What exactly should a church staff be reading together? First of all, if your staff is not going through books together then you are missing out on one of the key principles for leadership and team development. But what are the best and most effective books a staff can read?

There are corporate books, leadership books, marketing books, personal growth books, church growth books and there are several books in a collection called the Bible that are pretty good. We’ve learned there’s no set order of books to read to grow or transition a church but it must be driven by the leadership.

Whatever is on the Pastor’s heart and the things God is revealing to the leader is the best place to start. You should also factor in the church’s stage of growth, the current challenges you’re facing, and what is holding you back.

Here are a few scenarios that drove us to reading the following books at Elevation:

Let’s start a church
Purpose Driven Church, Warren (we focused on chapters 1-14)
7 Practices of Effective Ministry, Stanley
Simply Strategic Growth, Stevens and Morgan

Let’s create a buzz
The Purple Cow, Godin

We need to have a unified team
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni (or anything else by that guy)

Let’s go multi-site
The Mutli-Site Revolution, Surratt
The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber

Personal development of staff
Fresh Wind Fresh Fire, Cymbala
Integrity, Cloud
In a Pit with a Lion, Batterson

We need to develop leaders
Leadership Pipeline, Charan
The Next Generation Leader, Stanley

Take it to the next level
Good to Great, Collins
Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim

This is a snapshot of the books that we have gone through as a staff in the short history of Elevation Church. We’ve also created a leadership development plan for new employees to read some of these books to catch up with the books that have shaped the culture of Elevation Church.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

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We have tested every PC based presentation software program and could never find a program that met all our needs. Then we found ProPresenter and we were forced to go Apple. Last year at Northpoints’ Drive Conference I met the owner of Renewed Vision and he sold me on ProPresenter. By the end of the month we’ll be running 10 Macs with ProPresenter for each worship experience. To date it has never, not once crashed.

I talk to many people that are scared to move over to Apple, I was one of them. I’ve personally built 100’s of PC’s and had been a Microsoft fan for years. Then I got my 1^st MacBook Pro. Remember if you still need to run Windows programs you can run Bootcamp. We dual purpose all of our Macs each week. Our creative department and volunteers use these computers for video editing, programming and graphic design throughout the week.

ProPresenter is very user friendly, which is important because volunteers are running the program most of the time. We are able to quickly train people how to use the program and provide an error free worship experience. I urge you to go to their website and check out all the features.

Damion Pirolli – Production Director

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We have been absolutely swamped the past few months with questions about how our Evite pages work.

The page runs almost entirely in PHP. HTML is used only to create the form and it’s elements. The form’s method is post, and the action is set to itself; so that when submit is clicked, it comes right back to this same page. Just previous to loading, the page checks to see if a post variable, “submit,” is set. If so, the script continues on to separate all the email addresses specified and store them as an array. A for loop goes through each of the email addresses and calls the mail() function.

This is all pretty straight-forward, but can still be confusing. I’ve tried to make the code as clear as I could; you can view it below. There’s a number of places I’ve noted in the following code that need be changed.

evites.php

Caleb Loffer, Flipping Web Genius

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Currently, we stream all of our videos and audio through Lightcast Media. This allows us to embed streamable videos to any webpage (explained in this tutorial.) Unfortunately, the Lightcast Media player does not feature a click-to-play option, but that’s not to say there’s no work-around.

The idea behind faking a click-to-play Lightcast video is an extremely simple one, and could be used for any media player. The only requirements are the use of the html tag “iframe,” two .php or .html files, and the support php. This post assumes the reader has a very basic knowledge of HTML and PHP. Note that all source code will be listed at the bottom of this post.

Starting at the lowest level, I’ve created an iframe with it’s src tag pointing to what we’ll call “mediaNoAutoplay.php” This file contains only one image which links to another file we’ll call “media.php” The image is a screen-capture of the lightcast media player with a play button pasted on top of it, (see this image for an example.) To avoid using a click-to-play, you can simply point said iframe’s src tag to the next file we’re going to mention, “media.php”

The first php file, “mediaNoAutoPlay.php,” will contain a refrence to Lightcast’s javascript file, plus a few div tags. It’s essentially the bear bones of what you’ll see on their default player link, (see this video for an example.)

A php tag added where Lightcast requires a video’s ID and you’re set. Take a look at the snippets below. I’ve cut them down to be very easy to understand. Once you have put “mediaNoAutoplay.php” and “media.php” on your server and setup the links properly, set the ’src’ variable in the first example to the movie number you wish to link to and paste the iframe where ever you’d like to embed the movie.

embed.html
mediaNoAutoPlay.php
media.php

Caleb Loffer, Flipping Web Genius

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