I want to write this post to reflect that ministries require leaders to accept different roles and responsibilities, and people gravitate toward one set or type. God has gifted and talented each of us with a somewhat unique set of qualities and strengths that make some roles easier and other harder. While there is significant overlap between major role groups, passion is often the determining factor of this gravitation. Continue reading “Leadership and Passion”
Author: Rich
How We Treat Each Other
Mind you, I am writing this to myself as much as I am to anyone else. Leaders need to know how to treat others with respect and to be an encourager. Leaders need to balance this with the need to build trust and to help people be accountable.
I think that how we personally treat others who we work alongside in ministry is the greatest catalyst of deep connection within the body of Christ. I have also observed that it can be a powerful inhibitor for connection within the body. As leaders, one of the best ways to foster deep connection within our congregation is to have others work alongside us and each other to carry out the mission of the church. Continue reading “How We Treat Each Other”
Church or Cult
I was having a conversation with a brother the other day, and we were talking about Churches and Christians that exhibit some bad traits. Sometimes, we just plain get it wrong. Unfortunately, I am not talking about the truly heretical churches or people, but churches that look pretty normal and Christians that act pretty spiritual. Those who from a distance don’t appear to be that different from us. This is a hard post for me to write, because I don’t want it to be taken out of context, or to be read in a judgmental, critical way. I want each of us to be introspective, about ourselves, and the church we currently attend. I want each of us to take time to discern our own personal status, and that of our church. The point is not to point the finger outward, but self-evaluation. Continue reading “Church or Cult”
Intentions and Disappointments
Leaders are judged based on certain results of their leadership. Most frequently, they are judged based on whether or not their results matched their commitments. Most of the time, I think this is reasonable. I think leaders are also frequently judged based on whether their results matched their intentions. And this I think is unreasonable if the leader did a good job of articulating commitments.
The problem is that when a leader’s results don’t match commitments or intentions, people get disappointed. Continue reading “Intentions and Disappointments”
Planning and Execution
Execution is a strange word. In different contexts, it can mean killing someone, making things happen, or working intentionally. It is this last meaning that I want to elaborate. Execution is working intentionally. To work intentionally, you must:
1) Establish goals.
2) Determine how you INTEND to achieve those goals.
3) Spend your energy and time in ways that honor your intentions.
2) Determine how you INTEND to achieve those goals.
3) Spend your energy and time in ways that honor your intentions.
This sounds really simple, until we realize that we spend most of our time being distracted by administrivia, our own bad habits, and other peoples issues. Working intentionally, is plain and simply:
“bringing sufficient focus to a goal to justify ignoring the normal distractions enough to accomplish the goal.”
Unless you are one of those completely mission-oriented, type A personalities – you probably find this difficult. Moreover, the further the goal is away from your normal responsibilities, the harder it is to break free from the ordinary rhythm of activity to work on it. A wise man I met at my second employer used to say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions!” While this isn’t necessarily theologically sound – it sure expresses how things often work out. Continue reading “Planning and Execution”
Planning and Scheduling
Most people who are not professional project managers, build plans without much rigor. For simple endeavors, this can be just enough structure to get to done.
We have already discussed in our Planning and Goals Post about defining what done looks like. In this post, we are going to talk about how to put a schedule together, and how to think about resourcing the plan. This is a conversation about When and Who.
Schedules and resources are inextricably linked together. Your ability to accomplish the What by When of a goal, is determined by the ability and availability of the Who. But the starting point of a schedule is a sequence. These activities in some order will get to done. The order is determined by dependencies. Dependencies are simply an inability to start some activity until some other activity is finished.
What are the benefits of building the schedule to achieve a goal?
Planning and Delegation
Many leaders find it hard to let go. They find it very hard to let other people run aspects of their project, their ministry. They feel a constant need to be in the center of everything, coordinating, keeping track, holding the project together. I know how this feels.
The thing is, this is a sure way to make a project fail. You inevitably become a bottleneck. People end up waiting for you to make decisions, your “say so” becomes important to the timeline. Inevitably, you will burn out, alienate people, be frustrated, and think it was everybody elses fault.
But think about this: This is not the principle on which God operates! He, being infinitely competent, and infinitely capable, has chosen to delegate the work of his Kingdom on earth to us, incompetent, incapable us. Why, because he knows that we need it in order to grow in our relationship with Him. If he does everything how will we glorify him? Continue reading “Planning and Delegation”
Planning and Goals
Pastors and other vocational church leadership staff are educated in many things. If they have an M.div they typically have studied the Bible very deeply. They typically have studied church history, and probably have some counseling or other shepherding in their education.
In talking with pastors and other staff that I know, neither their undergrad or seminary experience prepared them for the “normal challenges of organizational leadership”. Some of them are great leaders, but it really is innate skill or talent, undeveloped until it needed to be exercized in the heat of battle.
Today’s post is about two simple activities in organizational leadership: Planning and Goals.
Planning is an activity that takes goals as an input, and creates action steps as an output. Goals are expressed as a what by when; some desired outcome on some desired schedule. Goals can be very simple, such as, “Preach a sermon series on marriage in May”, or they can be grandiose and complex, such as, “Convert our sunday school communities to small group communities by the end of the year.” Continue reading “Planning and Goals”
What are Your Bottlenecks?
I could ask the question differently. I could ask what is preventing your church from growing faster. I could ask what is preventing your congregation from growing deeper in relationship with Christ. I could ask the question relative to any specific goal you have what is preventing you from acheiving it. But I really want you to think about your ministry holistically. What are your ministry bottlenecks?
Sometimes the bottleneck appears to be finances. Sometimes the bottleneck appears to be human resources or volunteers. Sometimes that bottleneck appears to be a cohesive vision. I am going to say that none of these things are really bottlenecks. All of them are symptoms of a different bottleneck. A leadership bottleneck. Continue reading “What are Your Bottlenecks?”
Growing From a Seed
— An Incomplete Parable or Analogy —
Jesus used all kinds of parables and analogies in His teaching to his disciples. They lived in a primarily agrarian society, so agriculture was very familiar to all the people of Jesus day. Sheep and Shepherds were common place. Growers of fruit and other crops were also common. Jesus used these very familiar images in his stories, explaining the kingdom of God, because he knew that they would be very familiar to the people around him.
They are not as familiar to us. In this post-industrial age, how many of you have ever met a shepherd, or have raised any kind of livestock or grown crops. These word pictures don’t necessarily resonate with us, the way they did with the people Jesus came into contact with. Yet we persist in using His parables, and analogies to explain spiritual things to our peers. Even in this blog, Fruit Producing Ministry, I use agrarian metaphor to reflect the mission of The Church, as an output of agriculture.
This is a parable of leadership. Churches grow from a seed. We already call the most common way of establishing a new church a “plant”. In fact it is more like a cutting. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The lesson in this parable is that a growing plant needs different kind of leadership at different phases of growth. Continue reading “Growing From a Seed”