Posted on Monday, February 20, 2017

How to Build a Healthy Elder Team

by Joshua Reich

If there is one thing pastors know well, it is the pain that can stem from a poorly run elder team. Long meetings, arguments, back stabbing, meetings outside of the meeting, gossip, politicking. The list goes on and on.

On the other side, you hear about elder teams that care for each other, love and serve the church well, care for the pastors and their families and work together to fulfill what God has called the church to. This side of the equation is seen by many pastors as a unicorn. There are rumors, sightings and rumblings, but few actually realize it.

Those elder teams do exist, but they take specific steps to get there.

Here are seven things you must do as a pastor to build a healthy elder culture.

1. Make building a healthy elder team/culture a priority.

Too many lead pastors don’t make this a priority, and their elder team and the culture of that team shows how little effort this gets. In fact, in many churches the lead pastor has little to no say who is on the elder team, yet that team determines more about the health of the church than almost every other team.

Most pastors need to make building a healthy elder team a higher priority.

If your by-laws have a nominating committee that doesn’t include the lead pastor, change your by-laws. If you have a nominating committee for your elder team, change your by-laws and take that out. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

For too long at our church I saw leadership development as something that would just happen because I cared about leadership, but for leaders to be developed and a culture to be built, the lead pastor must carry the flag. Don’t mistake this, a culture will be built, whether you try or not, so make building a healthy culture a priority.

Pastor, this needs to be higher on your list of priorities.

Why does this have to be a priority?

A healthy elder team brings security, health, care and development to the whole church. When the elder team knows what it is doing (and not doing), when they care for the staff and leaders well, when they are connecting to new people in the church, praying with and for the church, protecting the church, keeping them on track with the vision as well as financially and doctrinally, everyone wins.

The whole church feels the effects of a healthy or unhealthy elder team.

When this doesn’t happen, you see carnage, hurt, pain and disillusionment all over the church.

2. Know what you are looking for in an elder.

If you ask most people in a church what an elder does, you will hear a few different answers. Those answers determine what you will get in an elder team.

They should be financially and business minded. In this case, the elders act more like a board of directors simply checking and balancing things.

You will hear someone pull out 1 Peter 5 and talk about shepherding and pastoring. This team is highly relational, caring and functions to make sure the church is warm, discipled and no one falls through the cracks.

Eventually someone will pull out 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and talk about the qualifications of an elder.

Many pastors simply look for friends to put on their elder team because they know the carnage that can happen if they have enemies on that team.

You will find whatever you are looking for in an elder, so look wisely and know ahead of time what you are looking for.

The failure of most elder teams stems from no one knowing what an elder does.

Does an elder preach? Counsel? Make budgets? Decisions? Do they shepherd everyone? Are they there to protect the pastor? Protect the church from the pastor? (I had an elder say that once.)

Again, your answer will determine what you get because you will go looking for that.

An elder is a man with character, someone who fits the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1 and 1 Peter 5.

An elder is a man who will protect the church, who will keep the church on mission and on track financially and doctrinally. A man who can see the whole field of the church.

An elder must be able to see the whole church.

This last part, seeing the whole field of the church, is one of the most important things to ask when considering someone to be an elder. Someone can be a great community group leader but not a good elder. Someone can be a good businessman but not a good elder. Someone might be a great volunteer in an area, but that’s the lid of their leadership. None of those are bad things. In fact, they are good things. It just means someone is not an elder.

Too many times we put the wrong people on that bus. We think, “He’s a good shepherd, so he should be an elder.” But as a church grows, shepherding isn’t the only thing an elder does. They also oversee staff and budgets (that begin to have a lot of zeros after them). Other times we think, “He’s good with numbers, but he might be a jerk.” You need to know.

3. Always be on the lookout.

You as the lead pastor are always on the lookout for great leaders for every part of your church. The moment you stop, the moment you delegate this, is the moment your church begins to suffer.

You must also have your antennae up for the guns blazing awesome guy who comes into your church and can hurt your church.

4. Start training an elder three years before they become an elder.

If you take responsibility to always be on the lookout, you will begin training an elder well before they become an elder to see if they can handle it. Give them leadership and shepherding opportunities to see how they handle them. Give them decision making responsibilities to see how it goes.

I lead a leadership development group every week with up and coming leaders in our church. Every elder in our church goes through this group. I want to see them interact with a group, argue over a case study, discuss theology, see if they’ll be on time for a meeting, if they’ll come prepared, speak up in a discussion, watch how others interact with them and see if they have the respect of the group.

This is so important, has low risk for the church but brings so much fruit.

5. Have a long process to become an elder.

Why a long process? Honestly, protection.

Three years allow you to see a man’s character, his marriage (if married), his parenting (if he has kids), his generosity and desire to live on mission. You hear him pray. You watch him serve. Read #2 again. You can’t know if you someone meets the qualifications in a month.

Three years also bring perseverance. A wolf who will destroy your church and eat the sheep won’t wait around that long; they’ll move on.

This process also helps you know if someone has what it takes to be an elder.

Now, they aren’t in a process for three years (at least not officially), but you should make someone be at your church at least two years before they become an elder. What’s the rush?

Someone should be at your church for at least 2 years before becoming an elder.

Depending on what you determine you are looking for in an elder, what they will do (and this changes some as a church grows), your process must help you see if someone can do that job. Don’t be swayed by charisma, a desire to not be alone, filling a spot or keeping a big giver. Those do not end well.

Have a longer process for an elder than you think you need.

6. Know how unique an elder is and what they do.

Elders do what no one else in the church does.

Elders do what no one else in the church does.

Yes, they serve, shepherd, pray, evangelize, give and disciple. That’s a role all Christians play.

But elders do something that is unique and builds into #7: they shepherd and care for the lead pastor and his family. This is unique.

Elders shepherd and care for the lead pastor and his family. This is unique.

Many people in the church care about the lead pastor and his family. Many people are fans of his and put him on a pedestal. Elders, though, see the man for who he is. They know him and his struggles. They know his hurts, pressures, frustrations and joys.

This doesn’t mean the lead pastor is special, only that his role is unique. Not everyone can shepherd and care for him. Most people are used to getting something from a pastor, so it is hard to think differently about the lead pastor. But it is a crucial, yet often overlooked role of elders.

When an elder team is working well and fulfills this, it brings great joy to a pastor and his family. This joy is felt throughout the church. This does not happen over night and takes training.

7. Always (almost) keep paid pastors off the elder team.

I expect some disagreement on this, but hear me out. Some churches make any paid pastor an elder. The qualifications for an elder and pastor are the same. I get it.

Here’s the dilemma.

The lead pastor leads the staff, is the boss of the staff. On an elder team, he’s one of the team. Yes, first among equals, but elders do not have power apart from the team.

It is very difficult for a student pastor or worship pastor to sit in a meeting with the lead pastor on Tuesday morning and be reviewed, be given an assignment, and then on Tuesday night sit in a meeting where they are equals in that meeting.

Are there exceptions? Yes, but less than you think. It is difficult for everyone to change the hats they wear. It is also difficult to discuss the salary and benefits of people sitting in the room.

7 ways to build a strong and healthy elder team.

Posted on Monday, October 10, 2016

How to Deal with Your Shame as a Leader

by Joshua Reich

Many pastors and leaders live lives that are filled with shame.

The problem is, many don’t know it.

Shame shows up in a number of ways:

Drivenness.
Working too much.
Compulsions to drink.
Compulsions to exercise a lot.
Isolation.
Overindulgences.
Feelings of disappointment and emptiness.

The list goes on and on.

Left unchecked, many pastors find themselves moving in and out of shame.

In Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God, John Piper says shame comes from three causes:

Shame comes from 3 places: guilt, shortcomings and improprieties. @JohnPiper

Guilt. This is the one many of us know well. The addiction, the hidden sin, the abuse we don’t talk about, the affair, the divorce, the poor parenting, our failure at work and in life. Many pastors carry around the guilt of hidden sins, hidden failures and hidden hurts. Many pastors have no one who knows them or gets close to them. We carry around guilt for ourselves and often without thinking, for others. When guilt becomes public knowledge, we have shame. Now we are known for what we have feared.
Shortcomings. Shortcomings and failures are something all of us experience. Some of them are real and others imagined. Some are life shaping, and other shortcomings we simply shrug off. It is the ones that are life shaping that lead to shame. When our frame of mind says, “You are a failure, you aren’t good enough, you aren’t beautiful, strong enough or worthwhile”, we experience shame. Many pastors feel like they don’t measure up. Either they tell themselves or their congregation tells them they aren’t good enough, or they feel like they are failing God. This last one many pastors know well, and it shapes how they preach and interact with God personally. If you are driven like I am, you carry a sense of failing God because your church isn’t larger.
Improprieties. These are the experiences in our lives where we feel silly, look stupid or are embarrassed. We make a mistake, and it feels like everyone knows about it. This can be saying something in a meeting, a misstep in a sermon, missing a key opportunity or sitting in a meeting and feeling out of our element. When this happens, most leaders won’t admit a weakness or a need for help, which leads to shame.

Without knowing it, many leaders pass their shame on to the people they lead. For example, if a pastor carries around shame, this will come through when he preaches. He will pass on to his congregation the shame he carries. He will paint a picture of a God who shames us instead of frees us.

A pastor unknowingly passes his shame to his congregation.

If a pastor feels like a failure in his marriage or because his church is not going as he expected or isn’t as big as he expected it to be, he will pass this to his congregation. He will push harder, burn out those around him, give the impression that God is only impressed with numbers and the success of something instead of faithfulness on the part of the individual.

Here are six ways to move forward from your shame as a leader:

1. Name your shame. This is a crucial step for anyone, but especially for leaders.

We are so used to simply helping other people, being there for others, listening to them and helping them identify their shame that we often overlook our own. We need to step out of leading and helping mode and shepherd our own souls.

What shame drives you? What shame do you carry around?

Is it a hidden sin or addiction? An abuse you can’t forgive? Have you been hurt by another leader or person in your church?

I remember struggling with whether or not I was a good pastor or cut out to be a pastor. I’ve often been envious of others who were so good at shepherding others and helping them in that way. I still remember someone telling me they thought I wasn’t a good pastor, and that reinforced the shame I’ve carried for most of my life. That I’m not good enough.

For me, naming it has been incredibly helpful. When you name it, you are able to start the process of freedom.

If you can’t name your shame, it will continue to have power over you.

If you can’t name your shame, it will continue to have power over you.

2. Identify the emotions attached to it. Many leaders try to stay away from emotions or they rely too heavily on them. Emotions are crucial, though. They show us not only what we are feeling, but what dominates us. Our emotions are able to override our thinking and judgment many times.

Don’t believe me? How often do you do the exact opposite of what you want to do? Most pastors who fail morally know they shouldn’t do something, but their emotions get the better of them.

What emotions are attached to your shame? If you don’t identify them, you will fall victim to them.

3. Confess the sins that are there. What sins are involved will depend on what your shame is. If it is something like abuse or abandonment, you don’t have a sin in that. Someone else sinned, and you are dealing with the brunt of that. You have to face that, though.

Are there sins on your part to confess? Are you holding yourself accountable for the sins of someone else?

Many leaders do, and many are driven by the sins of others. We do this to prove someone wrong, and our shame continues to keep a strong hold on us.

Maybe your shame drives you to drinking, overwork, overeating, bouts of anger. In this case, you have sin to confess, things you must face.

4. Grieve the loss. Many leaders will struggle with this. The dream that you have in your head for your church, your life, your marriage may never come to fruition. Will you continue to lead and follow God?

As leaders we don’t handle loss well. We have trained ourselves to not feel because we have people leave our church, a fellow pastor betrayed us, an elder lied to us, our spouse trusted someone, only to be betrayed. Because of this, we have closed off our hearts from feeling. This is one way we last in ministry, but it keeps us from actually ministering.

To stay in leadership, you must learn to grieve losses.

If you can’t grieve a loss as a leader, you will be stuck. You will become callous, you will keep people at arm’s length, you will protect yourself from getting hurt, and ultimately you will miss out.

The strongest leaders are the ones who can talk about loss, feel loss and move forward.

5. Name what you want. Leaders can name what they want for their church or organization, but will often struggle to name it for themselves. This is a good and bad thing.

It’s good because it keeps leaders from being self-serving.

It is bad because many leaders aren’t sure what they want or desire.

Many leaders (and this is a struggle for me) are not sure if God wants to give them the desires of their hearts. Many leaders struggle to name the place they want to be, how they’d like God to use them or the hopes they have for their lives and families.

Dreams for pastors tend to be about numbers and platforms (not always bad), but rarely do we think in terms of purpose and fulfillment.

6. Identify what God wants you to know about Him. The antidote to our shame is the truth of who God is. If your shame is that you are unlovable, the antidote is the truth that God is love.

For me, as I read through the gospels, I am blown away by how slowly Jesus moved and how little He seemed to do to move the mission forward. From a type-A, entrepreneurial perspective (me), He didn’t do a lot. Yes, He taught, prayed, shepherded, spent time with people, but I’m blown away by how slowly He moved. Right now, this is what I need to know about God. That Jesus walked through life and enjoyed it. He had fun. He had long meals, took naps, spent time with His Father in prayer, took fishing trips with His friends.

6 ways to move forward from shame as a leader.

For many leaders, we spend so much time trying to help others move forward that we rarely work on our own hearts to move forward. But, and here is why this matters, your shame follows you around until you face it.

Your shame follows you around until you face it.

Posted on Friday, April 24, 2015

When a Woman Struggles with “A man’s problem”

by Joshua Reich

On Sunday as part of our You & Me series, I talked about porn and sexual addiction and how it breaks intimacy in our relationships and ultimately harms us. Following the sermon, Katie and I did a live Q&A, which you can watch here as part of the sermon.

I love the willingness of our church to ask hard questions and I love that we get to be a part of helping people find freedom from sin.

One of the questions that came in asked: What if you’re a woman struggling with a sex addiction?…all the support seems to be for men struggling with sex addiction – who helps you if every time you hear about men’s struggles w/ sex you know you have the same problem? It’s incredibly isolating to be a woman struggling with “a man’s problem.”

Hope for women who struggle with porn.

While we responded to that question in the Q&A, I asked one of our leaders, Ciara Hull, if she could speak to that struggle from her story and she has graciously said yes. Below is her answer and story, which I hope, if you are a woman struggling with this, you will find this as a first step towards freedom.

When I heard these words from a live Q & A in Sunday’s sermon at our church, they echoed in my heart. I heard the plea, the pain, the shame, the desire for freedom behind those words. I don’t know this woman, but I share her secret. My earliest memory is of finding my dad’s Playboy magazine. That day changed the course of my life, it started a 22 year addiction to porn. It opened the door for early abuse, for wrong ideas about sex, intimacy and general confusion about how to relate to others. Sex became something that was a secret obsession. No one knew. But then it wasn’t enough and I had to push the boundaries. The term the industry uses is “experimenting”. Our culture calls it curiosity and encourages us to “explore”. But what happens when that’s not enough? How far do you go? How do you stop? Who do you go to for help? What are other people going to think? Ok, really what are other women going to think?

Hope for a woman struggling with a porn addiction.

This shouldn’t be a problem for a woman. After all we are the ones being used as objects in porn. You begin to wonder does anyone else have this problem? Do they feel this embarrassed? Can I ever find freedom? These are all the questions I could feel unspoken in this one woman’s question. These are the fears that haunted me everyday.

But I’m here to say there is freedom! There is healing. There is change. There is redemption. Galatians 5:1 says “For freedom Christ has set you free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”

I remember the day those words struck a chord in my heart. The day God got a hold of me. We are set free in order to have freedom! Seems like a no-brainer, but if you are a slave do you know what freedom feels like? Having a sex addiction is slavery. You are bound to your next fix and the high is always short lived. So how does freedom come? How do you go on to have a healthy sex life with your spouse?

Here are some of the things that have helped on my journey to freedom:

7 steps to freedom if you are a woman struggling with porn or sexual addiction.

Recognize the truth that Christ paid the price to free you. Develop this relationship with Him. Dive into His Word daily to see what He says about Himself, about you and about living free.
Know you aren’t alone. There is an increase in women acknowledging they are addicted and are seeking professional help. It isn’t just a man’s problem anymore. You may feel you are the only woman on the planet that is like this, but you aren’t.
Identify when the most likely times are for your addiction to happen. When you are bored? Stressed? Suppose to be studying? What is your pattern? Once I figured out mine I could create systems to change the pattern. For example I could study at Starbucks instead of my living room.
Reach out to a trusted female mentor. If she hasn’t had the same struggle she may know someone who has that she can connect you with. At the very least she is probably willing to help with accountability. This could be a leader in your church, it could be a professional counselor, it could even be an addiction group.
Figure out your triggers and work to avoid them. For me this means there are a lot of movies I don’t choose to watch anymore. There are high filters set on our home firewall to not allow access to certain sites on the internet. There are also clothing magazines I had to call and request them to stop sending me – if they still come in junk mail I put them in the recycle bin before I go back inside. Just like a man I had to train my eyes for purity.
If you are married, you need to share it with your spouse. In order to work towards unity this is not a burden you can carry on your own, you can navigate it together. If you are single, you should prepare one day to share with a potential finance what your struggles have been and how it may affect your intimacy.
Pray constantly. Just like any other addict I have to choose to fight everyday. I’m constantly talking to God to help me not recall a certain memory and to help me find healing.

My hope is that the one woman from Sunday reads this and is encouraged to fight. Please know I’m praying for you.

Porn is not just “a man’s problem.”