Happy Mother's Day!

With the ladies of your church on your mind today, this is a great time to consider how to create a healthy women’s ministry. While previous women’s ministry may have involved a limited number of events and activities, ironically, new avenues for ministry are more open than ever before.

How can your church innovate women’s ministry during this season?
ONSITE & OFFSITE WOMEN'S GROUPS
The focus for ministry is often directed towards on-campus groups and Bible studies, but now you can take principles you are learning during the Coronavirus season to focus off-campus and online as well. You may discover that some of your women will like these off-campus and online options better than the on-campus offerings.

MOTHER'S DAY LAUNCH
Create a quick talking head series. That just means to put a teacher in front of a camera and teaching directly to the camera. This could be the senior pastor, a pastor’s wife, a women’s Bible study leader, or another female speaker. These groups could start 2 or 3 weeks after Mother’s Day. Just use this weekend of Mother’s Day to announce what’s ahead, then start shooting the video. Groups could start online and off-campus (depending on your localities restrictions). You don’t have to have the whole thing done ahead of time , just shoot one week ahead of groups, then upload to Youtube or Vimeo.

CONTENT CREATOR
What if you could take your best teaching material that your pastor, their spouse, and any other teacher in the ministry could repurpose from what they’ve done in the past? Whether you are the pastor, associate pastor, Sunday school teacher, or Women’s ministry leader, you could create an online edition of your teaching material. Over time, you could even leverage your past, present and future content to create additional Bible studies, classes, and courses that will reach an off-campus and online audience. In this day of print-on-demand and self-publishing, you could also create books, curriculum, devotionals, study guides, courses, journals, social media posts, and more! There’s a big, bold world out there and a congregation waiting to be taught, led, and reached online. At LifeTogether, we are partnering with local churches to create content for every one of their adult ministries, Midweek services, and every one of their Senior Pastors and teaching series. 

LIFESTAGE STARTER CURRICULUM FOR ADULTS
As you repurpose your content, think of using it to launch affinity ministries in your church through small groups. You can do this by writing a Women’s edition, a Men’s edition, a Singles’ edition, a Couples’ edition, and/or a Seniors’ edition with questions and applications tailored specifically to these affinities
RELATIONSHIP SUMMER/FALL CAMPAIGN
Start with your own idea, a past series, or get inspiration at SermonCurator.com to help your people build into their marriages in this next season. Quarantine has taken a toll on even the best marriages. Let’s face it -- it’s a lot of stress and a lot of togetherness. Invest in the marriages in your church ASAP. You can do this for any theme including relationships, marriage, parenting, or any other topic you’ve preached more than once.
WOMEN’S CURRICULUM SERIES
Think about your next women’s event, even if it’s a ways off. If you bring in a speaker, ask the speaker to shoot a couple of 6-8 minute videos which you could turn into a curriculum. Do the same with your women’s director, Bible study leaders, and small group leaders. You can create a decentralized series for groups.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH ALIGNMENT CAMPAIGN
One of the most effective ways to get the men and women in your congregation connected into a group is to have your pastor host a Church Alignment campaign. It’s the perfect way to get couple’s connected beyond the Women’s ministry and help to build marriages at the same time. Over the last two decades, we have created and produced over 1,000 video teaching series that align with the weekend church services. It may seem complex, but it can be very simple if you consider producing a custom or semi-custom campaign based off an upcoming sermon series. You may have used other church campaigns in the past from other pastors and publishers, but your people will respond far greater if it’s your pastor doing the teaching, your staff doing the training, your people doing the testimonies, and your full-color magazine style curriculum filled with hundreds of your photos from your congregation. It’s a time tested, proven strategy to connect the majority of the adults in your congregation. The timing is perfect to not just create an on-campus alignment strategy, but to launch both online and off-campus- continuing the ministry that you have began during this season. Check out this page to see how you could create a Spiritual Growth Church-wide Campaign this Summer, Fall, or New Year.
HOW TO BUILD A HEALTHY (PURPOSE-DRIVEN) WOMEN’S MINISTRY
During my time helping to direct the small group ministry at Saddleback Church, I was responsible for creating a strategy to reach and develop thousands of women to not just gather for a time of teaching and fellowship, but also to mobilize them for ministry and multiply them for missions. We create content that covers a broad variety of felt needs and real needs for the women in your church. We did a series with Tony Evans and his daughter Priscilla Shirer titled Destiny that helped women not just go deeper in the study of God’s word and go deeper in community, but called them up and out to live the life that God imagined for each one of them. We did another with Christine Caine called Influence  that motivated women to leverage their God-given roles, ministry, and family for Kingdom purposes.


Finally, one of the most effective ways to cultivate a healthy ministry is to cultivate a healthy church- and the best way by far to do that is to host a 40 Days of Purpose campaign that will inspire and equip every man, woman, and child in your church to live a healthy, balanced Purpose Driven life. 

CREATE ONLINE CONTENT FOR EVERY ADULT AFFINITY AND LIFESTAGE  
If we’ve learned anything during this Coronavirus season, it’s not very difficult to create video content that is distributed not just on campus in a classroom, but online designed to reach any target audience or any affinity ministry. Empower every one of your adult ministries to repurpose any one of their best teaching series and produce the video teaching and stage a one-day video shoot in a single location and have every one of the ministry leaders come and deliver their best teaching series addressing the felt needs of their audience. You could do the same thing with every one of your Sunday school teachers, especially those that are targeting couples, seniors, singles, and any other teaching series that you like. 

CORE VALUES SERIES
As your church is connecting more people through your online worship services, it’s time to introduce your church’s values to them and to remind your whole church about what you stand for. Use your time this Spring to prepare, then shoot a video-based vision and values series this Summer to launch this Fall.

MOBILIZE FOR MINISTRY
Think of your faithful greeters, ushers, and others who serve from week to week. Now that the weekend service is online, where do they serve? They would love to reach out and care for others in your congregation. Encourage them to find a need and fill it. Direct them to ministry to felt needs like a food bank, job training, or marriage mentoring. You could also organize a campaign and have those volunteers call every man, woman and couple in your church, and while you’re at it, you could recruit them to help you call the next wave of members in your church.

MOTIVATE THROUGH STORIES
People love stories. A story draws people in. Stories can inspire and instruct. Now that your church is creating more media than ever before, change it up and tell the stories of faith in your congregation and make these shareable on social media. One of the best examples of a story was one that we produced on Mother’s Day one year featuring four generations including Kay Warren, her mom, her daughter, and one of her granddaughters. This is a great idea to do with the pastor’s spouse or any one of the senior staff. Creating medley stories for any adult ministry could transform the level of authenticity, sharing, and sheer inspiration. Spread hope!
MAXIMIZE EVERYBODY’S LIFE MISSION 
One of the most exciting projects we ever worked on was a project with Tim Harlow at Parkview Church in a series called Life on Mission. The goal of this series was to create a church alignment campaign that motivated people to discover, deploy, and develop their life mission. It was a simple model for helping people share their faith and encourage baby steps in sharing the Gospel. This series included numerous testimonies, teaching segments, and training resources that were second to few 40 Day Campaigns we have ever produced. Pastors.com now makes this series available, along with a companion book that was developed with this project. Whether it’s life on mission or another series, both reminding and raising the value for sharing your faith and living your life mission needs to forever be encouraged- and that’s how you build a healthy church ministry. 

• See the Life on Mission Print Curriculum
MULTIPLY YOUR SPIRITUAL LIFE
Debbie Eaton was in a women’s study with 30 table groups at Saddleback. One day her table leader wasn’t there, so she stepped up to lead. After leading a few tables over time, she came to lead the entire Women’s Ministry at Saddleback Church. She connected over 5,000 women in groups! Andrea Minor worked 15 hours a week at Willow Creek. She discipled other women. This part-time job led to mentoring thousands of women. All you need are transferable resources to start groups online and off-campus.


For more information on any of these programs, please contact Allen White at 949-235-7428 or allen@lifetogether.com .


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