Leveraging Leadership Development Golden Opportunities

by: Mac Lake

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While they may not say it out loud, many people feel like they don’t have time for leadership development. This mentality underscores a fundamental misunderstanding that training leaders always necessitates long hours of teaching and instruction.

Each day there are golden opportunities all around us we that can leverage as teachable moments. But if we’re not looking for them we may totally miss them. They come in the form of a conversation in the hallway, someone popping into your office to ask a quick question or a casual conversation in the middle of a ministry event. These “teachable moments” can take place every day if we simply take the time to look for them.

When someone walks into your office frustrated because they can’t seem to complete an important project, their frustration has created the perfect soil to plant a leadership principle. Now all you have to do is speak into that moment. One small principle given at the right time can sink into their thinking and stay forever.

I will never forget the time I was overwhelmed striving to fulfill a portion of the vision God had given me for my ministry. One of my key leaders sat me down and said, “Mac, if it were easy to be great, everyone would be doing it.” That simple phrase radically transformed my perspective and gave me the leadership fortitude to push forward despite the challenges and opposition. That phrase comes back to me anytime I’m feeling defeated, and it pushes me forward.

A simple principle, idea, or concept spoken at the right moment can give your trainee a totally new perspective and change the way they lead.

Here’s a simple formulate for maximizing on these types of leadership development golden opportunities.

• Listen closely to their frustration or challenge.
• Ask questions to get greater understanding of why they’re frustrated and solutions they’ve already tried.
• Ask them what options they feel they have to overcome their challenge.
• Affirm what they’re doing right.
• Share insights from your leadership experience that will add value to their leadership skill.
• Ask them what leadership lesson they’re learning.
• Have them write down the key next steps that will help them put into practice what they’re learning.

Look for some golden leadership development opportunities this week, you may be surprised by how many you will find.

> Read more from Mac.

Tags: Golden Moments, Leadership Development opportunities, Mac Lake, Teachable Moments

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The Pastor’s Church Finance Checklist

by: Thom Rainer

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A consistent theme I have seen in many churches is in the area of church finances. Many church leaders operate out of a mode of scarcity instead of abundance. While I realize that churches cannot and should not spend foolishly, too many church leaders just don’t recognize that God has provided more than they think.

Often the issue is not lack of funds, but unwise choices of church expenditures. There are many reasons for this reality; I plan to address them in a future post.

A Checklist for Your Consideration

For now, I offer a checklist of questions. As you answer these questions, I hope you will be motivated to think how your church might look at its expenditures and budgets in a different light.

1. If you were to start your church’s budget from scratch, how differently would it look than your present budget?
2. Do you have programs and ministries that, if they were discontinued, would have little negative impact on the church or the community?
3. How much of the church’s expenditures reflect “the way we’ve always done it”?
4. Are there clear lines of accountability for spending at every level?
5. How much of the church’s funds are used to impact the community?
6. Is the church spending its personnel dollars in the most effective ways?
7. Who are the true decision makers on how church funds are spent?
8. Do some of the expenditures reflect preferential treatment toward some of the members?
9. Is debt hindering your church from doing effective ministry?
10. What are the potential unintended consequences of making significant changes in the budget and expenditures?
11. Do you know clearly how church funds given to support missions are being used?
12. Does your church spend too much or too little on physical facilities?
13. Does the church have adequate funds for training and development of staff and laity?
14. Does the church’s budget reflect faith, futility, or foolishness?

An Attitude of Abundance

If we really trust that God will provide for our churches in all areas, including finances, we may realize that we do not have a money problem; we may have a stewardship problem. These fourteen questions can be a starting point to help you move toward a realistic and faith-based approach to church finances.

> Read more from Thom.

Tags: Thom Rainer, church finance checklist, church finances

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5 Success Factors in Changing Organizational Culture

by: Judith Glaser

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Culture transformation is an advanced leadership skill. The primary way to change a culture is to use your Conversational Intelligence to create an environment that infuses energy and commitment into relationships, teams, and the whole organization. Too often we get stuck in habit patterns of ‘talking about’ change but not creating change.

The more we talk about change, the more we talk about all the problems and challenges that can emerge — and we fall into negative mindsets which trigger “fear hormones” and “threat networks” in our brains. No wonder change is so difficult. By the time we are ready to take action we are frozen in place.

You can shift the way you think about change by following these factors that most successful leaders use to navigate their journey:

1st Success Factor: The first skill is be the change for transforming the culture. Realize you have the power, influence and the ability to see and understand the culture in which you work, and to see how you can play a role in transforming it into a healthier, more inspiring, and thriving culture. Transforming culture can mean a culture that is so powerful it transforms itself or it can mean that you play a role in activating the culture transformation.

>>Call to Action: Envision how you can play a catalytic role in transforming your culture. Envision how you can be accountable for co-creating transformation in your culture by the way you show up at work everyday. When you put skin in the game, you become the change that transforms the culture.

2nd Success Factor: The second skill, embrace the opportunity, is the ability to step out of your Comfort Zone and rather than allowing fear of the unknown paralyze you, embrace the opportunity with excitement and enthusiasm. Your shift in focus will create positive ripple effects on those you influence. By fully stepping out of your comfort zone and into a new opportunity – you are activating your ability to transform yourself, and also to inspire courage in others.

>>Call to Action: Embracing opportunity both ‘encourages’ others and ‘inspires courage’ in yourself and others. By seeing transformation and change as a way to grow you have an influence on how you experience the challenge in a positive and less fearful way.

3rd Success Factor: The third skill, create space for conversations, is the ability to intentionally open up opportunities for feedback-rich conversations one-on-one, within teams and across the organization. By opening up space for and creating Conversational Journeys, you create an environment in which employees have room to learn, grow, and be nourished by new ideas and energy.

>>Call to Action: Creating spaces is a call to action you need to take every day to open the space for more innovative, generative, and catalytic conversations to take place in your relationships and teams. This space ‘signals our brain’ that we can share and discover around new ideas we’ve never talked about before.

4th Success Factor: The fourth skill, practice Co-creating Conversations ® is a core to Conversatioanl Intelligence. In the previous steps, you learned to recognize and release old baggage filled with toxic experiences that negatively undermine and denigrate relationships, and replace them with new meanings that positively uplift and inspire relationships – empowering a new sense of optimism and effectiveness.

As a leader, you can begin to have “co-creating conversations.” Co-creating conversations are conversations that have the ability to release the past and open space for the future with others. a psychological state of being that is powerful and transforms us.

>>Call to Action: Co-creating conversations means opening the space for new energy for co-creation with others. This is a space where you and others are open to think about what you don’t know, what you don’t know you don’t know, and to explore possibilities that you never thought about before.

5th Success Factor: And, finally, there is the fifth skill of shaping stories. Having moved from a place of understanding, to challenging, to stepping out and releasing, to opening space for Co-creating Conversations, you have now mastered the most proactive and intentional skill of shaping the story of your team’s collective success. This is what visionary leader and organizations do. It’s work you do with others, no on your own in isolation. And what you co-create together are “shared stories for success” that envision and make possible the fulfillment of WE.

>>Call to Action: Shaping stories, is a call to action to realize how you shape the stories impact how the future unfolds. Reflect every day in a conscious way on how you shape stories so that they are winning, inclusive, and appreciative. These conversations have the ability to reframe your view of the world, give you and others hope for the future, and that enable you to see the best outcomes for all of us. Both meanings have the power to transform.

How You Label Determines How You See
Empowering your team to work in concert to achieve your organizations goals and strategies requires flexibility of thought, agility of mind, and speed of response. Most of all, it requires you to break out of old conversational habits and negative patterns of communicating and view the impact you can have on your business in totally new ways.

Use conversational intelligence as a way to break from the past and create the future. Rather than thinking about situations as problems, think of them as challenges and opportunities, and communicate this point of view in your conversations with others. Until you challenge yourself to change old thinking and old conversational habits, you will see little change from yesterday to today. Once you do – you will find you become a catalyst for change where ever you go and you will discover new energy appears around you for tackling big challenges and achieving the desired results and targets regardless of their size and difficulty.

Read more from Judith here.

Tags: Creating Culture, Judith Glaser, Transforming Culture

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Bearing the Leadership Burden

by: Michael Kelley

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Leadership, whether of an organization or of a Bible study or of a family, is a burden. A joyful burden much of the time, but a burden nonetheless. Oswald Sanders said it like this: “The world is run by tired men. Mediocrity is the result of never getting tired. Fatigue is the price of leadership.” In other words, leading is the willingness to pick up the burden. But most of the time, we think of that burden in “strategic” terms.

If you do a cursory search on “leadership” you’ll find all kinds of resources, most of which have numbers associated with them. You can 5 Ways or 7 Methods or 14 Theories. The vast majority of these resources deal in strategy, and they should. That is one burden of leadership; you are responsible for the overall vision and perspective of the people under your care. But it can’t really stop there. As a leader, whether in the home or in the church, we bear the burden for what we are leading, but we also must bear the burdens of whom we are leading.

In pastoral ministry, for example, the burden you bear cannot be exclusively in terms of the vision of the church. The burden must take on a more personal nature. Same thing is true in a family, or even in a small group or Bible study. The burden is not only the crafting of and guarding of a clear vision; the “burden” has faces. Problems. Sicknesses. Pain. The burden-bearing leader is one who is not isolated from those he or she leads, but instead is checked into the real issues the people under their care are walking through.

It’s this kind of burden-bearing Paul described in Galatians 6:1-2:

“Brothers, if someone is caught in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual should restore a person with a gentle spirit, watching out for yourselves so you also won’t be tempted. Carry one another’s burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

This passage is about more than stewarding a compelling vision for an organization or a family; it’s about people, and the willingness to come alongside those people in the day-to-day lifting. It seems to me that this is not just a single moment, but instead a lifestyle of investment. To that end, here are three characteristics of the burden-bearing leader:

1. The burden-bearing leader is available.

Time is a commodity like most other things. As a commodity, it is in limited supply. And the greater the leadership responsibility, the greater demand on the time. It’s tempting, then, to want to have a very insulated leadership kind of style – to focus on the big picture and to not come into the details. Unfortunately, it’s those details that are the most representative of people. The burden-bearing leader must, then, be available. This availability is also a responsibility, and it must have limits. But the leader who is available is the one who is going to err on the side of making accommodation to their time or their schedule if they can.

2. The burden-bearing leader is long-suffering.

One of the tendencies we have in leadership is to desire quick fixes to problems. We want to have the meeting, send the email, or have the drop in conversation and resolve the issue quickly and succinctly. And while that might work in some instances, it rarely does when you consider the people involved. Instead, the burden-bearing leader makes the choice to be long-suffering. They are willing to not just a conversation once, but to actually engage in that conversation and to have it again and again. It’s this kind of long-suffering investment that will mark someone who recognizes they are doing more than leading a nameless and faceless entity, but instead stewarding some part of the lives of those whom God has seen fit to put under their care.

3. The burden-bearing leader is listening.

Nothing makes a person feel less like a person than when someone gives only cursory notice to their issue. Conversely, nothing is quite as uplifting as when you know you have the absolute and undivided attention of the person you are speaking to. For a leader, there are lots of voices, and each one needs to be heard. The tendency for us whether in the home, the workplace, or the church is to try and have as many conversations as possible in a span of time. But many times, less is actually more. The burden-bearing leader does the simplest thing that can make the most difference – they actually listen. They look and concentrate. They are fully engaged in the conversation they are having. And in so doing, they are recognizing the creature before them is created in the image of God.

Leadership is a burden. And many times, it’s a heavy one. But as leaders we can cultivate the kind of habits that will not only make us bearers of the burden of what we are leading, but of whom we are leading.

> Read more from Michael.

Tags: Burdens, Leadership, Michael Kelley, bearing burdens, leadership burden

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12 2nd Tier Practices that Produce First Rate Leaders

by: Carey Nieuwhof

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Ever wonder what separates great leaders from poor leaders?

Ever wonder whether you’re developing the practices and qualities of great leadership?

I’ve met more than a few ineffective leaders who have great intentions, but just haven’t developed the skills and attitudes that separate great leaders from poor leaders.

So what separates great leaders from not-so-great leaders? There are many things, but these 12 overlooked practices stand out to me as often-missed qualities and characteristics of the best leaders I know.

The good news is none of them are genetic. They mostly consist of attitudes and disciplines.

Change your attitude, gain some discipline, and you can become a far better leader too.

For the sake of helping all of us lead better, here are 12 often overlooked practices great leaders develop.

Great leaders:

1. Make complex matters seem simple

This is much more difficult than you think. As Woody Guthrie is quoted as saying, “Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Great leaders stick with a problem or idea long enough and engage it deeply enough to clear away the fog and reduce the concept to its simplest forms so anyone can understand it.

This doesn’t mean they dumb it down. Rather, it means they make the concept accessible. And because it becomes accessible, more people are helped, and more people follow.

For a sermon: If you can’t say it in a sentence, you shouldn’t say it. I realize that’s difficult, but here’s the process I’ve been using for years to reduce complex ideas into single sentence summaries.

And when it comes to something larger than a 30-60 minute talk (like a project or initiative), work on it long enough to develop a 30 second elevator pitch (here are some quick hints at how to develop one). Again, if you can’t say it in 30 seconds, you probably don’t understand the problem clearly enough to proceed.

And even if you don’t, no one else will understand it clearly enough to follow.

2. Fight for clarity

In leadership, confusion reigns until someone makes things clear. Clarity is what great leaders bring to the table.

I find one of the best ways to become clear on issues is to ask questions, pull away to think and pray about it, sometimes for days or weeks and then take the idea back to the team for more discussion. Usually, clarity emerges out of the process.

But clarity doesn’t happen automatically. You have to fight for it.

3. Refuse to make excuses

Ever notice that the best leaders rarely make excuses?

In fact, the leaders who make the most progress make the fewest excuses. And the leaders who make the most excuses make the least progress.

This is one of my pet leadership themes: You can make excuses, or you can make progress, but you can’t make both.

4. Think abundance

A scarcity mindset will kill your organization or church over the long haul.

Yes there are seasons for restraint. Yes, every organization needs a bean counter.

But if you think small you will stay small. If you think it’s not possible, it won’t be.

5. Regularly sift through key priorities

It would be amazing if you could set your priorities once at say, age 22, and just cruise through life without readjusting them.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Great leaders are continually assessing and reassessing how they spend their time, energy and resources.

I realize that every 3-6 months now, I have to rethink who I’m meeting with, how much time I’ll make available for certain activities, and rethinking our organization goals and progress.

6. Think won’t, not can’t

How you speak to yourself matters.

Rather than saying “I can’t” (even internally), great leaders instead say “I won’t”.

That small change moves them from realizing they could do something, but have chosen not to. While you may not always say that out loud in front of people (it’s rude), telling yourself you won’t reminds you that you had a choice and exercised it.

While that might seem like a small difference, it’s the difference between people who let life happen to them and people who make life happen.

7. Master self-discipline

Self-discipline is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Self-discipline is simply taking responsibility for your actions, health, attitudes, schedule, words, mistakes and decisions.

To not do so makes you…irresponsible.

8. Think we, not me

Truly great leaders die to themselves.

As Jim Collins has so surprisingly and famously demonstrated, the greatest leaders in the corporate world are…humble. They are determined, but they’re not selfish. Jesus would agree.

They believe in a cause greater than themselves and serve the organization or cause they’re a part of. They don’t expect it to serve them.

If you want to be great, die to yourself.

9. Decide to work for their employees

One day you’ll be such a great leader everyone will serve you, right?

Wrong.

The greatest bosses realize their employees don’t work for them, they work for their employees.

If you show up with a ‘how can I serve you?’ attitude, you be a far more effective leader.

10. Get started early

This one’s simple. Just set your alarm earlier.

For whatever reason, early risers do better in life. They’re happier, healthier and more productive.

Get a jump on your day, and you get a jump on leadership and life.

11. Arrive on time

Great leaders are rarely late. This is another simple leadership discipline that can get you far.

Show up on time. Show up prepared, and you will be ahead of most people.

12. Practice self-care

The best leaders take time off. They don’t work 24/7. They realize they have limits and they respect them.

As I outlined here, almost every leader will either practice self-care, or will revert to self-medication.

Don’t believe it? Ever notice you eat worse when you’re under stress? That you swap out exercise when your schedule fills up in exchange for more caffeine? If you answered yes, you’re self-medicating, and it takes down a huge slice of business leaders and church leaders.

What Do You Think?

There are many more characteristics, but these are 12 I think deserve more daylight than they usually get.

What would you add to the list?

> Read more from Carey.

Tags: Carey Nieuwhof, Leadership, leadership qualities

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Understanding the Importance of the Critical Path in Your Next Ministry Project

by: Seth Godin

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The longest string of dependent, non-compressible tasks is the critical path.

Every complicated project is the same. Many people working on many elements, some of which are dependent on others. I want a garden, which means I need grading, a bulldozer, a permit, seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, weeding, planting, maintenance and time for everything to grow. Do those steps in the wrong order, nothing happens. Try to grow corn in a week by giving it a bonus or threatening to fire it, nothing happens…

Critical path analysis works backward, looking at the calendar and success and at each step from the end to the start, determining what you’ll be waiting on.

For example, in your mind’s eye, the garden has a nice sign in front. The nice sign takes about a week to get made by the sign guy, and it depends on nothing. You can order the sign any time until a week before you need it. On the other hand, you can’t plant until you grade and you can’t grade until you get the delivery of soil and you can’t get the delivery until you’ve got a permit from the local town.

Which means that if you’re the person in charge of both the sign and the permit, do the permit first.

That’s obvious, right? And yet…

And yet most organizations focus on shiny objectives or contentious discussions or get sidetracked by emergencies instead of honoring the critical path.

Thirty years ago, I led a team of forty people building an incredibly complex series of products, all of which had to ship in time for the Christmas selling season. The stakes were pretty high: if we missed by even one day, the entire company was going to fold.

We did some critical path analysis and pretty quickly identified the groups of people that others would be waiting on as each stage of the project developed. It’s a relay race, and right now, these four people are carrying the baton.

I went out and got some buttons–green and red. The deal was simple: If you were on the critical path, you wore a green button. Everyone else wore red. When a red button meets a green button, the simple question is asked, “how can I help?” The president will get coffee for the illustrator if it saves the illustrator three minutes. In other words, the red button people never (ever) get to pull rank or interrupt a green button person. Not if you care about critical path, not if you care about shipping.

Once you’re aware of who’s on the path, you understand the following: delaying the critical path by one hour at the beginning of the project is the very same thing as delaying the entire project by an hour at the very end.

Rush early, not late. It’s cheaper that way, and better for your peace of mind, too.

Read more from Seth here.

Tags: Critical Path, Seth Godin, Staff Leadership Roles

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Leadership Should Start with Apprenticeship

by: James Emery White

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Someone asked me the other day what my advice would be to young leaders. Then they followed it up with this: “and if it could be just one piece of advice.”

Wow….

My mind was instantly flooded with a thousand replies, like:

• stay in close community with Christ
• pray like a mad-man (or a mad-woman)
• don’t give in to a worldly understanding of success
• prioritize marriage and family
• as you preach and dispense, drink freely from the cup yourself
• never waver from Scripture

But then I realized what would probably be the best, most all-encompassing, advice I could give. The most practical. The most “from the trenches.”

“Apprentice yourself to an older, proven and seasoned leader through an existing local church.”

How’s that for a lost word.

“Apprentice.”

(Maybe I’ll deal with older, proven and seasoned in a later blog.)

But I wish it would get found.

We make knowing about something equivalent to its reality in our life. But that’s not what knowledge means. We confuse information with knowledge. They are, of course, not the same. In the Bible, to know was to do. It was intimate, experiential, something within you. If it didn’t impact your life, you didn’t know it – even if you had the information.

In colonial America, one would be apprenticed for six years to a particular tradesperson in order to learn the craft. The apprentice would live, eat and breathe with the person they wanted to emulate in terms of the skill they were trying to master.

This was the dynamic behind the idea of an apprentice. You would seek to learn a craft under a master not simply to acquire information, but skill. You didn’t learn about making a gun, or forging iron, or weaving a basket. You learned to do it. And to do it well. Only when you could do it were you turned loose as one who had the knowledge (real knowledge) to do it.

Today, we’ve made “knowing” all about information – seminars, videos, podcasts, TV, classrooms, conferences – which allow the head to be stuffed, but the life to remain untouched.

Going even further, unless you spend time with someone long traveled along the road you wish to take, you don’t have any idea what it is you have no idea about. That’s the real problem of thinking you know everything. You think you know everything there is to know – but you don’t know what it is you don’t know.

No one does.

That’s why being an apprentice matters.

So I would advise young leaders to go against ego and instant gratification, opportunity and eagerness, yes, even church planting (at first) and consider serving in an existing church for a season in order to be mentored. Serve your time. Learn all you can. Humbly submit and be schooled.

And who knows?

You may just end up filling one of the most important and growing needs of our day, which is succeeding the previous generation of leaders by assuming the leadership mantle of…

…where you apprenticed.

> Read more from James.

Tags: Acceptance, Apprenticeship, James Emery White, Leadership

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Leading Your Congregation to Invest in God’s 5 Funds

by: Rick Warren

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Should Pastors ever talk about money? Only if you want to make disciples. What we worship shows in how we spend our time, our energy, and our money. So one of the roles of church leaders is to help people see the proper place of money in our lives and the potential reward in eternity when we invest our resources into eternal things.

The Bible says in 1 Timothy 6:18-19, “Tell people to use their money to do good.  They should be rich in good works and should give happily to those in need, always being ready to share whatever God has given them.  By doing this they’ll be storing up real treasure for themselves in heaven.  It is the only safe investment for eternity and they will be living a fruitful Christian life down here as well.” 

Notice three things:

• Money should be used, not loved. We should love people and use money and never use people and love money.
• Money can be invested to store up treasures for eternity.
• You invest in eternity by using your money for God’s purposes for your life.

Since God has five purposes for your life, He also has five funds for people to invest in – one for each purpose.

1. We can invest in His treasury fund.

In Matthew 6 Jesus says, “Don’t store up for yourself treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves can break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” We invest in God’s treasury fund in heaven when we use our money to express worship to God.

God doesn’t need money. But when people given an offering to God, they’re saying, “God, I love you and I’m thinking of you and I want you to be first in my life.” Worship giving is undesignated. We offer it as a sacrifice with no strings attached and no controls placed on it. And we offer it when and where we worship.

2. We can invest in His mutual fund.

The second purpose of God for our lives is to learn to love other people. The Bible says in Romans 12:10,“Love one another with mutual affection.” People invest in God’s mutual fund by using money to encourage fellowship and build relationships with other people. Giving to God brings people closer to God, and giving to other people brings us closer to other people. We lead people to give to each other through acts of hospitality, such as hosting a small group with refreshments, encouraging and discipling people over a cup of coffee, and serving a meal to people who need friends. This often happens within the body in a way that can’t be programmed. It’s spontaneous and personal.

3. We can invest in His growth fund.

The Bible says in 2 Peter 3:18 “Grow in spiritual strength and become better acquainted with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Some of my money expresses worship. And some of my money encourages fellowship. And I invest in God’s growth fund when I use some of my money to enhance my own personal character, my own personal growth.

When you teach about money, it’s always appropriate to challenge people to use some of their money to buy and read books, to develop skills, to pursue education, or to become a better leader. People waste tons of money on comfort and entertainment. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with spending money on entertainment, a higher priority should be to spend money on personal development.

The Bible not only says people can give an offering, but also that we can be an offering. It says in Romans 12:1, “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” (MSG)

4. We can invest in His service equity fund.

When we teach about money, we should be teaching people that one of the ways we serve others is by helping in times of financial need. The church should develop a reputation for responding to crises financially when we take a special offering after a tragedy. And it should happen in behind-the-scenes ways as well when members of a small group help another member during a difficult season.

In the Bible there was a church in Greece that did this. They heard about another church that was in trouble and going through a famine so they gave them some money. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 8:3-4, “They gave as much as they were able and even more than they could afford. No one told them to do it. They pleaded with us to let them share with us in this service [that’s the Service Fund] for God’s people.” (NCV)

The Bible says this in Proverbs 11:24, “The world of the generous gets larger and larger. The world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller.”  One aspect of discipleship is moving people from selfishness to generosity by instructing and inspiring people to give to others.

When we did the 40 Days of Community campaign, Saddleback Church decided we would feed every homeless person in Orange County three meals a day for 40 days. Then we found out there were 42,000 people who were homeless. The members of Saddleback collected over two million pounds of food and then 9,200 volunteers collected, sorted, and distributed it.

5. We can invest in His global fund.

Luke 16:9 is probably one of the most misunderstood verses in the entire Bible. Jesus says this, “Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves so that when it is gone you will be welcomed in eternal dwellings.” What in the world does He mean by that? I’m convinced Jesus wanted people to use their wealth to share the good news of Jesus, to expand the family of God, to enlarge heaven’s population.

Churches can give people opportunities to purchase resources to share their faith, to give to missionaries, to go on mission trips or sponsor the trips others are going on, and to support the evangelistic outreach capacity of the local church. God is looking for people who will care about the whole world as much as He does.

Your reward and your responsibility in heaven – not your salvation but your reward and responsibility for eternity is going to be based on how you manage what God put in your hands while you’re here on earth. It would be foolish and shortsighted to spend it all on myself now in light of eternity.

The best time for people to start investing in eternity is now. And the best time for you to teach and lead your congregation to embrace this life of generosity is now. So where do you need to start?

> Read more from Rick.

Tags: 5 Funds, God's Purposes, Invest, Investment, Rick Warren

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Moses and the Temporary Nature of Leadership

by: Eric Geiger

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Leadership is always a temporary assignment—always. It is a temporary assignment because leaders do not ultimately own the teams, ministries, or organizations that they lead. They simply steward what the Lord has entrusted to their care for a season. Wise leaders embrace the temporal reality of leading, and they prepare the ministry for the future. Because the assignment is fleeting, developing others for leadership is an essential responsibility of a leader.

Moses understood the temporary nature of leadership and the necessity of succession. He personally selected and invested in leaders. He modeled leadership by replicating leaders.

This pattern of divesting and replicating leadership began not long after the exodus from Egypt. Moses led a group of millions literally by himself. At one point in his ministry, Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, arrived for a visit and asked, “What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?” (Ex.18:14). Moses tried to explain his role as arbiter of millions, but his answers fell short. Jethro, always quick to correct, said, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone” (Ex.18:17-18).

Jethro encouraged Moses to select honorable, wise, and godly men who could be taught basic interpretation of God’s laws and instruction. It was a defined leadership system designed not only to alleviate stress immediately from Moses but also to sustain the young nation for the long haul. Ultimately Moses listened to Jethro, leaders emerged, his stress lessened, and his father-in-law went home.

This pattern of multiplication in Moses’ life and leadership reached its pinnacle with his selection of Joshua as his successor.

Joshua is first mentioned in the Scripture when Moses chose him to lead the Israelite army in battle against the Amalekites (Ex. 17:8-16). From that moment forward, we observe Moses intentionally developing Joshua.

As you read through the Scripture, you see Moses pouring into Joshua. Moses brought Joshua up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God (Ex. 24:13). Joshua observed Moses’ righteous indignation when Moses smashed the two tablets (Ex. 32:17-19), and Joshua was witness to the holy communion Moses shared with the Lord as he guarded the tent of meeting (Ex. 33:11).

Through all these critical moments in the life of God’s people, Joshua was there with Moses. Moses helped ensure the following generation would love and fear God. He served his people by pouring his life into another. And immediately after Moses’ death, Joshua was ready to lead Israel.

Moses’ behavior is a model for modern-day leadership. We can see the priority he placed on the future by how he empowered younger leaders like Joshua. Simply put, leaders are responsible for future leadership.

A leader who is not developing future leaders is not serving the organization well. The leader is either being shortsighted or selfish—shortsighted in that the future is not being considered or selfish in that the leader thinks only about himself/herself.

The leadership legacy of Joshua, sadly, is very different, as we find in the Book of Judges. After Joshua’s death, Israel drifted from the Lord and lived in chaos:

“Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110…That whole generation was also gathered to their ancestors. After them another generation rose up who did not know the Lord or the works He had done for Israel” (Judges 2:8,10, HCSB).

Why the stark contrast?

There is no record of Joshua investing in anyone. We don’t see him intentionally developing leaders. We don’t read of him pouring into others. And the generation after his leadership didn’t know the Lord.

A soul-searching question: If you were to hand your temporary leadership assignments over today, would a statement about your leadership sound more like Moses or more like Joshua?

Moses proactively and intentionally invested his life in Joshua. Under Joshua’s leadership, Israel enjoyed great prosperity and victory. But Joshua failed to see the value of investing in younger leaders.

Will you be like Moses or like Joshua? Will you invest in others who will ensure the following generations know of the Lord and His gracious works?

> Read more from Eric.

Tags: Eric Geiger, Joshua, Leadership Development, Moses, temporary leadership

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Steps to Measure and Monitor Your Church Ministry Teams

by: Dave Bair

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When was the last time someone asked you, “How is your ministry going?” The most common answer people give to that question is something like ‘fine’, ‘busy’, or ‘growing’. Those answers are OK, but they really don’t provide much insight. Often the answers we give to that question are really answering how we feel about our ministries or how we feel we are doing as ministry leaders. When digging into why we give those answers, I discovered it is partly because many of us don’t really know how our ministries are doing. Few church leaders actually measure and monitor the performance of their church or their ministry team. 

Performance Matters

The work of ministry is the most important job in the world, with immediate and eternal significance. If we believe this so strongly about a job, then that job deserves our very best. The challenge we face is that we can’t really know what our best is without clear objectives and measurements. Only by knowing those things can we identify how we improve. If you want to accurately answer the question ‘how is your ministry going’, you need three things: define ‘good’, monitor and evaluate, and execute change.

Define Good

A key cause of poor performance is poorly set expectations. Setting expectations for performance must happen at the individual level through a job description and at the ministry team level through a mission statement and business plan. Job descriptions should include three sections: purpose of the role, activities and tasks directly responsible for, and how to measure success, both objectively and subjectively.

A ministry team must have an idea what they are trying to accomplish within the context of the church’s mission. If the team is new to mission statements and business plans, I recommend starting with the resources at Building Champions. This organization provides great guidance for how to create your mission and a simple business plan to move you forward.

Monitor and Evaluate

Now that you have clear goals, it is time to monitor how you are doing at reaching them. I suggest three types of metrics for each ministry team or leadership role. 

• Track some hard numbers. How many baptisms did we do this year? What percentage of attendees are in small groups? How many people in our church gave money each month in the last year? These are the types of things you put on a graph and publish to the team.

• Trust your intuition. The graphs are great, but they only tell part of the story. How you feel about the ministry, or how others feel about it, is equally important. Is the team getting along well, or is there tension? How would you rate the level of collaboration in your team?

• Get an assessment. There is great value in getting an unbiased assessment of your ministry, based on an objective standard of excellence. We all have blind spots, and a third party can help us see things from a new perspective. It is common in an assessment to discover things we didn’t even consider important are the lynchpin to taking the ministry to the next level. Church Community Builder offers assessments of four key leadership roles: Volunteer Coordinator, Connections Pastor, Leader of Finance and Generosity, and Executive Pastor.

Execute Change

You have set clear expectations for performance, and you have your assessment results and your metrics trending on a nice colorful graph … now what? The purpose of all this is to identify what’s working and what’s not. Now you can begin to try new things and see if results improve, stay the same, or get worse. When using metrics to drive behavior change, we examine the data in three sequential steps.

1. What? What is the data telling us? What is included in this data? How was it calculated? As an example: ‘We had 560 people on Sunday’. Does that mean in the main worship service? What about kids, or youth, or volunteers? Before we can make a judgement about the data, we must understand what the number represents.
2. So what? What does the data mean? Is that more or less than last week or last year? How does it compare to our goals? This is the time you make a personal judgement about what you see. The focus is on finding meaningful improvements. Often we resist analyzing the data, because it might include negative feedback for people or ministries. If we skip this step, we miss the opportunity to get better. Once we know what the data shows, it’s time to give the feedback to the stakeholders. While this is difficult, you are really close to experiencing the payoff of the whole process. Here are a few tips on the power of being direct from Rob Cizek.
3. Now what? What are you going to do differently tomorrow, next week, and next month? Is this a behavior you can change on your own, or do you need to demonstrate some expert change management in the team or across the church to make it happen? How long will it take to make the change? Then, how long until you expect results? This is where you can experiment with new strategies. Make sure the metrics you’re tracking will tell you if the new approach is working. 

Your Next Move

There is a lot involved in tracking and improving performance in your ministry team. It would be logical to start at the beginning and revisit job descriptions and mission statements. However, I recommend you start with metrics. Start tracking the data you think is important. You may not get the metrics just right, but they will likely be close. Then, you can watch the trend while you are working on the business plan and job descriptions. In addition, starting with metrics tends to reveal the quality of our data, which is likely to become a metric in itself. It won’t be easy, but the work is important enough to make the effort. Next time someone asks how your ministry is going, you can ask yourself if they are making small talk or if they really want to know. If they want to know, tell them to pull up a chair and settle in, because you really do know the answer.

> Read more from Dave.

Tags: Church Ministry Teams, Dave Bair, Measure, Ministry Team, Monitor

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