Andy Rowell

Church Leadership Conversations

  • Big churches take note: Fortune magazine says the rules of business have changed

    BradThis is a guest post from my brother Brad Rowell who works for DeWALT Industrial Tools and is involved in a church plant called Hillside Church of Southeast Denver.  (See photo from last summer to the right).
    The July 10 issue of the business magazine Fortune has a good cover story entitled The New Rules: Tearing up the Jack Welch playbook that I thought applied to the church.  The article basically says that famous GE CEO Jack Welch’s rules for winning in the 1990’s no longer apply today.  The article blasts Jack’s 7 rules and suggests 7 new ones that might work.
    New Rules vs. Old Rules
    1 Agile is best; being big can bite you. Big dogs own the street.
    2 Find a niche, create something new. Be No. 1 or No. 2 in your market.
    3 The customer is king. Shareholders rule.
    4 Look out, not in. Be lean and mean.
    5 Hire passionate people. Rank your players; go with the A’s.
    6 Hire a courageous CEO. Hire a charismatic CEO.
    7 Admire my soul. Admire my might
    I thought that many of the "old rules" reminded me of building mega-churches in the 80’s and 90’s and I thought many of the "new rules" are being practiced by the emerging church of today. 
    Enjoy,

    Brad Rowell

  • How I added a Google Search to My Blog

    A couple of days ago I added a Google Search to my blog. 

    Here are a couple of helpful links on how to do it:

    1. For TypePad users: Adding Google Search to your Weblog 
    2. How can I add a Google search box to my Web site?
    3. Google Free

    I ended up using #2. 

    This was one of the biggest things I missed at Blogger.  (At the top of Blogspot.com blogs, you can search that blog which is great). 

  • How I Keep Up Reading Blogs

    If you areFeeds  new to reading blogs, I will tell you more about why you might want to use a RSS_aggregator like NewsGator Online (Free version).

    [Update: March 2008, I use Google Reader now]. 

    Summary of what NewsGator does for me:

    In the previous post I placed all the 44 church leadership blogs that I am currently "subscribed to."   You can scroll through them and see what’s of interest to you. But there is an easier way.  I check my NewsGator Online (Free version) website each day and it gives me the headlines of all the new posts.  You can save stuff to read later in your "clippings."  After scanning them, I click "read all posts" so that only new ones show up next time.  Newsgator works well.  I recommend it.  It takes a few minutes to get set up but it is worth it once you start using it. 

    Story of how I came to use NewsGator:

    When I was first blogging, I went through and searched for like-minded blogs.  I looked on other people’s blog rolls, etc.  I saved them all in a folder in my favorites.  Then I would browse through them once a month and see if there was anything of interest.  But I would end up re-reading things that I had already read.  And some people would not have posted anything new.  And sometimes the conversation was already over by the time I read the post.  A couple times, authors offered free books to the first people who would email so-and-so.  Well, I always missed that.

    That is the great thing about having something like NewsGator.  (I’m happy to have other people recommend their newsreader if they recommend it).  Here is Wikipedia’s explanation of what an aggregator is and here is a list of all of them available. 

    Basically, with NewsGator, you just go and search for the blogs that you want to subscribe to.  So you put in "Jesus Creed" and Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog appears and you click "Subscribe."  Or you can simply paste in the URL (web address) of the blog and NewsGator finds the feed for it and subscribes you.  You can always unsubscribe.  Then whenever you open your NewsGator webpage, it will tell you the headlines of all the posts since you last checked it.

    I recommend picking a few blogs and trying it.   

    Note: I had subscribed to a bunch of news sites like CNN, NY Times, Fortune Magazine, etc. but they have too many posts each day so I decided not to subscribe to them.