A church leader must balance two things: 1) working IN the church and 2) working ON the church. Working IN the church refers to doing the tasks that keep things going. If the teaching pastor doesn't work IN the church on a given week, there will be no message for Sunday. If the director of finance doesn't work IN the church the offering doesn't get deposited. Working ON the church refers to doing the tasks that keep things growing. If you don't work ON your department, you'll never come up … [Read more...]
How to Prevent Staff Burnout in Ministry
A couple years back I was on a tele-coaching call with Nelson Searcy and I asked him what he does to prevent his staff from burning out. With our volunteers we rotate people one month on then one month off. That's our strategy to not burnout our volunteers but currently we don't have any strategy to not burnout our paid staff. And since I love my staff and don't want them to get burned out I asked Nelson how I go about doing that. I was suprised at his answer. Here's what he said: It is not … [Read more...]
The Benefit of Teamwork
The purpose of teamwork is synergy. Synergy is the state in which the output is greater than the sum of the inputs. One plus one equals three, four, even five! Let me explain... In the 1885 world series of mule team competition, held in Chicago, the winning team pulled 9,000 pounds, the second place team a little less. Someone suggested that they see what the two teams could do together. The result was 30,000 pounds, much more than the sum of their separate loads. Or take geese for … [Read more...]
How to Stay Fresh in Ministry
I received church planting and senior pastor coaching from Kerrick Thomas and Nelson Searcy of The Journey Church for five years. Here's one of the best things I learned from them. Nelson used to say that the way to stay fresh in ministry is to: Divert daily, withdraw weekly and abandon annually. If you're going to stay fresh you have to take breaks, you have to rest, you have to do something other than work. And you have to do this daily, weekly and annually. Here's how this fleshes out in … [Read more...]
Quarterly Reporting to Your Board of Directors
At New Day, each board of director is a pastor that does not attend New Day. Since they serve from a distance I work hard to keep them informed of what's happening at our church. If they don't have the right information, they can't properly help us succeed in our mission. One of the ways I keep them informed is by sending them a report at the end of each quarter that summarizes some of our key metrics. Here's the last one I sent for January through March of 2015. Sean, Bill & … [Read more...]
Dealing With Underperformance
If you have a low performing staff member (or volunteer) on your team, you basically have three options: 1. Train them. You may have failed to properly equip them to do their job well and if that's the case you need to take a time out and spend some time training them properly and thoroughly. 2. Transfer them. Jim Collins in his book Good to Great points out the importance of both having the right people on the bus (a metaphor for your team) and having each person in the right seat on the … [Read more...]
Tip for the Salvation Invitation
In this post I want to share a tip that will help you create a more powerful salvation invitation. Not too long ago I learned the concept of the preacher as witness. Here's the basic idea: A preacher is like a witness in a courtroom. And the audience is like the jury in that they will be weighing Christ’s paradigm for living vs culture’s paradigm for living. And at the end of the sermon they will make a decision for or against Christ's way. That being the case - during our weekly sermon … [Read more...]
Twenty Mile March
I read in Jim Collin's book Great by Choice of two explorers in a race to reach the South Pole in the early 1900s. Team A would take advantage of good weather and travel 40 miles in a single day. But then they would take a couple days off to recover. If bad weather came, they would take those days off too. Then when good weather came again, they would go extreme and travel another 40 miles or so. Team B had an entirely different approach. They would travel 20 miles a day, no matter what … [Read more...]
A Leader’s Job
In Dave Ramsey's book Entreleadership I read the following: "It is leadership's job to continually shine a spotlight on the goal and remove any distractions." That being SO true, let me shine a little light on what we're trying to accomplish at New Day (i.e. the goal). We are in the disciple-development business and our product is changed lives (Christlike people). In accordance with Matthew 28:19-20 we: 1. MAKE disciples (we help people become followers of Jesus - “go and make … [Read more...]
What To Spend Time Working On
Everything you do today will fall into one of four categories: Things that are important and urgent. Things that are important but not urgent. Things that are not important but are urgent. Things that are not important and not urgent. Productive people spend as much time as possible in categories one and two and avoid or delegate tasks in categories three and four. … [Read more...]
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