Reflections on 40 years... Part 14. Develop an outside interest

You don’t have to have a hobby to be a Christian leader! But an outside interest will bring you into contact and relationship with those who are not Believers.

I sometimes think that one of the reasons I have not been more ‘successful’ as a church leader is that I am too interested in too many things! I find all sorts of stuff interesting – rugby, running, rowing, brewing, baking, building, politics, poetry, plants, dogs, ducks, dictionaries, motorbikes, mycology, music, fishing, fruit, flamenco, gardening, garages, glossolalia… I love going to places where other people work and seeing what they do. A magazine stand is a dangerous place to leave me – I could be there for weeks delving into the more obscure hobbies represented there. Maybe if I were just a bit more focussed!

But it is good to have a hobby! Yes, it gets you out of the Christian ghetto. Yes, it gives you some sermon illustrations. Yes, it helps you get a broader perspective on God’s creation.

And it just makes you less boring!

Don't Cheat on Your Family

According to Andy Stanley, we'll never have enough time to attain our ideal career productivity, relationship to our spouse and kids, physical fitness, service to the community, financial goals, and devotion to hobbies. Regardless of our discipline in managing time and controlling our schedules, something or somebody is going to feel cheated. It's unavoidable. The issue isn't whether to cheat, but choosing where to cheat and how to go about it.

Click here to read more.

Counting the Cost

John Maxwell's latest article for Catalyst on counting the cost,

All dreams have price tags attached, and the cost is always higher than we expect to pay. Not once in my conversations with successful people have I heard someone say, "Getting to the top was much easier than I anticipated." The reverse is true. Those at the pinnacle of their professions point to the hardships and sacrifices they had to endure to reach the top.

Click here to carry on reading.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 13. Be flexible

Fast moving changes in our society and rapid cultural change mean we need to be culturally aware. Paul says, ‘After beginning with the Spirit are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?’ (Gal. 3:3). Flexibility shows openness to the Spirit. 10.00am on a Sunday is not sacrosanct for a church meeting, nor is it wrong. We need to be flexible in today’s world.

It is scary how quickly we build walls of religious practice around our Christian faith. The stories are legion of how a particular way of doing things in a church becomes the reason that things are done. But Jesus promises us living water, and the thing is that the water will soon leak out of structures that are simply structures – which is why the world is littered with so many things that call themselves ‘church’ but are in fact just empty shells. My kids like collecting shells from the beach. They are interesting, they can look pretty, beautiful even. But they are dead!

Too often we spend our time admiring the shell, and trying to protect the shell, all the time failing to notice that the life has gone.

A better model for ministry is the hermit crab. The hermit crab isn’t fussy about shells – he doesn’t bother to grow one of his own. Instead he takes an empty shell and slips it on his back; until the day he gets too big for it, when he shrugs it off and finds another one which is the right size.

We should be more like the hermit crab. We need structures, but we also need the freedom to shrug them off and find more commodious ones.

It is a tragedy that we so closely associate “church” with a particular building or place. It makes it far too easy for us to put all our efforts into safeguarding that particular place. It is great that so many churches now are buying and building bigger and better buildings – I’m all for it. But that mustn’t hold the life of the church hostage. It is the life that is the thing, and life is always flexible.

Getting Things Done

Last Friday I was teaching on Vision to a group of emerging leaders and made the observation that without implementation there is no vision - just futile thinking. We can have the most brilliant ideas in the world, but they won't count for anything unless they get put into action.

Here is a helpful article that explores the power of completion.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 12, Pay attention to team

A team needs complementary team members in terms of gift and personality, etc. Successful teams work when each member of the team is prepared to make personal sacrifices in order to gain the benefit of being on a team. Team members need real stuff to do.

In our office recently we were discussing the remarkable success of Sir Alex Fergusson as manager of Manchester United. “Why is he so successful?” was the question.

There are lots of factors that contribute to Fergusson’s effectiveness, but surely absolutely central is his focus on the team as a whole. No one player is allowed to get bigger than the team, and when they do (whether it be Beckham or van Nistelroy or Ronaldo) they are shown the door. Individual brilliance is not sufficient if it jeopardizes the overall team performance. Other teams are sometimes able to recruit more Galacticos but if they do not gel as a team they usually don’t win championships. I will always remember back in ’95 when Newcastle should have won the Premiership, but then Kevin Keegan brought in the brilliant, mercurial Faustino Asprilla – he was amazing to watch and scored some incredible goals, but he didn’t help the team. And Manchester United were champions again.

Fergusson has an uncanny ability to nurture home grown talent and recruit judiciously from outside the club, creating a blend that brings success again and again. And he has been able to do this repeatedly – just when it looks as though one set of players are fading and that the team might slip back, Fergie refreshes the blend and brings them back to the top.

And he brings them to the top with a passionate desire to win. Somehow he manages to keep the hunger of multi-millionaire footballers alive, and has them more focussed on trophies than on their Ferraris.

All this is very galling for those of us who do not support United, but it is a good lesson in leadership of a team.

My observations of church teams that work well are that:
• The leader is very secure in their own gifts and position. This means that he doesn’t have to fight for territory but is ready to delegate real authority to other team members and have his ideas questioned by them.
• At the same time there is no question that he is the team leader, and he is held in real respect by his colleagues.
• The best teams are led by someone with vision, and energy, and determination, and are staffed by people who are willing and able to implement the vision and plans of the team.
• There is a greater focus on what the team is doing than on what any individual team member is doing (which means team members are not trying to build their own power bases).
• Great teams are good at developing new players from within the church, but also at times cherry pick people with particular skills from outside. They hire slow and fire fast.
• There is a sense of fun and camaraderie in the team, but also a certain ruthlessness – things just move too fast for their to be much sentimentality.

The Church needs more Fergies!

Reflections on 40 years... Part 11. Use the different ministries

The church really does need all the ministries – Apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor/teachers. Ask them in. And if they say what you have said a 100 times before but now people ‘hear’ it for the first time – Rejoice!

Note to leaders of smaller churches: I know you would love to have lots of high-impact ministries come into your church, but you can never get them to come.

It’s a tough one.

So, grab what you can when you can. Develop and ruthlessly exploit whatever relationships you can. Team with other churches in town. Maybe set your targets a little lower as to who you ask to come in. Take your congregation to conferences. Don’t give up.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 10. Don’t fret too much about those who leave

Pastors always feel it personally when individuals leave the church – especially when they tell you that it’s not personal! The fact is people always leave churches. Generally for everyone that leaves you unhappy someone joins you ‘cos they are unhappy somewhere else! It tends to even out!

I hate it when people leave!

You know the ones that annoy me most? Its when we’ve had a long chat and they seem to be happy, only to call the following week (or more likely send a note) saying they’re off anyway. That just feels like a waste of time!

However, I think I’m getting more relaxed about people leaving. Every body needs a bowel, and sometimes people need to pass through one church before (hopefully) entering another. Always trying to ‘block up the backdoor’ isn’t always a good use of energy. Sometimes its better to hold it wide open!

I have made the mistake in the past of desperately holding onto people who were pillars of the church, in fear that if they left the church would fall down, when of course it is Jesus who actually holds this thing together. At times we have to be positive about even our very best people moving on. If we hold onto people too tight they only stagnate where they are – and stagnating things have a tendency to start stinking. Better to send people with your blessing and trust God to replace them – and add more in return.

Of course, it would be great if there was a more profound understanding of loyalty in some people. We live in faithless age, and those who bounce from church to church are a menace. And I wish people more often made decisions about which church to join on genuine theological and missiological grounds, rather than on style and personality.

But there it is.

So the approach I try and follow is this:
• Let people go if it is right they should go
• Fight, but not too hard, for those who shouldn’t go but want to
• Hold the door wide open for those who are just getting in the way
• When it cuts the other way and someone from another church in town comes to you, pick up the phone and check things out with their previous pastor (at the least this is simple courtesy, and it amazes me that more people don’t do it)
• Try not to get too stressed about it all!

Reflections on 40 years... Part 9. Beware the latest fad

It’s easy to believe that if we do it this way or that way we are guaranteed great success. But exceptions make poor models. There are exceptional churches around today that we can learn a great deal from. But their leaders are not your church’s leader. “…the best way to be lastingly relevant is to stand on the rock solid durable old truths rather than just jumping from one pragmatic bandwagon to another.” John Piper

Woe! Twice woe! to the copiers of another mans vision!

This is such an easy trap to fall into, and so understandable. Good leaders want to keep on learning. We go to conferences, read books, keep up with the blogs, and are eager to learn from anyone more ‘successful’ than we are. These are all good and commendable things to do. But it is so easy to jump from appropriate learning to an assumption that the latest book or conference offers the silver bullet that will turn us into superstar leaders and our churches into the kind of places that other people come to visit in order to copy us!

Sometimes it feels as if the primary ambition of some church leaders is to lead a church that provokes other leaders to envy because of its size, financial resources, and cutting edge ministry.

And that’s not very Christ-like.

Only Rick Warren can be Rick Warren. And Orange County is different from my town or your town. Only Mark Driscoll can be Mark Driscoll. And Seattle is different from my town or your town.

Lets be the people Jesus has called us to be, and build the churches he has called us to build.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 8. Go for students

Some say ‘you can’t grow a church on students’ – you can! It doesn’t happen in the first 5 minutes, but eventually students will begin to get jobs in your area, get married and settle down. Students are the nation’s influencers in the future. International students return to their own countries and take a vision that has come from your church. Some students plant a church overseas and take your church to the nations.

One of the great frustrations of student work is the way in which students only tend to be around for half the year. In some student towns this means that for half the year churches can be half the size they are for the other half.

Glass half-full or half-empty?

Glass half-full! It is always worth going for students – and it isn’t difficult. When I came to Poole there were only two students in the church, although there are thousands in our area. Simply by making the decision that we wanted to reach students we began to gather some, and now have a decent crowd coming along. We hope to build on this when the new academic year begins in October.

It is a bit painful when term ends and the students depart, but part of my longer term strategy is to win students who will eventually get jobs locally and build into the church permanently. I also see students as prime church planting candidates, both in this church and overseas.

I also just like reaching students because they bring a different dynamic to church life – it is healthy for a church to have a bunch of people in their late teens and early twenties around, who are trying to find their way in the world and have creative and crazy ideas. It is also very good for students to be part of a church family. It is good for them to be in a setting where they are mixing not just with other students but with children and older adults. There is a lot of symbiotic benefit for the church and for the student.

So go for students!

Book Review: Church Unique

Church Unique by Will Mancini

I read this on the advice of a friend who is church planting in Belfast, with whom I was discussing the thorny subject of vision.

First a gripe: the jargon in these kind of books drives me mad! I know what Mancini and his ilk are trying to do – grappling for language that expresses new concepts – but I was never keen on alphabet spaghetti as a kid, and I’d like to read a leadership book without it now I am a man.

Gripe done with; to the content…

Doubtless many church leaders struggle to articulate a clear and compelling vision for their church, and even more fail to implement it. Vision is much agonized over and many books have been written about it. The thing is, we all know it when we see it! Certain leaders simply embody vision. There is something about them, some charisma, chutzpah, pizzazz which just seems to make things happen, and which often denies analysis. These are the mega-leaders of the mega-churches. Men who are just somehow, well, different. I think of my friend PJ Smyth who planted a church in Johannesburg four years ago and now has a congregation not far short of 2,000 people. Not many people can do that.

So I am always a little bit sceptical about vision books, as I don’t think just anybody can be turned into a great visionary leader. You’ve either got chutzpah or you haven’t. But I do believe that all of us can work on our strengths, sharpen our edge, and do better at what we are doing.

Does this book deliver at this level?

To large degree I think it does.

Probably the most liberating thing about it is the insistence not to simply copy another mans vision. Mancini warns against the ‘Conference Maze’ in which pastors jump from conference to conference and idea to idea trying to copy the latest successful model. The point of this book is to argue that every church is unique, and by definition, trying to copy the unique success of one model will only lead to disappointment, because the circumstances that created that success are unique to its context. Every church needs to find her own unique vision.

(As an aside, I am concerned that the massively growing influence of Mark Driscoll means that many people will be jumping into a multi-service/campus model when it is not right for them. I was an early advocate of multi-site, but I’m sure it isn’t right for everyone. And is this the kind of thing we really want to be encouraging?)

Mancini is critical of the Willow Creek type model of strategic planning, advocating instead a framework that enables the leader to recast, clarify, articulate and advance the vision. He blasts strategic plans as being overly complex, and leading to burnout. He also criticizes the approach that measures success purely on the A,B,C’s (Attendance, Buildings, Capital). He is highly critical about overly long mission/vision statements, with multiple goals, too much jargon, and too little specificity. Instead, we should be focussing on what kind of Christian our churches are designed to produce. One thing that was encouraging to me, being 18 months into leading my current church, is that Mancini says it takes three years to get an established church re-engineered so that everyone is pulling in the same direction. Only another 18 months to go then!

One of the most thought provoking single-line statements in the book comes right at its close: “Religious people have preferences; missional people have stories.” As visionary leaders, we need to be building churches where people have stories to tell of the transforming work of Christ in their lives.

Central to the book are Mancini’s concepts of Mission Mandate (What are we doing?), Mission Motives (Why are we doing it?), Mission Map (How are we doing it?), Mission Marks (When are we successful?), and Mission Mountaintop + Milestones (Where is God taking us?). But to see what he says about those things, you need to buy the book!

Hiring Well

Some great advice on hiring staff from Nelson Searcy's blog.

I'll definitely try this one next time:

One of my favorite things is to toss them the keys and let them drive the car. That’s always revealing.

Good & Bad in Seattle

This may be of interest - Scott Thomas (Director of Acts29) talking recently about the strengths and weaknesses of Mars Hill Church.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 7. Preaching and teaching

I believe that generally on a Sunday we should seek to handle the great doctrines of the faith. But increasingly people don’t know how to live day to day. Given my time again I would run a ‘School of Life’ in which I would want there to be Biblical and practical teaching not just on obvious things such as marriage and money, but on issues like reliability, integrity and loyalty.

Now this one has got me thinking…

The trouble is, if I were running a session on reliability, would anyone turn up?!

Like my dad, I am not a particular fan of the Bill Hybels style of life-issue topical preaching on Sundays. It can have its place, and sometimes I do it, but generally I think it is healthier and safer (and more biblically faithful) to work systematically through a book of the Bible, or a biblical theme. However, if we are preaching faithfully, real-life issues should be tackled through systematic expository preaching. This must be one of the reasons behind Mark Driscoll’s current popularity – he almost always preaches through a book, but makes it very, very applicable to life.

But running a ‘School of Life’ sounds like a great idea. It sounds like discipleship – which means it could not be merely classroom based, but would need to be worked out in relationship. And this is what we are meant to be doing anyway!

I am always reluctant to add more programs to the church calendar, but I might do something with this one…

Jim Collins: How the Mighty Fall

There is a lot of pressure on church leaders to go for more, so this cautionary book by Jim Collins might be worth a look...

In another groundbreaking leadership text, How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins has hit upon a root cause of organizational / societal decline: The Undisciplined Pursuit of More. To maintain a healthy sense of discipline, leaders ought to be wary of the hazards of excessive ambition. In a similar vein, leaders must put growth in perspective. Bigger isn't necessarily better. Finally, leaders would be wise to realize that growth has to be fueled by the right people. Otherwise, the expansionist urge will bleed an organization of its resources.

Click here to read all of this review.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 6. Play to your strengths

Leadership is the greatest need in our churches. But leaders need to ‘fan into flame the gift of God’ and sharpen up on what they are good at, not waste time on what they are not good at.
Every leader can help serve the body of Christ more widely by specialising in something. This could be an area of teaching or skill that we can bring to others.

Putting this one into practice is easier in a church of 1,200 than one of 120.

In the smaller church, inevitably, leaders have to be more generalist in how they operate. But as the church grows – indeed if it is to grow – it becomes increasingly important to develop specialists.

Whether we are in a larger or smaller church the challenge for us is to work most on our strengths, while the temptation is to focus on our weaknesses. In a small church the leader might need to do something of everything, but wherever possible they should do so in line with their strengths. This means if you are strongest in personal discipleship to focus on that and not feel guilty about not spending 15 hours in sermon preparation each week. It means if you are strongest at administration and strategy giving your best time to that, and finding someone else who is better at hospital visitation to help you with that. It means that you need to staff (or recruit volunteers) to cover the things you are not so good at and resist the demands that you do the stuff that drains energy without producing much fruit.

This means you need to have a certain toughness of skin, because people will always pick up on the areas where you are not so strong and demand you give that more attention. We cannot afford to give into these demands. This is not an excuse to be lazy or ‘selectively sluggardly’ but it does mean choosing to lead efficiently and fruitfully, and not be a people pleaser.

Playing to our strengths means we need to keep developing our strengths – just as Tiger Woods never considers himself to have mastered his golf swing but keeps on honing it, we need to keep applying ourselves to the development of our gifts.

Reflections on 40 years... Part 5. Ask more from your people

Believers are prepared to give a lot of time; effort and money to those things they see have purpose and are worthwhile. Good leaders can be quite demanding, but get a response.

The demands church leaders sometimes make of their people can be shocking.

Even more shocking is when we fail to ask enough.

Asking a lot of people takes some nerve, and many pastors are simply not cut out to be that brazen. Too many churches settle into mediocrity and decline because their leaders do not have the courage to ever make a big ask.

I moved from a church where it was relatively easy to make big asks for money, because that was in the culture of the church – time and again we had raised the bar for giving and seen people respond in faith. This didn’t mean it was always easy, but it certainly made things easier. Moving to a new church I had to dig deep in order to confidently ask people for an increase in giving when our bank balance was looking very wobbly earlier this year. I didn’t have the same track record with the church; the national economy was in recession; I knew some people were uncomfortable with me talking about money – but I had to ask.

Often it is money that we have to ask for, but there are many other things that will cost our people. We must never become manipulative. We must be sure we have heard right from God. But we mustn’t be afraid to ask.

Approachable and Accountable?

A helpful link from Between Two Worlds

A wise set of companion articles by Ken Sande:

Approachability: The Passport to Real Ministry and Leadership
Accountability: The Mark of a Wise and Protected Leader

One of his suggestions is to go beyond your inner circle with regard to approachability and seek the candid feedback of others. Here's a suggested email:

Dear ___, I would like your assistance in gaining an accurate assessment of how “approachable” I am to other people. Therefore, I would appreciate it if you would do me the great favor of reading the attached article and giving me your candid feedback on how approachable I am in your eyes. You may do this in any way that is comfortable for you, whether offering some general observations, or evaluating me in light of any or all of the characteristics described in the attached article. It would be especially helpful if you could provide specific examples that illustrate my strengths or weaknesses in any of these areas. I sincerely want to become more approachable to others, so the more candid and specific your feedback, the better. Thank you!

Reflections on 40 years... Part 4. Implement the vision

Leaders need to have strong vision, but how are you going to implement it? You need either the gifting to do it yourself or to employ those who can.

The King James translation of Proverbs 29:18 is often quoted: Where there is no vision, the people perish. It is true that churches that lose vision eventually wither and die, but my observation would be that as often as a lack of vision the real problem is a lack of implementation. Lots of leaders are happy dreaming up ideas, fewer are happy to get stuck in and really make things happen. I have been part of some strong teams that lacked implementers – team discussions were exciting but a lot of the time didn’t really produce very much.

By contrast, the leaders I know who seem to be doing best at growing healthy churches are great at implementing, or, more to the point, great at recruiting team members who are brilliant implementers. My special respect is given to those men who are happy to buy into another man’s vision rather than create their own, and spend themselves turning it into reality.

If your vision isn’t happening, perhaps your vision isn’t right, or perhaps you are just not implementing it.