Video Transcript: How To Start A Ministry

All right, compensation. How does one get paid for ministry? You've been taking  classes, but how does that translate into a job? We talked about different ways,  different things. I want to talk about a ministry. Now, you can start a business,  you can plant a church. A lot of different things that you could do, but I want to  talk about starting a Christian ministry. How to start a ministry? What is ministry? The word ministry is from the Greek word diakoneo, meaning to serve. That's  why we call leaders in the church deacons. They are people that serve and the  New Testament, ministry is seen as a service to God and to other people in his  name, which, by the way, is our spiritual dream. Remember to connect to God  and to make a difference in the lives of people. Ministry is trying to do both of  those things. I Corinthians 12:7, now to each one of you, the manifestation of  the Spirit is given for the common good. The Spirit of God gives each person a  spiritual gift, and the point of that gift is to be of service to the body and giving  glory to God. Every Christian has a ministry. Every Christian doesn't get paid to  do the ministry. What is a vocational ministry? Vocation means it's a job in which you get paid. It's like, you know, I play a sport, but I don't I'm not a professional.  A professional gets paid for doing the sport. We're all called to be ministers.  We're all called to ministry, but all of us do not get paid. So we're talking about  how you might get paid for doing ministry, a ministry that involves getting paid.  Two kinds of vocational ministries. There's nonprofit. That's the typical  vocational ministry. I know a lot of different ministries, NASCAR ministries,  people for every niche out there. There's a ministry trying to reach them, and  they they form a nonprofit, and that means they can raise money for their  ministry. There's also a thing called a for profit ministry. It does ministry, but it  generates its own profits, and you don't have to have donors, because the  ministry, whatever it is that the ministry does, whether it's a product or service,  pays for itself. The nonprofit, vocational ministry. The advantages of a nonprofit,  it's tax free. Don't have to pay taxes to the government. People trust the  nonprofit, because it's not about profit, it's about ministry. You get to raise money for the ministry, so whatever it is that you do, let's say you give Bibles away. You  can give them away because someone else pays for them. You can raise money for the ministry. The disadvantages of a nonprofit vocational ministry is you have to have a board. Okay? You start this thing, you have this idea, you want to do it, but now you need a board, and the board is actually in control, not you. You're a  servant of the board. So you can start the ministry, and you have this vision for  what it is, but then the board can come along and change it. The money you  make gets taxed anyway. Okay? So if you have set up a nonprofit, you have a  board, and then you work for the nonprofit, and the nonprofit pays you. When  the nonprofit pays you, you receive it as income, and then you have to pay taxes on that income. Disadvantages. Sometimes, because you're a nonprofit, people  don't trust you because you don't actually make a product that pays for itself.  You raise money, and there's all kinds of lack of trust with the whole raising of 

money. Nonprofits struggle with that these days. The for profit vocational  ministry, okay, this is a ministry. It's doing good for the kingdom of God, but it's  not a nonprofit. It pays its own way. It sells a product or a service, and the  product and the service pays all the expenses incurred, including hiring  someone to run it. The advantages, it's easy entry. You don't have to get a  certain license, you don't have to go out and find a board. You can just start it.  The market determines the value of your product or your service, not the  donors. See the advantage of a for profit ministry is, you know, let you know  when I work for the Bible. It was a nonprofit, and we came up with Bible studies  and Bible products, and we peddled them all over the world, but we peddled  them at a tremendous discount, so people were almost getting these things free, and because they were free, people said, wow, these are great. We never  learned. We never improved our product because we never actually sold our  product. If you go out and you have to actually make your own money, and you  have to sell the product, the product has to pay for itself, and it has to pay for all  the staff that is involved in making the product and distributing the product and  teaching people things, it has to pay for all those things, so the product has to  be really good, and if it's not good, you have to improve it, or you're going out of  business. So the advantage of the for profit vocational ministry is the product  actually gets better and better. In a nonprofit, the product tends to not improve  very much, but the relation to the donors improves, because the real product is  the donors. You have to keep the donors happy. You have to sell to them, or  you're out of business. So in a nonprofit, there's that confusion as to what really  is our product and service, is it to the end user, or is it to the donors? In a for  profit ministry, it's very clear, and if you don't have a good product, it's not going  to last. Your product has to be worth what people pay for it. Disadvantages for  the for profit vocational ministry is the market determines your value. You think  you have a good idea. You think this is going to be good for the kingdom, but it's  only good if people think it's good and they're willing to pay what it's worth, or it's not going to last. Disadvantages, trust, sometimes, you know, if it's a for profit. I  remember when Henry and I started life net 21 it was a non profit, but we sold  the serendipity Bible. We had Acts sheets for prayer. We had these tapes, we  had this whole kit. We sold it for, like, I forget, $30 or something like that. And  ministers would say, are you guys getting wealthy off of this? And I was like,  What are you talking about? How in the world could we get wealthy off of this?  So there's a little bit of distrust in the nonprofit world and the for profit. There's  distrust in the ministry world. We've heard too many stories of people making  millions of dollars off of ministry. And so even a little start up somehow people  think you're making more money. Steps to starting a vocational ministry, a  ministry where you actually get paid. Step one, evaluation of your personality  and your particular gifts. What kind of personality Do you have? Do you have a  go out there and sell mentality? Are you good with product? What part of starting

this fits you, and what particular gifts do you have? Are you good with ideas?  Are you good with connecting to people? Churches? You know you have to  evaluate what part of what ministry fits you. Are you the salesman type? Are you the product type? Are you the customer service type of person? Or you're just  good with people, and you can help people with their needs and so on. Number  two, evaluation of the spiritual needs of the Christian community. What's going  on the Christian community? What needs are there in, for example, the church?  What does the church need? I just put down random things off of the top of my  head. Thought about, what do church buildings need? So, you know, when I  think of church buildings, we just renovated ours, I think lighting, sound, these  are things that churches need. Churches are way behind on these things,  church education, outreach, administration, start thinking about all the  categories of church and what you could do programs. You know, if someone  came to my church and said, I will manage all your visitors, people come to your church and I will send letters to them. I'll bring cookies over to them. I will get  them involved in all your programs, and I only get paid if someone keeps coming to your church. I'll tell you, I'd hire that person. They're willing to manage that  because, you know, a person finally comes to my church and then we drop the  ball. We don't, we don't do something with them. So look at all the different  areas of church and think, am I gifted in any of these areas if I formed a little  something that could help in these areas, would a church be willing to pay me to do some of those things? Is there a service that I could do? So you start with the church needs, then maybe the denomination, or into the denomination. There's  all these churches in the city. Is there something that I could do that? Each one  of these churches could pay me a little bit to do. Is there something I could  organize retreats, or something in the community? Is there something going on  the community that I could do that people would be willing to pay for? So you  start evaluating the Christian world. What in the Christian world, in my area, is,  is there a need that there's frustration. You listen to pastors talk, they're  frustrated about this or frustrated about that. Is there something that you could  do that would alleviate that frustration? Maybe there's a possible vocational  ministry there, step three, explore products and services needed in the Christian world that could be better. Did I give any examples? No, you know, again, I think of sound. Sound is just horrible in a lot of churches and lighting. A lot of times  the pastor's speaking in this in the darkest place in the building, I spoke at a tent church in the summer, 2000 people inside a tent, and the pastor is lit. The worst  Sun is peeking through other places, brightly lit. And where the pastor stands,  you can hardly see the guy, and you have to listen to him talk for a half an hour,  and you don't your mind doesn't know why you're not listening, but it's because  the lighting is so poor. Lighting today is so easy, and yet most churches have no  clue how it works. If you found out how it works, you know right now, I know I  can start a business with just lighting in church. I could just go to any church 

randomly, show them what could be, show them what they have, and show them how inexpensive it could be, and they'd probably get on board. Step four, follow  up on your past experiences. And I worked for the Bible League. We were doing  

New Testaments. Here's the New Testament, and we were printing the insides.  This is the inside of a New Testament. And then we were customizing the cover.  This one is for some youth camping place for kids. And so we put this cover on  these people want 2000 of them, so we make 2000 of them. Here's another one, same, New Testament, but it's a biker group these. This is biker people, and this  is an old guy that runs this organization. And he orders like, I don't know, he's  got like, 20 different ministries all over the south, and he orders for all of them.  So every few months, he orders like, 300 of these, and he's still got this old  picture, black and white picture. That's what he likes. Go, you know, biker things, a lot of biker groups out there. Here's another one, wild horse ministries. This  guy goes around to rodeos and He tames a horse and he shares the gospel  while he's doing that. So that's what he does. Okay, so at the Bible League, I  was in charge of that department. It just happened to be fall into my lap. And  then the Bible league got rid of the whole USA department, and so I took that  whole ministry with me, and I expanded it into other things. But that was my  past. I bumped into these things. And you take your past with you. You take your past connections. You take the past things that you've learned. I've been doing  preaching and Bible studies all my life. Now at my church, I write, I write out a  devotional for every series that we do seven weeks we're going to be looking at  the seven words of the cross. So I make a devotion for every single day. I make  it into a book. It's, you know, seven weeks. We just finished up seven hymns in  seven weeks, well I make the book so people can follow it. When I'm done with  the book, I have a book ready to go. I then publish the book. So, you know, it's  what I'm doing for my job, and it turns into a book. It's but it was my past. I had  been doing that kind of thing for a long time, then I figured out how I could  actually do something with it. So follow up on all your past experiences, things  that you've done, is there something in there that could be a vocational ministry? Step five, follow up on all your connections. You know, I ended up working for  the Bible league because I had worked for a guy running the ministry  DEPARTMENT OF THE BIBLE league 15 years before in the Philippines, he  was my supervisor in the Philippines, 15 years later, there's this connection. And somehow, you know, we get connected. And now I have this whole different  thing because of something that happened 15 years ago. You look back at your  life, who are you connected to? Never burn a bridge with the relationships you  have. Don't burn any bridges because you never know when God is going to  bring that relationship back to you. Possible start up ministries. So I'm just going  to give you a random things. I want you to just think about preaching. Some  churches are well organized, but they haven't. Their preaching is horrible.  Maybe you've learned some good things. Maybe you're a good speaker. Maybe 

that's what you could do, marriages and funerals. Someone who can organize  things, run these things. Maybe that's something you could do, counseling a guy that I went to school with and planted a church with. He's now in our building,  and that's all he does. He does Christian counseling, retreats and or seminars.  Maybe you're good at leading groups of people. Write some seminars, maybe  on marriage, on the things that people need in your community, and see if you  can't get people to join these things. Write a book. Today, it's so easy to write a  book. Go to something like create space and write it out, boom, and you'll have  a book. Let's see what happens. Maybe it won't work, but so what you give it a  go. Give it a try. Music ministry. Maybe that's something that you're good at.  Maybe you could go out and find churches that are struggling with their music  ministry and start to volunteer. And who knows what that might lead to, church  child care, catering for church functions, elder care visitation, a lot of churches  struggling in that area sound. There's so many issues with sound in churches.  Become an expert in this and do sound, church building maintenance, church  building renovation. You know, we just did that our church. I know I could make  a business out of that. I mean, we did some creative things. Very inexpensive.  Churches spend all kinds of money. They don't need to spend all that much  money. Banners. We got a guy in our church does these banners and prints. He  can print anything. There's people like that everywhere, but churches just don't  get off the dime. There's this stuff that churches could do that would, you know,  communicate to the community. All it says is a steeple and a cross. We don't  communicate anything, but it's because churches just they're busy with things,  and they have a hard time getting off the dime. If you came and just knocked on  the door and said, Hey, I could make any kind of banner that you want, I would  say something. Give them a few examples, and churches would finally jump  onto it. They can't do it on their own in so many areas, church, social media,  marketing, Facebook, all those things, lot of churches, just, they just don't get off the dime. They don't know how to make a website, and they want to, but they  never get around to it. Or perhaps you need a partner with someone, or you  need to partner with someone else's ministry before starting one of your own.  Maybe you can't think of anything. Maybe, for whatever reason, you can't just  step out into the Nowhere Land of starting a ministry. Well, then help someone  else's get on board with someone else's. I'm going to give you an example. This  is a ministry that I do. It's a it's a it's not a nonprofit. It's a for profit ministry, the  personalized Bible materials. I told you that, you know, I inherited this thing with  New Testaments and and people were doing New Testament. Here's the New  Testament. This is a cowboy church. He's got the cowboy nails. There are  cowboy churches all over the United States. I never knew that. There are  NASCAR people that are doing ministry. There are horseshoe people doing  ministry. There are firemen and and policemen and everything under the sun,  and they all have their little ministry, and they all want their little cover with their 

address and maybe a message from the pastor. They're all doing that. So  anyway, I had that thing, and I felt bad about all these ministries, just handing  out a New Testament. Someone, someone who's never read the Bible, gets this  New Testament. They turn to page one, which is Matthew 1, and they read a  bunch of names. That's how Matthew starts out, one name after another, the  ancestry of Jesus. And I'm wondering, What in the world is any thinking of this.  What is this book about? How far do they get in these names before they just  put it down? So I thought, you know, is the New Testament the best thing to  hand out to people. So I spent a few years writing some other things that might  be useful. This is called the 30 second Bible. Now this is how I print it doesn't  have a cover 30 seconds. It has a verse and a thought and a question for every  day, there's 52 topics. People can read it topically. They can read them one  every day. They can read through the whole book, whatever it is. It's just a small  little thing of 100 pages, and there's just a verse, a thought and a question.  Exodus 23 do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. Then there's a thought.  Being a person of integrity means you have a spiritual and moral, moral  principles that guide your life. There's always pressure to get you to compromise plan to live your life gathered by God's word. What sort of things? Does the  crowd try to convince you to do? How do you respond? Okay, on and on and on. Faith is the topic of faith, topic of gratitude, topic of wisdom, strength. Ephesians 6:10, a final word, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Thought you  can't do it, you feel like giving up. You are tired and worn out. You can't do it, but  God can do it through you. God's mighty power is within you. Where in your life  have you experienced God's power? Where in your life do you need God's  power? So it's just simple stuff that someone that has never read the Bible ever  in their life can read and go, Oh, that's kind of encouraging. That's kind of  interesting. They can actually succeed at this. They can feel like they're getting  somewhere, rather than getting bogged down. Then I spent time writing what I  call the Jesus Bible. You know, I've heard about Jesus. Who is this Jesus? Well,  this is 150 pages. And in this 150 pages, I just organized all the things that the  Bible talks about Jesus so his birth, his teachings, His miracles, his betrayal, His death, His resurrection, and then the rest of the book is where Jesus shows up  in every book of the Bible. Just one little, you know, something, a few notes on  the side that will help 150 pages. They know all these things that the Bible talks  about Jesus. People try to read the whole Bible. People live their whole life and  never get through the whole Bible. There's a lot of stuff that's just hard to get  through. So I thought, Well, why don't I just abridge the Bible. Give people the  highlights. Instead of trying to read the whole thing for the first time, why don't  you just read the highlights of every single book? So here it is 1/3 the size of the whole Bible. But they get the whole thing. You get them interested in, and then  maybe they read the whole thing. So anyway, I want to talk about two things you can start. You can join in something that exists like that, or you can start your 

own regional CLI seminar. So these Bible products that I have, I just print them  like this. Has no cover. Just white, and then I just put covers whatever the  person wants with their logo, their message, their picture on the front or on the  inside. I have the New Testament. I have the NIV New Testament. I have the  King James Bible. I have the King James plus that's this one. This ministry  wanted the King James. They insisted on the King James. But I thought, well,  let's make it so that someone new to the Bible could actually read it. So I added  quotation marks chapter headings, and I have in parentheses the explanation of  the words that people can't understand. So it's like the easy to read King James  Bible. I have the Spanish New Testament. I have the Jesus Bible. Part one is the harmony of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Part two is where Jesus shows up in every book of the Bible. It's only 150 pages. Someone gets introduced to Jesus  in short order. Again, the 30 second Bible, I showed you that the sampler Bible  1/3 of the whole Bible. I also have something called the walk with God tract. I  don't have it with me, but it's just a little tract that that folds, and it's in the title of  it is walk with what? Walk with God six days and see if he exists, see if he  shows up. So that's my form of evangelism. Someone is, you know, wondering  why I believe in God, or I'm talking to them about God, and then in the end, I just challenge them, you know, I don't maybe you don't believe in God, maybe you  don't think he exists. But tell you what, why don't you just walk with him for six  days see if God shows up? And what do you have to lose? And the six days are  like that 30 second Bible, there's a verse, there's a thought and a question for  each day of the six days, will God show up. I don't know that's up to God. So I  personalized those. I put the church's logo and the church's name on that tract.  So if you wanted to start a vocational ministry, but you don't have any grand  ideas, you don't know how to get going, you could just join in with this. For  people in the USA, it's easy ministry to start. Just get some samples of each of  the Bibles that we have. Approach as many churches as you can. You go and  talk to them in later video, I tell you how to sell something. Approach as many  churches as you can. Churches. You know, a visitor comes to their church. You  know, it's hard to get a visitor to come to your church. They leave your church,  and the only thing they have from your church is the bulletin. Want to give  something that says who your church is, something that might change their  whole life. You know the Bible. The Bible stands for everything that your church  is trying to do. Why don't you give them something with the Bible in it, something that can make a huge difference? So you just talk to as many churches as you  can. Hey, what do you hand out to your visitors? Oh, we don't hand out  anything. Well, I'll tell you what you could do this. It's very inexpensive. Take  orders and call Marie. That's my wife. There's the number, and we take the care  of the rest. How easy can it be? You make $1 on each book that you sell. So  you sell 100 books to 100 bucks to 100 different churches, you make $10,000 so you don't have to do anything. You just have to take a concept and give it to the 

people that are hurting in that area. Most pastors, their church isn't growing at  all. So simple in Canada, for people in Canada, it's easy, but it's a hassle  because of the border. But you can give you can do the same thing as we do in  the United States. All right, the rest of the world, okay, the rest of the world.  Some of you are in Africa and well, how are we going to do this? We can't just  get samples and do it. But yes, you can. It's easy to just start out with a tract you can download. I'm going to have the tract. You can just download it right from  this course. You can print it yourself, cut it in half, make it an accordion,  personalize it to someone, and there you go. You can do that free of charge.  And next, you can make your own little book. The 30 second thing I said, this is  only it's only 100 pages. You could do it on a copier. 100 pages would be 50  size, 50 size times two cents. For $1 you could print the whole thing. Okay, now  you got to put a cover on it. You print some cover on it, and then you can either  staple it or, well, how are you going to do this? You know, so I hear I say next,  you can own your own 3o second Bible, or Jesus Bible. 30 second Bible is 60  pages, which would be 15 on the copier back to back. You can have it done for  two cents a page, 60 cents a book The Jesus Bible, 160 pages, take 40 pages  back to back. Average cost of the copier you would be $1.60. So you can just do it yourself. Now. Cover options. You can do a color copier. You can do a local  printer, depending on how many now you get the problem of binding. You have a cover about, how am I going to put it on this? You can make it a notebook. You  can staple holes in it and do a notebook, and just put them in. You can do a  spiral bound I have a little spiral bound machine. It cuts the holes, and then you  take those little spirals and you just stick them in and bing bada boom its done.  Or you can perfect bind it, you know, I have a big machine, you know, I invest in  the machine. It goes across some glue, it takes the book and binds it, and then I have to cut it. I have a three Blade Cutter. So that's a really fancy way to do it,  but that's a lot of money. How else could you do you do you could just do it by  hand and do the best you can. You know, again, when you start a business, you  just do the best you can. You start out small. I started with a tiny little copier and  a little printer and a little cutter, and I had to do all this work by hand. And  gradually, as it grew, I got a bigger machine, a bigger machine. Now I get this  huge four clamp binder machine. So it just takes time. The copyright, there's a  minimal copyright cost for the Jesus Bible and the 30 second bible of 20 cents.  Otherwise the rest is yours. So it's up to you. Okay, New Testaments in the  sampler Bible, that's a little harder. I need permission to print this New  Testament from the New International Version I have the King James. Of course  you can just do it's in public domain. All the Bible that I have too. The sampler  Bible is 400 pages. It's done on Bible paper that can be very difficult for you to  do in any economic kind of way. So you'd have to sell a whole bottle, you know,  boatload of them, and actually have them shipped. So again, start small. Who  knows whether you can even do this or whether it's needed. Start small or Okay,

so that's joining, and I'm just offering mine as one possibility. There's a lot of  ministries that you could join, okay? Or you could start your own regional CLI  seminary. Well, what would you do? You get CLI certificate or a degree. You  take the How to Start a CLI micro seminary Course. The basic idea is you recruit students who will do the lessons online together at a central location, or they do  the lessons online in each one's home, and then come together once a week for follow up. And the idea is you could charge an appropriate fee for your services.  Or we have this new thing called starting a house church. Now you start a house church. It's a small little group. They're not going to pay you to have a little group in your house. But if you keep multiplying these, and you become the network  guy, the one who organizes and keeps all of these going, all of them together,  might be able to pay you. And so you start. A vocational ministry as a network  guy, someone who organizes a church planter. So, you know, I'm just giving you  some options, some specific options, but keep your eyes open. Look around.  There's needs everywhere. And you know, when I started the Bible thing, I just  started with this simple thing. How do I get people to read the Bible? That was  my concern. Back in the day, Henry and I, we had a paradigm shift. We have to  get people into the Word of God. We thought it would be easy. Turns out, it's  hard. How do you get people into the Word of God? You can't just hand them a  New Testament. You got to make it, you know, something that's relevant to  them. So how do you get, well, that one thing led to another, the Bible League,  this connection, all of a sudden, it's now a vocational ministry. So start with  where you're at. Start with something, you know, a need that God is, something  that you're frustrated with, some a problem that you see out there in the  Christian world, and just start small and go for it. Do something you can do it.