e of the disadvantages of waiting until March 1 to be fully on board
with Kairos is that it puts me behind in preparations for Easter Sunday.
As you may know, this is one of the largest attendance days for any
church. Some churches use this to an advantage and try to connect with
new people, those seeking to return to Jesus, and others who may desire
a relationship with God. After preaching for established churches for 20
years, I did not notice how well this day could bless a congregation until 
we planted Agape Church of Christ. Easter took on a different dimen-
sion as we planned, strategized, prepared, and invited as many people to 
church as we could during the Spring. Easter also provided a powerful 
boost to “snapping out of the February Funk” that we so often experi-
enced.

Last year we followed the Spring Surge program with Kairos and saw
an increase in our attendance along with two baptisms. While we were
not prepared enough to offer Spring Surge again this year, I would like
to encourage you to develop your own Easter plan. I will also point you 
to free or low cost resources for you and your congregation. Three sim-
ple steps can help you plan to make Easter a convenient way to reach 
new people for Jesus while energizing members to break out of their
comfort zones and invite others.

Decide that Easter Sunday will be a special focus Sunday. Whether your group will meet on Easter Sunday in one location, or you are moving to small groups due to the Covid-19 Virus regulations, you can decide that Easter Sunday will be a special day of worship. Easter is a time that people think about the resurrection, so remind people to be aware of this.

Develop a plan to connect with people who attend. Try something creative: prepare a lesson that
addresses resurrection themes, encourage the group to share how God is putting people in their lives in preparation for Easter. You will find resources for your Social Media, Website, and
Worship program through these website/online companies.
 Proclaim and Faithlife
 Dan Stevers
 Outreach and Prochurchmedia.com
 Do you know of others?

Dedicate extra time to not only recognize your guests, but follow up with them. Give them a gift
for coming. Get them to fill out an information card and encourage them to follow the ministry. I know that we have heard individuals suggest that guests don’t want to be bothered, or that people flee churches that encourage members to be friendly. I am sure these people exist. However, after 13 years as a church planter and 35 years in ministry I can tell countless stories of people who came to church high, hungover, hurting, feeling alone, and needing hope who have testified later that someone in our church greeted them, sat by them, or even talked extensively with them—and that changed their life. Let God’s people encourage your guests—that is their ministry!

Bruce Bates, our lab leader, reflected on the week with these words: "It's inspiring what we do. Lifting up leaders, letting God build their platform and then letting them fly. Sometimes we truly have the best job in the world."

The work of discovery is both invigorating and exhausting. Interviews and observations are interspersed with personal stories and worship. Nights are short and days are long. Above, one of our candidate couples leads us in a time of praise.

By Joe Carr

A couple of days before the new year, I got a call from a local ministry friend. He told me that a minister he knows in California had met a young man in need of help. The young man (we'll call him, "Seth") had grown up in New Hampshire but had been living on the street after losing his job and all of his money due to his addictions. Seth had recently had something of a mystical experience where he felt as if he was suddenly awakened by someone while sleeping alone in an abandoned warehouse. This experience also seemed to awaken a desire in him for getting sober and putting his life back together. And so Seth went searching for help, and that is when he ran into this man that knows my friend. It was Christmas day. He and this minister met over lunch at Burger King. After hearing his story, this man offered to buy Seth a plane ticket home if he thought there would be someone there to see him get the help he needed. 

 Purposeful apprenticeships are one of the best ways to raise up new leaders for the future of the church. But having an apprentice at your church as a go-fer or a warm body can lead quickly to boredom, frustration, and stagnation. Below are some ideas to help engage apprentices in your church's work and prepare them for ministry beyond their time with you.

1. Appoint a Director
The adage "If it's everybody's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility" is certainly true for apprentices. You can't assume that an apprentice will find his or her own way around and will figure out how to spend time. Having an intern with no director can easily lead to one of two extremes: someone who ends up sitting around with nothing to do or a someone who ends up inundated with all the tasks no one else wants to do. One extreme leads to stagnation and the other leads to resentment and burnout.

In order to make the apprenticeship a positive experience for everyone, your apprentice should have a director or supervisor. The director should establish expectations and schedule regular meeting times. Consider setting up a weekly one hour meeting just before or after your regular staff meetings to go over the past week and set goals for the coming one.

2. Expose Your Apprentice to a Variety of Ministries
Your apprentice should be exposed to as many ministries as possible. This might take the form of a weekly rotation (Mondays in the preschool, Tuesday at Alpha, etc.) or could be set on the calendar according to the church's cycle of busy seasons. The children's minister will need help planning VBS. The youth group can always use a chaperone on summer mission trips. And there's always room for someone to take responsibility during busy holiday seasons like Christmas and Easter.

3. Assign Your Apprentice Quality Reading Material
There are so many great books on developing leadership. We highly recommend "Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership" by Ruth Haley Barton. A couple other books to consider are "The Hero Maker" by Dave Ferguson (this one is for the director, too!) and "Evangelism as Exiles" by Elliot Clark on sharing faith in a culture that no longer welcomes Jesus.

4. Give Your Apprentice Opportunities To Meet Your Congregation
The first chunk of time can be spent getting to know your church and its culture. Get your apprentice a stack of index cards to write down the names of the people they meet, what their life situation is, and any other snippets of personal story each person offers. Have them visit your various Bible classes, small groups, and other regular activities to get an overview of what your church is about and who your people are.

5. Ramp Up the Responsibility
Your apprentice might start out just getting to know people, but as time goes on, responsibilities should increase. Move your apprentice from basic faith conversations to leading classes or groups. Not sure how to do that? Consider working through the Emerging Leadership Training Course on Sharing Faith. It gives regular assignments that will increase your apprentice's involvement and level of responsibility.

6. Teach Your Apprentice How to Have Spiritual Conversations
One of the skills covered in the Sharing Faith ELT is how to have 3 question conversations that move you from asking polite questions to interest questions to caring questions. Give your apprentice opportunities to speak with strangers and move them from small talk to real talk. During your weekly debrief, ask about these conversations. What went right? What went wrong? What will he do differently next time?

7. Expect Your Apprentice to Establish Regular Spiritual Rhythms
Of course, you can't expect to form a new habit in someone you're training if you don't practice it yourself.  Encourage your apprentice to establish a daily office of prayer and study, weekly rhythms of prayer, and regularly scheduled chunks of time spent in silence, stillness, and solitude.

8. Help Your Apprentice Figure Out "What's Next"
​As you get to know your apprentice, you'll start to see giftings, strengths, and weaknesses. Pay attention to these and encourage him or her to seek out the next step that will play to their strengths, but also have room for growth in areas of weakness or inexperience.

Last year was a busy year in the Kairos network--but what year isn't? A new church born, another closed. Planters assessed. Apprentices trained. A new staff member. And more forward movement for the future of God's kingdom across America.

​We hope you enjoy the slideshow that gives a quick visual of what Kairos Church Planting is all about.

​A disturbing prospect looms before us as the fact of our decline of Churches of Christ (CoC) has moved from unbelievable to undeniable. The question we must answer is no longer, “How are we doing;” our question is now, “What shall we do about it?”

I've written articles for The Great Commission Journal and in collaboration with Tim Woodroof addressing the urgent need to plan for the future of Churches of Christ before it's too late. In my most recent article at wineskins.org, I offer 3 of the biggest challenges facing the Churches of Christ and 3 strategies to meet those challenges.

If God has invested heavily in this branch of the tree of Christianity, can't we do the same?

In the olden days of a decade or more ago, the internet was the Wild, Wild West. Everyone “needed” a website, but didn’t know what to put on it. So, they included everything. At Kairos, we over cluttered our website with the best of them. But web audiences have changed and tastes have become more refined. If you want your church website to work for you, here are a few tips for clean and effective design.

Color
Your Website should have, at most, 3 colors—one primary, one secondary, and one for accent or Pop! If you don’t know how to find a trio of colors that matches, coolors.co can help you pick out a great, contemporary color palette.

Fonts
Fonts, like colors, can work for you or against you. Limit yourself to three fonts. More than that is just too visually confusing. Just like with colors, there is a great website to help you out. FontPair.co has all the latest fonts already paired up for you to use.

Platform
Running a website can be super complicated, where you hire a designer or a developer and any time you want to make changes, you have to run them through that person. If I may be so bold, just stop it! We want to be 21st -century churches, so let’s use 21st -century technology. Two companies that I think are great for a church are SquareSpace and Wix. Both of these companies provide hosting and have great looking templates for your site. They are basically a one stop shop and are very reasonable prices. If you just really want more flexibility you can use Wordpress.
​
You can get go a lot more in depth on website design, logo design, and choosing a theme or template, but these basics will get you started. Use your website as a way to delegate and develop leaders. And use it to give potential guests a first glance of what visiting church might look like.

The first century church didn’t like art all that much. In that time, it was too closely connected with their suppressors, the Roman Empire. Through the centuries, the church has, in turn, embraced the power of art, and rejected it. In 21st century America, it’s good to embrace it. Americans today are more aware of good and bad design than ever. We have grown into sophisticated consumers who are familiar with fonts and videos, colors, and photography. We know what we like and what we don’t like, even if we can’t put a finger of exactly why design or lack of it makes us feel a certain way.

1. Good design speaks to people who are not listening.

The world these days is constantly changing. There’s always a new iPhone coming out, a redesign on your favorite website, a new display at the grocery store. When things look the same, they become invisible.
By changing and refreshing your church’s design, you make the message visible in new and engaging ways. When we do the same things with the same look for years on end, old habits become old hat. Keep the message True, but use design to change the way it looks, whether it’s by changing worship order, stage design, web or print design.

2. Good design helps people receive your message

Do you learn by seeing or by hearing? Some of us are visual learners and some of us are auditory learners. And to make things more complicated, however you gather information through any of your senses, you have to process it emotionally, socially, and intellectually.
In that order.
The first step to any of that, though, is in sensing. When someone visits your church, what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch are giving them the information they need to make a judgment on whether your church is the right one for them.
By choosing aesthetically pleasing, consistent design, whether on your website, in print, or on the screen at church, you are allowing the message of the Gospel to land easily where there are fewer barriers to it being received.

3. Good design matters to God.

​God is the ultimate designer. At the end of each phase of his ultimate design project (the creation of the universe), he stood back and said, “It is good.” Not, “it’s okay,” or “I’ll do better next time,” but “It is good.” In the same way that he put care and thought into the design of the earth, we can reflect Him by putting effort into design that moves people into deep, reflective, glorifying worship.

If you want your church to make an impact for your city, you might think you have to go it alone. But partnering with organizations in your area can strengthen your networks and provide opportunities for you to make connections. Partnering with your city and its organizations uses Missional muscles and takes advantage of existing structures in your local setting. You can work with proven, established services, while using their resources to help accomplish your church’s mission in making disciples.

Many civic and non-profit agencies have great budgets but run short on volunteers. By helping them out, you can use their resources to accomplish your goals.  Some of these local organizations might be:

• Better Business Bureau
• Main Street Associations
• Chamber of Commerce
• Your local city government (City Council)
• Farmer’s Markets
• Parades
• State & County Fairs
• Food Banks
• Homeless Associations
• School Districts & Community Colleges

Start with connections across a cross section of your community. Don’t limit yourself to working with only one organization. Partnerships tend to grow and deepen with time, but it’s hard to know up front which partnerships will yield the best fruit.
​

1. Partner in ways that are mutually beneficial. Neither you nor the community organization should feel like you’re only giving and not receiving.
2. Work with people, not just organizations. Be sure there is a specific person in each organization who is your go-to person.
3. Share the vision, share the load. Develop your vision collaboratively so both parties carry ownership. Include both parties in decision making.
4. Communicate progress. When you experience a victory—or a failure—be sure to communicate with your partner organization. Shared information helps everyone adjust as needed.
5. Be available. Be willing and open to serve on committees and boards. Attend city council meetings. Show you care by investing in your community.
6. Think big. Dream big. Act big. Momentum is your friend. When an activity looks like it is succeeding, it is more likely to draw more volunteers and participants.
7. Remember who you are. Partnerships are amazing, but there’s a danger of losing your own identity, your own mission, in the partnership. Always keep in mind what your goal is in partnering with community organizations and don’t let it get lost.

If you want more ideas on building and maintaining community partnerships, Andy Coe wrote a terrific article for the International Nonprofit Development Council, which is available on Convergent Nonprofit Solution’s website.

I’ve been blessed to coach great leaders who are starting new missional churches around the country.  The best leaders are hungry for wisdom and insight!  Here are things I’ve noticed in them.  Look for these qualities in yourself and other leaders you are trying to add to your team.