Every business, church or organization needs to have passion to make it work. Passion is the fire that feeds people and gives them energy to keep going. Here’s a great look at what passion should look like: Reverse-engineering passion: part 1.
Kathy Sierra says there are seven ways to realize passion. And rather than focusing on one or two of them, we should always do things that help our users:
Evangelize
Connect
Learn
Improve
Show Off
Spend Time
Spend Money
Often we want to do the later, but not the rest.
It’s easy to throw money at a project or ministry or organization, but without the rest, there is no passion.
When people leave our meetings or fellowships or use our products,
Do they want to tell everyone else about it?
Do they want to find ways to connect with others who have used the product or tried the church?
Do they go to a website or blog to learn more about us?
Do they try to feel like they’ve improved or know how they can be a better Christian or believer when they leave?
Are they proud to be a member or a part of the group?
Do they want to keep coming back and spending time using the product or spending time with the group?
And a big one for the church –
Do they put their money where their faith is? Or do they believe in the ministry strongly enough to open up their wallets?
Passionate people create more passionate people. Passion breads passion. And that can do nothing but strengthen a cause, a group or a belief.
Author: Jonathan Blundell
I'm a husband, father of three, blogger, podcaster, author and media geek who is hoping to live a simple life and follow The Way.
Creating Passionate Users: Users don’t care if you are the best.
Creating Passionate Users blogged this week about how Users don’t care if you are the best.
It really had me thinking about ministry and the church and even my own work at The Belton Journal.
According to sociologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, people don’t care how great my product or message is – they care about how great it will make them.
It makes sense. Anytime I’ve been in sales, I’ve always been trained and taught, don’t sell the product, sell how the product will benefit the user.
I have a really cool cell-phone in my opinion. A Motorola V551. I love it – now that I have one that works right.
It has bluetooth technology, a still camera, video camera and all sorts of gizmos that I think belong on a cell phone.
Now if I were to show this phone to my mom, she wouldn’t understand.
“Mom this phone has bluetooth, a camera, voice memo record and handsfree! Isn’t that great?!”
She’d look at me like I was an idiot (well maybe not an idiot – she is my mom after all).
She wouldn’t understand.
But maybe if I told her of how all these tools can benefit her, she might be interested.
“Mom, I know you love taking pictures and seeing pictures of your family – this phone lets you carry a camera with you, so you can take a picture where ever you are and then send it to any other cell phone. And if you want to save the picture to print it out later, you can use the bluetooth feature to send the picture, or video, to your computer, so you can print it out or save it to a disk.”
That gives her a lot more reason to make the purchase. She now sees how the phones features will benefit her.
Just because a phone is high tech, doesn’t mean it’s for everyone, but now she has reason to believe, this is the phone for her.
When I share the gospel with someone, its one thing to tell them how great I am because I’m a Christian and its another thing to tell them how great their life (and eternal life) will be if they become a Christian.
Share how being a Christian has benefited you and how it will benefit them as well.
Ministry Follow Ups
Effective Web Ministry makes a great point with a recent blog, Quick! Follow Up!
A recent study showed that of people who send comments or seek responses from websites:
– one in five near receives a reply
– a third receive messages that are deemed unhelpful
– 31 percent of firms did not respond consistently or did not respond at all to online inquiries
– only 47 percent were answered within a day of being sent
If you’re doing ministry, how quickly are you responding to inquiries?
How quickly are you responding to visitors to your blog, website or even your services?
I try to keep a rule in my office: Always return calls the same day you receive them.
Now, somedays that just not possible, but when I’m on the other end, a quick response goes a long long way.
Respond quickly, efficiently and completely.
4 Ways Blogging Can Change Your Church
Churchmarketing sucks.com relayed an article from Lifeway that tells of 4 Ways Blogging Can Change Your Church.
Here’s a quick summary:
1. Blogging will bring churches closer together as it closes a communication gap
2. Blogging will help to develop sermons and classes
3. Blogging will break down barriers and remove masks
4. Blogging will help the church to engage the culture.
Saint John’s Bible
So I was doing a bit of web surfing before I went night, night tonight and I came across this site, The Saint Johns Bible.
I haven’t had much time to look at it and seeing that my laptop battery is getting low — and it is 4 in the morning. I probably won’t look at it much more tonight.
But it looks very interesting. According to the site:
At the dawn of the 21st century, Saint John’s Abbey and University seek to ignite the spiritual imagination of believers throughout the world by commissioning a work of art that illuminates the Word of God for a new millennium.
Apparently they are writing the entire Bible in calligraphy with ink and quill. Some of the artwork looks amazing.
I’ll be excited to stay on top of this and see the progress they make.
Flowers make all the difference
Originally published as Church Flowers in The Belton Journal
A pastor in St. Paul, Minn. blogged this week about a flower garden planted in front of his church.
First of all, I love pastors that blog regularly. It gives a lot of insight into the ministry and what they go through and see throughout the week.
Some even give insight into how their weekly sermon progresses.
Fellowship Church in Dallas has a blog set up for their entire church staff to post notes and journals on. (UPDATE: While Pastor Ed Young still blogs, I can’t find the blogs for the entire staff anymore.)
It gives you a connection with the staff that you might not otherwise have.
But I digress…
Pastor Pat Kahnke of St. Paul Fellowship Church writes that he noticed a bunch of kids bustling around in the church parking lot earlier this week.
As he walked closer he realized that a number of his church members had taken the initiative to plow up a weedy section of their church lot and plant a flower bed in its place.
While planting the flower bed, one of the church members knocked on a neighboring house door to ask to borrow a water hose.
The church neighbor said they could borrow the hose that day and year-round to keep the flower bed looking healthy.
And as a result, another member volunteered to plow the man’s backyard for him.
What a great sign of ministry on so many levels.
They took the care of the church upon themselves
No one sat around and waited for a church beautification committee to tell them what needed to be done. No building committee hired out work that church members could easily do.
People took responsibility for their church and went the extra mile to be sure their place of worship was taken care of.
What if each of us looked for areas in our own churches or work places where we could go the extra mile without being asked?
What if we quit shrugging responsibility for things in our offices or church and stepped up and said, “This needs to be done — and I’m going to do it. Even if it’s not in my job description and even if I may not be an expert on the subject.–
They involved outsiders
One of the things I love about this story is that it involved people in the neighborhood.
Now granted, with a little planning they could have brought their own water hose, but think of the ministry opportunity they would have missed. In the process, they made sure that a neighbor of the church knew what was going on at the church and then found a way to meet him at his need.
Wasn’t that Jesus’ entire ministry was about? He met people at their need.
If we are passionate about what we do, or wherever we do it, it can be contagious – people will want to be a part of it.
A business cannot grow without new customers and a church cannot grow without new members. We must rid ourselves of being exclusive or selective in who we reach out to. We must bring outsiders in.
A few months ago I wrote about George Masters who was so passionate about Apple’s iPod, that he spent several hours designing a complete television commercial based on his favorite toy.
“Why would a school teacher spend a good chunk of his free time, for five months, crafting a really slick ad for no money? For no real recognition other than a, ‘Hey, that’s cool,’ from a few friends? Because he really, really likes his iPod,– wrote blogger Andy Havens. “Masters frankly admits that he partly worked on the project as a way of teaching himself some computer animation basics, and to be part of a portfolio. That being said, why pick the iPod mini as his subject? Because he’s a huge fan. And let’s remember that ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic.’–
If we can get people passionate about our product or message, people will become a part of the message and share it with them where ever they go.
Little efforts can go a long way
Third, as Pastor Kahnke wrote in his blog that he was blessed and ministered to by seeing their effort and the beautiful flowers left by their effort.
A pastor who was worn down was encouraged and blessed by a small effort by members of his congregation.
I can’t imagine that this group of church goers would have realized the impact their thoughtfulness had on their pastor, or the impact it would have on a newspaper editor some 1,113 miles away.
You never know what impact your willingness to serve will have on others.