We want to say thanks and welcome a new partner to RookiePastor.com when they come on, today we welcome Cook Up Creative. Their mission is to give your church great design at a great price.

To be accepted as an advertising partner with Rookie Pastor it has to be a product/service/resource that is worth your time. Cook Up Creative brings it.

If you are like me and the opposite of a designer you can only ask your designer buddy so many times for free work before he deletes your number from their phone.

Or if you are the creative one you’ve got idiot friends like your’s truly always hitting you up for a graphic. Not only are they always asking it is always last minute, you would think they would realize something they are clueless on might take more than 5 minutes.

This is where Cook Up comes in. They understand that most churches don’t have an in house designer, and the churches that do need an unbiased opinion from time to time. Cook Up and their owner Josh (email) also understand the importance of quality design.

Take a look at the portfolio on Cook Up’s site.

Now walk out and grab that brochure you made for Student Ministry or the sermon slides you were planning on using Sunday.

If you are crying because you realize your work looks like a 3 year old using Microsoft Paint or because you think there is no way you could afford Cook Up, here’s the good news.

$300 a month for unlimited graphic design service.

Is $300 worth the time wasted trying to create something yourself. Or the opportunity missed for ministry or time with family? Is your Sabbath worth $300?

Thanks, Cook Up Creative, for supporting RookiePastor.com. Go check them out!

This is part of a blog series that has 30 practical tips for the pastor looking to start or restart well. You can get the entire series as a Kindle book. The landing page will be updated with each new post.

In my first paid ministry we had people in our home after one of our first Sundays. We put out snacks, turned a football game on and let people walk around our sparsely furnished home. It was one of our better bad ideas.

About 10 minutes before people showed up my wife dropped a big bowl of pretzels. We made eye contact and I said, “laugh or cry babe, laugh or cry.” It was one of those moments in our marriage we both refer back to because we were so overwhelmed with things and had no idea what we were doing, but having people in our home felt right.

Four years later as we were saying goodbye I had a couple tell us how nice it was to be invited over in those first few weeks. And I am confident it had nothing to do with pretzels. We didn’t know what to do or what to say; we just knew it was important to share our home.

As a youth pastor it was also important for us to have students over to model what a (mostly) healthy marriage and home environment looked like.

Sometimes I think we get so wrapped up in what we are going to say, play, or plan that we forget that some of the most important things we do have to do with the example we set.

This is part 1 of a blog series called Leading a Small Group.

My seventh grade English teacher told us to read our papers backwards. When we thought we were done editing to read it backwards and we would catch more of our mistakes. Reading it normally we would gloss over our repeated words, misspellings, or poor word choice.

The key is changing your perspective.

When working on a group curriculum or planning out a meeting it can be easy to get lost in the details. Maybe you are so focused on the icebreaker or setting the tone for your group that by the time you get to the end of your plan you have forgotten what the group was all about.

A lot of Rookie Pastors who work with small groups think that they will be writing multi-week curriculum from scratch. You could do this but you are taking a big risk.

Writing a curriculum is hard and it is easy to lose sight of the end goal. You get bogged down coming up with good opening questions. The videos aren’t lining up with your vision. The booklet is a disaster. You get the idea.

Before you know it you are lost in this mess and you have forgotten where you were headed in the first place.

Plus starting from scratch at the very start will only exaggerate those early mistakes. Don’t be afraid to use someone else’s stuff and adapt if to suit your community.

Regardless of your approach be sure to focus on the end result. As a groups pastor (and in some of my preaching) I’ve started leading with the ending. So even in the groups I lead I tell them where we are going. Don’t be cute and go for a big reveal invite people into your thinking. We aren’t good enough to get cute. For my group leaders when they get a curriculum for me at the very top under the title is the main idea or conclusion. Make it simple.

So when you sit down to write a group curriculum start with the conclusion and figure out the illustrations and icebreakers later. Besides you don’t want the one thing they  remember to be the get to know you game you played.

This is part of a blog series that has 30 practical tips for the pastor looking to start or restart well. You can get the entire series as a Kindle book. The landing page will be updated with each new post.

Every community and church has influential people. Sometimes these are people that enjoy their status a little too much, but other times these are people who just seem to know everybody. You need to get to know these connectors.

These are the people to go to the Friday night football game with or to eat lunch with. If they are always stopping to talk to someone you need to get around them. Sometimes the social dynamic is vastly undervalued in leading the local church, but when done well can be leveraged for great Kingdom work.

Perhaps you don’t think this is important so ask yourself: how many people that you let influence you are people you don’t really like? There are people I don’t connect with and I discount their opinions. They might be authors that I have never me that rub me the wrong way so I don’t read what they have to say. People don’t follow people they don’t like.

This is also about understanding who the gatekeepers are in your community. Administrators at the local school, local politicians, people with a swimming pool and plenty of others are people that can help you in ministry and are good people to introduce yourself to.

If you are getting to know these people simply because you are trying to benefit personally then you have a problem on your hands, but you are completely justified if you are making these connections and meeting these people for the benefit of ministry and connecting with people who are far from God. The issue is how you are looking at this. So get over yourself and get to know people that have influence.