3 Lessons in Church Planting

I was asked by someone recently about 2-3 things I’ve learned about church planting since we launched our church. I think there’s a lot of lessons to be discovered. In fact, I feel like right now I’m being stretched as a leader and pastor in a way I haven’t been in a while and that’s a good thing.

1. Decide what it will take to last. When you start a church, a marriage or a business, you start with the intention of finishing. Again and again, I’ve seen it not last for people.

For church planters, sometimes their churches didn’t last, so they found a different job. Some got caught in failing morally; pride took them down, their church fired them.

Lasting isn’t just a matter of morals or not sinning or getting caught with your pants down. It also means you need to build a church that will last, that has a strong foundation of leaders. It means making a solid team and knowing that who you put around you will determine how far you go.

It also means making a plan with your spouse about what it will take to serve joyfully side by side for decades. It involves determining how to keep your soul fresh and alive with the passion you had when you started as that will wane over the years.

From an energy perspective, this will go down and the way you ran the race as a 27-year-old will be different at 37 and 47 and 57. You must learn this early on and choose to be wise when it comes to food, exercise, and sleep.

Also realize, you will retire as a pastor. This point will help you prioritize relationships and know how best to spend your time.

2. Know that not everyone will finish with you. One of the most painful realities of life is the loss of relationships. It becomes even more pronounced in a church.

I have tried numerous times to explain to someone the pain a pastor feels when someone leaves their church, but there is not a comparison I’ve been able to make.

There is something deeply felt when you spend time with someone in a hospital, weeping at a funeral, walking with them through cancer, parenting or marriage difficulties and then have them meet with you (or not at all) and say, “we’re leaving because this church isn’t meeting our needs.”

This makes what I said in point 1 so important. This is when you will cling to the calling God placed on your life.

It also means that your spouse needs to understand the road ahead. One of the things that have been the hardest for Katie is facing the hurt when someone leaves our church, meets with me but says nothing to Katie.

You will feel discarded.

If you’ve read your New Testament, this shouldn’t surprise you, but it will still hurt.

You will also have elders and staff members you will have to fire or ask to step down. Sometimes that will be for obvious moral or theological sins, and sometimes it will be a judgment call. No matter how blatant or not apparent, you will lay awake at night replaying conversations. Your soul will ache when you tell someone they no longer have a job. You will know the pain of betrayal as people who loved that person leave, as that person goes down the road and starts a new church.

That is why friendships will be so crucial to your health, whether they are other pastors or people inside/outside of your church. They will bring normalcy to your life and a listening ear when you need it.

3. Hold your methods loosely. What you plant your church doing, how you do church, that will change. I know you don’t think it will, but it will. Candles and incense, cover songs, lights and haze, dialogical preaching, small groups, missional communities, long series, short series, all these things will work and excite you for a time.

Never say, “We’ll do this forever.” You probably won’t.

And that’s okay.

Notice, this doesn’t have anything to do with theology or the message you preach, how you do church. Hold that loosely. What works today and reaches people will not in 3 years and that’s okay. Cultures shift and so do people, so churches must adapt how they reach people.

There is a passion and maybe even a naivety when you start a church, and in many ways, that’s a good thing. You don’t know the road ahead, much like when you have your first child. There is so much hope, so many dreams, and passion at the beginning. It is natural the longer you are in church planting to lose this, to forget this, but stay fresh and close to Jesus so that you will finish the race He has given to you.

Leaders Anticipate What’s Next

leaders

Good leaders never say, “I never saw that coming”, because leaders anticipate what is next.

Now leaders cannot see the future, they do not know how everything will work out when they make a decision, how things will go in the world or what will happen next. They aren’t fortune tellers. That would be nice, but it’s not true. But the point still exists.

This is one thing that separates leaders from followers. It is also what separates great leaders from simply good leaders.

But why do some people miss things?

They aren’t looking for what is next. Many leaders are simply trying to survive the week. Many pastors are just trying to get through Sunday. When this happens, you don’t look up. You have no vision, no plan, no dream, nothing that you are moving towards. So when what’s next comes down the pike, you are helpless to grab the opportunity.

Another reason is that what we see in front of us, what we know, is comfortable. Anticipating the future is difficult and pushes us into new arenas, new skills and possibly even changing something.

So if you want to be a leader, how do you anticipate the future?

1. Stay current. One of the reasons pastors and churches find themselves out of date on things is that they don’t stay current on what is happening. I’m not talking about current events as much as I am thinking through how to reach the world around you. Many times pastors don’t know the questions people are asking, so they preach sermons that are irrelevant to their audience. Churches don’t ask who lives around them and how to best reach those people. They ignore them, and consequently the world around them ignores the church.

2. Be willing to ask hard questions. At least once a year (I’d say more than that, but at least once a year) ask some hard questions about your church. Are we reaching our goals? Are we healthy as a church? Are our leaders healthy? Are we seeing lives changed? Are things clear at our church? Do people know their next step, how they fit into our church?

If you never ask hard questions, you’ll continue on the same path, which is usually the easy path of least resistance. If you do this, what’s next will sneak by you.

3. Be willing to look at data you don’t like. Your hard questions will probably bring to the surface things you’d like to ignore about your church. You might see that you have some leaders who need more training, a leader who doesn’t fit in their role; you might see a staff member that isn’t able to keep up. You might even see some areas in your leadership that you need to grow in. This is painful but good. Don’t ignore data, even if it hurts. Data is your friend.

Seasons in Life, Leadership & Church

leadership

I grew up in a farming community, so everyone was very aware of the seasons and what those seasons meant for life. Certain things happened during certain times of the year. You planted, watered, prepped the dirt and harvested plants at certain times. If you did it at the wrong time (too early or too late), you could harm the crops and miss what could be.

Life, leadership and church are the same. There are times when things are high (harvesting the crops) and times when you are prepping the dirt (getting ready) or pulling out weeds, and it feels like nothing is happening.

Then, like a farm, you start over.

When you start a church (or a new chapter in life), you are clearing the field, getting the seed ready, tilling the ground. Things like building a team, building in that team, getting the word out, working through logistics and schedules to get a church off the ground. This is hard work. There is no shortcut through this, although I meet plenty of church planters who want to skip this. It’s easy to see why; it is hard. Long hours, you see very little fruit because you are planting, you are weeding, you are watering. Some younger leaders can relate to this season as they work under a pastor, waiting for the time to plant a church. Many guys see this as “biding their time” but need to see it as the time of pruning, the Spirit of God working in and on them for what lies ahead. This season is mostly behind the scenes. The work that is being done is often being done in hearts, lives and in meetings as people work to shore up systems and how things are done.

In our lives this is trying to get a career off the ground, trying to finish school, pay your dues at a company, working to get your marriage off the ground, trying to figure out kids, how that all works as you parent. This is the beginning of things. This is hard work. In this season most dreams, most goals stop because of the difficulties.

Don’t miss this: this is not a wasted season. If you don’t do this hard work, preparing, studying, reading, getting ready, you can’t actually plant a crop. You can’t start a business, you are unprepared to start a family. We too often rush into things we are not ready for.

Then you water, you clear the weeds away, making sure the crop gets sunlight, plenty of fertilizer and water.

This is the time that you start to see life. The first person to become a follower of Jesus, the first baptism, first marriage saved, you launch something in your church. This is exciting, this is what you hoped for. For many guys, though, this can be depressing because it is slow. You will see plants come up that just die. You will see weeds that overtake plants. Or plants that don’t grow to what they should be. Leaders you poured into who walk away, marriages you counseled only to have them quit. Moments of betrayal and feeling stabbed in the back, feelings of God abandoning you. At this point you will probably hear of how God is working in the church down the street. Don’t despair; they are in a different season.

You are in your season, they are in their season.

Your marriage starts having small wins, you begin to see eye to eye, you’re connecting again. You get pregnant after a long, difficult season of infertility. Your work is beginning to get noticed, you get some accolades, a promotion, get accepted for that master’s program.

Like a church, you can start to get jealous at this point. Someone else seems to have an easier time. Their child isn’t as difficult, their marriage (while yours is great) is better.

The next season is the harvest. Plants are growing, you are reaping rewards from your hard work. In this season you have unprecedented momentum. You can do little wrong. Every idea you try seems to work. Your sermons click, community groups multiply, money is great, staff is getting along. There is a buzz about what God is doing in your church. You might even be getting noticed in your city, people are talking. This is the season you hear about on twitter, blogs and at conferences.

This is where you can look back with some accomplishment on a project that has taken awhile. Maybe you had a lot of work you had to do in your marriage, you sell a business, a business is finally humming and hitting on all cylinders, you graduate, and all the work you put into your schooling is done. It is a season of accomplishment.

This is the season everyone wants to live in.

The reality, though, is that this season comes to an end, and then you start over. What often keeps pushing you through this cycle is the reality that the harvest season does come.

So how long do these seasons last? It depends. Some leaders, churches, careers and marriages get stuck in an early season and never reap any benefits. Some after going through the great feelings of the harvest and seeing things start over simply throw up their hands and quit. Most people seem to stay stuck in an early season and wonder why life is so hard.

The important thing for a leader is to know what season they are in personally and where their church is so they can lead effectively and know how their church is doing. People need to be reminded that hard seasons do not last forever, but they also need to be reminded to enjoy the seasons of growth and momentum.

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How Does Your Church Make Decisions?

decisions

Most people don’t realize it, but the one thing leaders spend the majority of their time on is decision making.

I know you think you spend a lot of time on relationships and in meetings, but when you boil leadership down, much of it is spent on decisions.

Most churches don’t have a strong decision making grid that they look through. For many churches, decisions are made based on cost, if they will lose people (or make people mad) or who thought of the idea (if it is a person with power, that gives more weight to the idea in most churches).

While there are some valid points to those, making decisions through that grid won’t always get your church to where God wants it or accomplish the vision God has given you.

Think of your decision making grid as the hills you are going to die on. These aren’t necessarily theological hills, because the theological hills you will die on should kill a decision before it gets too far.

This a philosophical grid.

Here are some questions to consider for your grid:

  1. As you make a decision, will how that decision affects the next generation or empty nesters be the factor that pushes it over the edge?
  2. Are the opinions of churched people or unchurched people more important?
  3. How much does money factor into the decision?
  4. How much risk are you willing to take?
  5. Who are you willing to lose?
  6. Who do you hope to gain?

Circles of Relationships

Breathing-Room

Many of us find meaning in our relationships. They shape so much of our lives. One of the reasons that we end up being tired, overwhelmed and stressed out has to do with relationships and the number of them. We often join groups, teams, committees, or make volunteer commitments without much thought. Slowly our circles of relationships begin growing to the point that we know many people but lack true community.

I want you to think about every relationship you have (serving team at church, small group, PTA, children’s sports teams, work, neighbors) as a circle. You will have multiple people in a circle, but each commitment of community makes up a circle. Even if you think you don’t spend much time with it or you don’t have friends in it, like a child’s sports team, it’s a circle.

The reality is your circles all take up time. Each time you add a new circle or a circle expands because of the commitment that circle requires, you are pulling away from another circle, and you only have so much time to go around. Many times we haphazardly add circles and then lack community. For men, as we grow older, this becomes an enormous problem.

While men don’t do relationships the way women do, we need them just as much. It seems that as men get older, because of the time they give to their career and their children’s activities, they begin pulling away from friends to the point that when a man turns forty, he can’t think of anyone to call for a beer or to go fishing.

If that’s the case for you, it means you have allowed your circles to get out of control.

In our family, when we talk about adding a new circle, we also take one away. This limits the number of circles you are a part of. We believe community is that important. And yes, this means we will miss out on things, disappoint people, and even anger people.

The other reason we run out of space in our lives as it relates to relationships has to do with the ones we choose. While hopefully you start to think through how many friends and circles of relationships you can be in, this will change as you get older and your kids get older.

We often spend time in the wrong relationships.

We end up at meetings and gatherings that we don’t want to be. We have coffee or meals with people we’d rather avoid, but for some reason, when we got invited, we said yes.

Why?

It could be fear, a sense of duty, maybe our job demands we say yes. If you can say no, why don’t you?

A few years ago Katie and I made a choice that we would spend our time with people who were life giving. If you stressed us out, ran us down, were not life giving, we didn’t want to spend time with you. That may sound mean, but with a growing family, a growing church, we don’t have a ton of time to “just hang out” with whomever. We have to be intentional about our relationships.

This is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. We talk about being intentional with our schedules, money, careers and our kids, but what about who we spend time with?

The people you spend your time with, do they challenge you, encourage you, breathe life into you, spark you to greater levels in your life? If not, why are you giving them a lot of time and energy?

The flip side of this is sometimes you become that person for people. You are the spark, the energy giver. That is okay as long as that isn’t the primary source or your relationships.

When it comes to Breathing Room, you only have so much time and space. You only have so much relational energy and time on your calendar. You have to spend it wisely. You have to think through who gets it and prioritize.

*This is an excerpt from my brand new book, Breathing Room: Stressing Less & Living More. Click on the link to purchase it.

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How to Engage Business Leaders in Your Church

business leaders

The other day I got a question from a church planter that I hear a lot: How do I get older, more mature Christians to my church plant? How do I engage and utilize the gifts of business leaders in my church? The answers are deeply connected.

Most church plants are filled with young professionals, young families, and singles. Because of this, most church plants have a lot of energy and a lot of kids.

In every church plant there is a group that is often overlooked. If you ask every church planter what he wishes he had more of, his answer would be this group. It is older people, established people, people with wisdom to share.

For many church planters, they are entrepreneurs, driven by leadership and vision, but they struggle to make that vision come to fruition. They struggle to build systems of follow up, systems to care for people and make sure no one falls through the cracks. While they can cast a vision and tell you what their church will look like in five years, they can’t tell you how they will get from where they are to their desired destination.

Often the person who can help them is a business leader. This person may be in their 20’s or 30’s, but they will often be someone in their 50’s. Maybe they are retired or looking for an opportunity to serve and make a difference with the gifts they have.

Sadly their is one reason this person never gets to serve in the church and use their gifts, and it hurts the business leader and the church plant and the pastor: It is the fear of the pastor; it is the intimidation that a pastor feels towards a business leader or someone with organizational and administrative gifts.

Why?

Usually this leader is very high capacity; they accomplish a lot because of how gifted they are organizationally. They have years of experience, so they know how to work well with people, which makes them likable and well spoken.

All of this leads a younger church planter to decide to go it his own way and not utilize the gifts of the people in his church.

Now here is what every church planter tells me: We need more older people. We need older couples who can mentor younger couples. We need wisdom.

But what they don’t realize is they have communicated to that person, that person that they want so badly at their church, We have no place for you. 

Not on purpose, but the message has been sent loud and clear.

So what can you do? How do you turn the tide?

1. Give them something real to do. If you want older people in your church, if you want experienced business leaders to connect in your church, you must give them something real to do. Real responsibility. They have experience with budgets, decision making, systems, efficiency, communication and productivity. Tap into that. Learn from them. Ask them questions. You also need to think through responsibility below an elder level for these leaders, as all of them won’t want to do that, and you may not want them all to do that.

2. Stop trying to be the young, cool church. Yes, the target of most church plants is 20 – 40 year olds, which often means the message, sermon, communication, ministries and music are tailored to that group. You don’t need to change that to engage an empty nester, you just need to think about how to do that. Use examples in sermons that would be helpful to them. Highlight the people in your church that aren’t 20-something’s.

3. Be who you are and let go of things. As a visionary leader, if you want to engage a business leader, if you want to utilize the gifts of an older Christian, you are going to have to let go of your feelings of pride and intimidation. Often you are the reason they aren’t engaged; you have communicated you don’t need them or want them. You have made it difficult for them to use their gifts and feel needed. I know you don’t think that is the case, but it most likely is.

4. Engage them relationally & show them respect. The best way to engage older people in your church, to get business leaders onto your team and use their gifts, is to engage them relationally and show them respect. Be their friends, invite them over, spend time with them. Ask them questions, get to know them without a desire for anything else. This seems so obvious, but when an empty nester walks into a church plant they often get treated like a unicorn, and everyone mauls them, so they leave quickly.

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Get out of the Way

Why Personal Leadership Growth Matters

In his book The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #Join the Ride, Darren Hardy quotes a leader:

The only constraint of a company’s (or church’s) growth and potential is the owner’s ambition. I am the constraint. The market, the opportunity, everything is there. It’s up to me to set the pace, clear the obstacles, get the resources, and create the conversations to grow the company faster. As CEO, the most important thing I manage is myself. Do that right, and everything else falls into place.

Yet, this is one of the hardest things for a leader to do, to look in the mirror.

At every stage of a church’s growth, one of the main barriers to its growth and health is the lead pastor.

Yes, buildings get too small, you run out of kids’ space, ministry ideas get stale, but what often happens is a church grows past how a pastor is leading.

Every time a church grows, a ministry grows, a team or staff gets larger, you need to change how you lead, what you do, and what you don’t do. If you don’t make those changes, you will find yourself treading water, and ultimately you will stunt the growth of your ministry.

If you’ve gone through the barriers of 50, 100, 200, 400 and beyond, you know this to be true. What I did when the church I lead was 100 was not what I could keep doing at 200. And now that we are moving toward 500, I’m finding that how I lead, what my hands are in and what decisions I make, are changing again.

As a leader this is painful.

For those connected to you as a lead pastor, this is painful and exciting.

It is painful for some because the meeting they used to have with you they will now have with someone else. The decision you used to give feedback on, someone else will give feedback on.

It is exciting because they get to lead in a way they haven’t before. Right  now I’m handing more and more decisions off to other leaders and I’m making less and less daily decisions about my church.

This is exciting for everyone involved, but it feels weird for the leader who used to be involved with more things.

Yet, for a church to grow a leader needs to get out of the way so more leaders can play and use their gifts.

How to Pick Ministry Ideas

ministry ideas

Pastors know this conversation.

Someone comes up to you and says, “Do you know what our church needs?” A ministry for _______.

Now, that blank is often a good idea. In fact, it might be a great idea. The one idea that is just waiting to take your church over the top.

What many people and pastors fail to realize, the person asking it doesn’t actually want that. They may think they want that or that they want to be a part of that, but they don’t.

Typically, when someone in a church says “we need a women’s ministry” or a class on finances or prayer or parenting, we need a group for empty nesters or college students, church leaders jump and start one up because “they don’t want to lose this influential person.”

Now, when this class or ministry starts, do you know who won’t be there?

That’s right.

The person in the original conversation.

Why?

When it comes to our spiritual growth we don’t know what we actually need. 

We often want what we think others have. We look at the end product of another church, another ministry but don’t ask, “What led them to start that? What need were they trying to reach? Does that need exist in our church or city? If it does, what is the best thing to reach it?”

We often get asked why we don’t have a women’s ministry or life stage groups at Revolution. The answer is, we think there’s a better way to reach our target in our city. There is nothing wrong with them, we just think the way they are usually done would hinder our goal as a church.

The other issue we don’t often think about is when a need is presented, it is simply in an effort to meet that need. This is good, but what leaders often fail to realize as they take in suggestions is they are tasked with seeing the whole field, the whole situation, while the person making a recommendation is not.

This isn’t bad, but before a leader goes ahead with an idea, they must stop to ask if it fits into what is already happening, the goal of a ministry or church.

Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it is no or wait.

So, when that new idea comes up, here are some criteria to take it through:

  1. Does it reach our target as a church? Every church has a target whether they admit it or not. The target of your church, whether that is families, singles, students, empty nesters should drive many of the decisions of your church. Your target is who you are best situated to reach and who God has called you to reach. You want to reach everybody, but are best suited to reach certain people in your city. Who that target is will determine the ministries and ideas you run with as a church.
  2. Does the answer to question 1 matter? Sometimes the answer to question 1 doesn’t matter. God is calling you, your church or team to move forward with an idea that your target doesn’t matter. This won’t happen a lot, but I wanted to put this in there.
  3. Can we afford to do it? Do you have the structure, the bandwidth, the finances to make something happen.
  4. Can we afford not to do it? If you don’t do something, what happens? Not enough pastors list out what happens if they say no or not yet. Often, we live in fear of people, losing people, making someone angry and never list out, “What really happens if we say no?” Often, saying no will not mean the world ends.
  5. Is now the time to do this? Just because an idea is good or great does not mean now is the time to do it. Church planters often feel this tension as the larger church down the road can do a lot more than they can. That’s okay, let them.
  6. If we do this, will it hurt something else we do? Many times, we unknowingly undermine something that we are already doing by doing something else. This is why we don’t do a women’s ministry at Revolution, because of what unintentionally happens in a church when one is going.
  7. Can we be great at doing it? Too many churches do too much because that’s what churches do instead of asking, if we do this, will we be great at it? Can we do this better than someone else? Don’t just do concerts, Awana or classes to have them. Be great at the things you do. This will mean, you will do less.

The reality when this conversation happens is the person who says, “We should do ____” wants to see their church be great, healthy and reach more people. You as a leader though are held accountable for knowing when the time is right to say yes.

Be a Leader, not a Jerk

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One of the sad things that has happened in recent years, especially in the reformed camp of church planting is that pastors and bloggers have become known for being jerks. We have watchdog bloggers, people who are constantly pointing out mistakes in people, creating more and more lines among Christians instead of working together.

Fewer pastors are known as winsome and gracious and more known for being jerks.

If you want to stop any movement, kill any church from having influence in a city, stop any influence you may have long-term with other leaders, be a jerk.

That isn’t the kind of person people follow for a long time. You may get by for a period of time based off of skill, charisma or simply connections, but eventually your colors (in this case, being a jerk) show up.

Here are a few ways to remind yourself as a leader to stay on track and be winsome and gracious:

  1. Remember your brokenness. The fastest way to become a jerk is to think you have it all together, are beyond sin or can’t fall. Remember your weaknesses, your need for Jesus and that you don’t know it all. Because the jerks online tend to be about pointing sin out in others, this is a hard thing to remember, but crucial. You cannot be gracious without experiencing grace.
  2. Spend time with people and read people outside of your tribe. They don’t need to be on your reading lists all the time, but read some business books, some books by those you don’t agree with theologically to learn from them. There should be some discomfort when you read instead of always just nodding your head. While you need to be cautious here, but if you are a leader of a church, your theology should be strong enough to be challenged. Also, those books will also tell you what some of the people who show up to hear you preach think and that can be helpful sermon prep. Otherwise, you end up answering questions no one is asking.
  3. Have some friends who can tell you when you are being a jerk and taking the wrong stand. Whether this is your spouse, an elder, another pastor or blogger, but you need a friend to tell you, “you are being a jerk on that, let it go.” Historically, pastors are terrible friends. We don’t know how to do anything or talk about anything other than church, so we get lost in our world of what other pastors are doing, the latest theology debate, what the blogs are raging about and most people we talk to could care less.
  4. Take the right stands, but not all of them. A mentor told me once, “be careful the hills you choose to die on because you will die on all those hills and you can’t die that often.” Every issue doesn’t deserve a response from you. Every heresy you see online, some can be let go. That person who spouts out bad marriage advice on Facebook in your church, eventually they are seen for who they are. You can let it go. Someone else can step in. Sometimes though, you need to step up and say something, but when you do, be gracious and winsome.

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Why Pastors Should Read more Leadership Books

book

A few years ago another pastor told me he was concerned for me because my blog only reviewed leadership books but not a lot of “gospel centered or theology books” as he said. The other day another pastor asked me why I don’t review more of those books and then said, “Do you even read theology books?”

The short answer is “yes I do read them” but I believe pastors (especially ones in my Acts 29 tribe) read too many theology books and not enough leadership books.

In fact, when I shared what churches could learn from Amazon, I got comments about how business thinking and learnings fail the church and pastors need to spend less time learning from CEO’s.

Here’s a few reasons pastors should read more leadership books:

  1. It’s the language people in your church are speaking. If your church is like mine, it is filled with leaders and businesspeople. They respond to strong leadership, budgets, systems, and marketing (and yes your church markets simply by having a website and a place to meet).
  2. The church is like a business. I didn’t say it was a business, but like one. Money comes in and goes out. There are bills. Each church has a target audience. Each church competes with things (ie. sports, trips, activities on Sunday mornings, school, work). Churches do not compete with other churches, but there are a lot of things vying for people’s attention on Sunday’s.
  3. You need to be stretched. Most pastors are very smart when it comes to doctrine and theology. Yes, you should grow in those areas, but most pastors are well on their way in those things. They can counsel people well, preach well, but struggle to lead meetings, handle budgets and build systems for follow up with guests, new givers and new believers (most pastors give me blank stares when I ask what happens for all those things in their churches.

Robert Bruce Shaw in his book Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter said, “My fundamental belief is that if a company wants to see the future, 80 percent of what it is going to have to learn will be from outside its own industry…Leaders need to master the details of their business but also need to remain curious about a broader range of topics that can enrich their ability to seize opportunities and recognize threats.”

I am blown away at the sermon material I get simply by reading the latest business book. A lot of our discipleship ideas have been taken from business books because they are stronger in the areas of developing leaders and a pipeline.

I remember talking to someone and they asked, “But how do you expect your leaders to grow in doctrine if you encourage them to read more leadership books?” The short answer I gave, “well, they do read their bibles.”

If you are looking for a good place to start, here are 10 books I think every Christian leader should read.

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