Leading a Program Ministry Without Losing Your Mind – Part 1

Stop The Insanity!

Does it seem like preparation for a weekly ministry program always runs down to the wire? Is it hard to delegate prep work to volunteers so it ends up back on your plate on day of your program? Do you somehow believe that ministry is improved through chaos? Do you believe that God somehow rewards you for pulling it together in the eleventh hour?

I ran across this verse a few months ago, and it has become one of my new favorites. It talks about wisdom as applied to how we do work.

Ecclesiastes 10:10 NET

10 If an iron axhead is blunt and a workman does not sharpen its edge, he must exert a great deal of effort;
so wisdom has the advantage of giving success.

In Solomon’s day, the axe was a universal tool, used for many tasks that involved cutting and building. If I wanted to apply this verse to how we work in ministry, the axe would be the ministry team. So this series is mostly about things that we can do to “sharpen” our ministry to enable our team’s effectiveness.

Continue reading “Leading a Program Ministry Without Losing Your Mind – Part 1”

Developing Organizational Leaders

In a previous post, I wrote about developing disciplers and shepherds, which accounts for much of the leadership that most churches need. In this post, I turn my attention to describing organizational leaders – and how we can develop them from our own congregation:

Exploring the start of the problem

Lets take as a starting point, that most pastors have no formal training in organizational leadership. Some of them, however, are great organizational leaders. In my conversations with leaders of churches, I have discovered that most learn to lead and manage organizationally by doing. When they got their first pastorate, it came with the expectation that they would be the leader, the executive, the decision maker, the planner, the organizer, the coordinator. Most learned by trial and error. Continue reading “Developing Organizational Leaders”