy obviously is doing some things differently than the typical planting approach.  

It is no surprise that at its root, much of what we will look at are building skills and perspectives that balance an inward and outwardness on the teeter-totter of church life.  Very few church planters have in-born skills that are anywhere close to what is needed to gather a group of people who will eventually comprise the church they aspire to see.  Without significant coaching church planters are destined to become teachers who:  
- gather already believers from other churches (not from outside the Church world), OR
- gather already believers who are patrons of the “smorgasbord” of fine dining of the church world – church aficionados with an acquired taste for a particular kind of church that appeals to them, and will serve them.  Unfortunately, much of what was billed as part of he church planting movement has degenerated to this form of “church” in lieu of a redemptive model the Great Commission Jesus spoke clearly of.  
IMPORTANT NOTE:  Each of these coaching sessions will be conducted from the angle / assumption that the church planter / team in question desires to build a church that will ultimately reach the city / culture at large, NOT simply move people from Church A to Church B, which is what is going on in the vast majority of church plants currently when accurate stats are laid out.  
These sessions will be presented based on our experience which has been to connect with a high percentage of not-yet believing people as well as some percentage of already believing people.  Everyone claims to reach the not-yet believers, but in reality few are producing results.  
Our story tells how to do the above.  

Among other focus issues we will look at:

•    Looking each session at super practical issues that every church planter – no matter what point you are at – at the pre-planting / planning stage, or midway into things (1 or 2 years into things), or perhaps you are a church planting coach…  The emphasis here will be placed upon practical tools for planters who are carrying out the task of putting a new outward focused church into orbit.  

•    How to connect with your city without falling into the trap of becoming an “Either-Or” church (“We have to decide to be EITHER a church for not-yet believers OR a church for the committed, deep veteran believers…”  There is a third way that we have built that works wonderfully that attracts both groups powerfully.)  

•    How to prioritize your limited time as a planter.  

•    Learn how to transition from phase to phase depending on where you are, where you are going in your plant.  

•    Learn how to think strategically with your plant.  

•    Learn now to think as a team person, not a “Lone Ranger” (Lone Ranger planters are small, and stay small forever – teams grow but one must learn essential team leading skills along the way)

•    Learn how to recruit a team based on your strengths / weaknesses as the “Lead Goose”  

•    Learn how to see beyond what is now toward what is coming / based on the plan God has given you / is giving you and you are faithfully carrying out…

•    Learn to operate in daily / weekly profoundness and avoid mere cuteness or cleverness