2. The more adjectives in a church name, the stranger the church.
Adjectives aren’t inherently bad.
They can be an interesting feature on a dinner menu. When something is hand-fed, organic, locally sourced and maple-infused, two things are true: It will likely be awesome and it will likely be expensive. Apart from the cost, the more adjectives the better when it comes to dining.
But a good thing on the dinner menu can be a bad thing at church.
If you are the First Episcopal Baptist Freestyle Church of the Holiness of the Tabernacle of God, there’s a significantly disproportionate chance unchurched people aren’t going to check out your church.
If you need that many adjectives to explain how different you are from everyone else, everyone else may feel excluded. It just sounds too weird, however awesome your adjectives might sound to you.
A simple church name communicates welcome better than the 12-adjective special from days gone by.
Want to communicate that you’re a welcoming church? Drop some adjectives from your name.
Same goes for a pastor’s title, by the way. If you need to be the Reverend Doctor Brother Pastor X, you’re putting up a wall between you and the people you serve.
3. The longer an email and the fewer paragraphs and spaces it contains, the worse it is.
So that single-paragraph, three-page email with no spaces you got was awful, wasn’t it?
It’s like there’s this secret angry-person email rule book that says the angrier and less helpful you are, the longer you should write and the less space you should put in this document.
How do you deal with a long, unhelpful email?
Give a short but empathetic reply. Something like, “I’m so sorry you feel that way. I’ll take your views into consideration. Thanks, Carey.”
Kills the trolls every time without you being a jerk.
I know what you’re saying … but what if that email is from a key leader that makes a great contribution to our church?
Simple. Key leaders that make great contributions to your church never write emails like that. Ever.
And in the off chance one does … call that leader and schedule a lunch right away. It will probably take less time than a full reply anyway.
For everything else, short, honest, empathetic replies to long emails almost always improve the dynamic.
