Tag Archives: culture

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Four Challenges to Leading Change

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Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Changing anything is a challenge.

Whether in your personal life, finances, marriage, work, or church. The reason isn’t that people hate change, even though that is what everyone thinks. On the contrary, as Ronald Heifetz says, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.”

What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change. -Ronald Heifetz

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But when you lead change in a church, the challenges you are facing are obvious and not so obvious.

The first challenge is authority and influence. You can only accomplish something with authority and influence. When they begin to make changes, many pastors think they have authority and influence but may not have what they need.

This is important because you will need authority and influence to change anything. If you are new to your role or church, you must determine who has the most authority and influence. For my first two years at CCC, I only made changes by getting crucial people on board first because they had the relational equity I needed. According to the org chart, I have the authority to do things but need more influence to see them through.

How do you know who has authority and influence? Listen to whose name comes up often. Who do people seek out for advice and input? When you bring up ideas, does anyone say, “I wonder what _______ thinks?” As you sit in meetings, see who sways the room and who people wait to hear from. The person with the most authority and influence in a church is rarely the person with the title but who has built the relational capital over the years. This person can make or break change.

Do you have the authority and the influence to make the changes you want to make?

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The second challenge is tradition and how things have been done. Countless leaders can tell stories of new ideas that died on the vine of “That’s not how we do things around here.” Or, “We’ve never done it that way here.”

This doesn’t mean you don’t try something or do something, but you need to know what has been done and what hasn’t been done in the past. It is particularly important to know what has been attempted and has failed in the past at a church. Those have important lessons for you as you lead.

When you seek to change traditions or how things have been, you must do some groundwork to understand why something began and how effective that thing is, and also understand the sweat equity people have in a ministry or program.

To understand tradition, you need to look at who is involved, who has a passion for that ministry, and how much budget it receives. When you ask questions about a ministry or a way of doing something, listen to how people respond. When you ask why things began or have changed over the years, listen to any indication of people trying to change or take away a ministry or way of doing things.

Does this mean you should always keep something that falls into this category? No. But it does require care and influence, which will take time.

The third challenge is cultural. If you are new to the city your church is in, this is one of the hardest challenges. You don’t know what you don’t know about culture. I grew up in Pennsylvania, similar to New England but also different. Each state in New England has its flavor and way of doing things, which impacts how the church is done. The same is true in other parts of the country. And while some places are more transient, which lends itself to less tradition, there is still a culture there.

There is also church culture that you have to navigate. That culture has been built from Day 1 (even before) of your church. Was your church started as a plant or a split? What families built the church? How much power do they have? How has the conflict been handled over the years? How many transitions have there been in your church? Has your church experienced growth or decline in recent years? These things fit into the culture and “how things are done around here.”

Culture is simply what people do without being told. Culture can be shaped and changed, but that is a very intentional process that is a different blog post.

Culture is simply what people do without being told.

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For now, you must become a student of your culture. Over the last two years, I sought out staff members and leaders who have left our church to find out what happened and looked for commonalities (which there are). That’s culture. Watch how things get handled, how decisions are made, and how things happen. That’s culture.

Make no mistake; culture can work for or against you, so you must know how it plays out.

The fourth challenge is memory. This one is the least obvious because it is so personal.

Every person in your church has memories of your church, for good or bad. They can tell you stories of the church at its peak, when the building was full, when this program or that began, and the excitement of it.

Many pastors find themselves working against the memories of the past. Those memories are real but only sometimes accurate. While you will hear stories of how full the building was for that program, you will hear from someone else about how that program burned them out or made a different part of the church challenging. Memories and stories are personality and people-specific. They are also never as great or bad as people remember them. So, ask for stories, listen for commonalities, and talk to as many people as possible inside and outside the church to get as many details as possible. 

These stories will help you as you lead change because they help you understand your church’s story and your people’s experiences. 

When you arrive as a new pastor, you will feel the pressure of living up to people’s memories. This is hard, especially after COVID-19, because the reality is that those memories won’t easily be replicated.

The memories people carry from your church’s past are incredibly powerful and shape how they experience your current church.

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Is leading change difficult? Yes. 

Is leading change impossible? No. 

It will require a certain kind of leadership. 

To begin, lay out what will change and won’t change. This can begin just in your mind. Share it with trusted leaders, get feedback and help. 

A simple first step is laying out your top 3 priorities as you move forward. These are things that are ripe for change. Not everything is ripe for change. 

How do you know?

Here’s a simple question: If you don’t change anything about ____, will it matter in two years?

If you don’t change anything about ____, will it matter in two years?

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Not everything is worth changing now or maybe ever. This question will help you know where to begin, what to work on, and what to fight for. 

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10 Lessons from “Build”

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Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Recently I read Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell. It’s part memoir, part leadership & organizational book. One that is worth picking up if you are a leader or a pastor. Many lessons are wrapped up in the story of his life and leadership. 

Here are a few that stood out to me:

Ten lessons from “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making”

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The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. He spends a lot of time talking about how to get started in life and your career. He said all the stuff they don’t and can’t teach you in college – how to thrive in the workplace, create something unique, deal with managers, and eventually become one – it all slaps you in the face the second you step off campus. No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful. You have to try and fail and learn by doing. He goes on. So when looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”

When you’re in your thirties and forties, the window begins to close for most people. Your decisions can no longer be entirely your own. That’s okay, too – great even – but it’s different. The people who depend on you will shape and influence your choices. We know this as we age, but we take extra chances when we’re younger.

The way I made decisions in my 20s isn’t how I make decisions in my 40s because my life is different. I’m going after other goals, and different things matter to me. In my 20’s, I focused more on building my platform and career. In my 40’s, I’m more focused on my kids and the people they are becoming.

It is crucial as we age to evaluate how we make decisions, what drives us, and what our willingness to take risks is.

Customers need to see that your product solves a real problem they have today – not one they may have in some distant future. Pastors need to think about this more when they preach. What is the tension your sermon speaks to? This doesn’t mean that should drive your sermon, but can you articulate what problem your sermon will solve? Do you tell people what it will solve?

Meetings should be structured to get you and the team as much clarity as possible. We’ve all sat in meetings that accomplished very little, that wasted time, or left us confused. The whole section on meetings was an excellent reminder for me. Does everyone leave a meeting with as much clarity as possible? Asking, “Are we clear on everything, and who will do what?”

A great deal of management comes down to managing your fears and anxieties. The longer I lead, the more I see how my past affects me. Now, your past can be a great teacher to make sure that you choose the right path in the future. But, if you don’t deal with your past, it will have a way of rearing its head in your present and potentially harm your future.

Many pastors and leaders make decisions based on their fear and anxieties without realizing it.

A great deal of management comes down to managing your fears and anxieties.

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You must consistently check to see if you are acting out or making decisions out of your fears and anxieties. How much are they playing a role in your daily life?

You must pause and clearly articulate the “why” before convincing anyone to care about the “what.” Years ago, one of my jobs when I joined a team, was to find out the “why” behind what the church did. I spent months meeting with leaders, teams, and departments, asking, “why do you do what you do? Why did this ministry start? Why do we keep doing it?” Do you know what I found? Most people at that church could not articulate why they did what they did; they couldn’t articulate why they started something, only “what” they did.

What matters, it matters a lot. But, as Simon Sinek pointed out years ago, the why will always win the day, and you need to start there.

Many churches, teams, and companies can tell you what they do, but that isn’t as important as why you do something. Leaders must be clear and ensure their teams understand why they do something.

You cannot be afraid to disrupt the thing that made you successful in the first place. This is a hard lesson for leaders, no matter who they are. Especially if you created the thing that makes you successful, leaders must consistently ensure that what “got them there” doesn’t hold them back from what is next. This is why continuing to return to “why” you do something is so important.

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math. The longer I lead anything, the more critical I see the culture of a church. The culture of the church decides what gets done and what is essential. Culture is how things happen. You can have the greatest strategy or ministry idea, but it will only be effective if your culture doesn’t fight against that.

The most important thing you have to pay attention to as a pastor.

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The CEO sets the tone for the company – every team looks to the CEO and the exec team to see what’s most critical and what they need to pay attention to. This took me too long to learn. I used to think that if I said the right things, people would know what to do, but I’ve learned that my actions tell people what matters. Does starting on time matter? What things do I check and double-check? What stats do I check? Those things tell my team and our church what matters most.

Then as you lead, “Your team amplifies your mood.” Your team takes what you think is essential and passes it on. If you want to change your church, you must decide what is critical and start paying attention to that and amplifying that. 

The lead pastor sets the tone for the church.

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How to Grow as a Leader as Your Church Grows

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leader

There has been a lot written about church growth barriers, what they are, how to break them and get past them. The reality, though, is a church will only grow as much as the leader grows.

Every church experiences barriers at different points, but they are usually around the same size: 60, 100, 200, 400, 800, etc. While barriers can happen at other times, these are usually the ones discussed.

I was talking to someone the other day about how things change at different times in a church, and it got me thinking about the barriers and what changes at each one.

5 questions every leader needs to ask each year.

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1. What new temptations do you face? As a church grows, leaders face new temptations. There are new ways to cut corners, new perks that creep up, and it is easy to start believing your own press. It is also easy as a leader of a growing church to start to think you are too big for some things, and while your job changes you are still a leader, and leaders are to serve.

When you start a church and there are just a few people on your launch team, you face unique temptations. While some temptations follow a leader through the life cycle of a church, some temptations are unique to sizes of a church.

Every time your church grows, ask: What new temptations do I face?

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2. What things must you stop doing? Peter Drucker asks, “What can you stop doing that nobody would notice?” John Maxwell thinks a leader could stop doing 80% of what they are doing, and nobody would notice. While that might seem high, there are a number of things you should stop doing. It might be because you aren’t as good at those things, but usually the things you do keep you from doing what only you can do. As a church grows and as you grow, the things that only you can do, the things that you are wired to do, might change. This is why it is important to consistently ask this question.

Leaders must ask themselves on a regular basis what they need to stop doing.

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3. What things must you start doing? A helpful grid to think through is, what things must I do or else this thing falls apart? Another way to think about this is, are there things I am not doing right now that I need to start? Or, are there things I need to give more time to than I currently give to those things?

4. What is keeping you and your church from going to the next level? A leader lives in two worlds: the world of the present and the vision of the future. This is a tension of leadership, but it is one you should invite because you are the leader. A leader must continue to ask, “What do I need to do to keep my church healthy and growing? What can I learn or grow in to take my church to the next level?” That next level is not always a size issue. It might be growing in personal productivity, preaching or care. It might be getting better at reading culture or developing leaders. There is always a next level to go to.

For me, each year I think through one aspect of my job that I need to grow in. I ask for input from those closest to me, and then I look for resources and people doing that well and learn from them.

What is one thing this year you need to grow in?

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5. What am I afraid of now? I heard Matt Keller say this on a podcast recently and felt very convicted by it.

Many leaders make most of their decisions out of fear.

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If you think about it, you make a lot of decisions as a leader out of fear; fear of people, finances, success, failure, your team, what you look like to others. While every pastor has fears throughout his ministry career, there are specific ones at each size. What are they? They will be unique to you as a leader, but you must identify them. You must be on the lookout for them.

5 questions every leader should wrestle with today.

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Lies we Believe About Marriage

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marriage

Marriages are strong and marriages need work for all kinds of reasons. Sadly, few marriages got the distance and even fewer are happy. A lot of that has to do with expectations of marriage (before and during) but many of the issues in marriage stem from lies we believe about marriage.

7 lies people believe about marriage.

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Lie #1: My spouse will complete me. This is one we are fed from the time we start to notice the opposite sex. It is in movies, books, articles and deep down, we hope that we will find someone that will meet all our needs, be everything we want, but the reality is, no one can do that. It is not possible for someone to meet all your emotional, spiritual, and relational needs. There will always be a gap and this is why our spouse’s inability to meet all our needs points us to Jesus. On the flip side of this, we can’t meet our spouse’s every need, so we can’t save our spouse (as many try to). We can’t change them, we can encourage them, but we can’t make them do something, although many try.

A common lie about marriage many believe is their spouse will complete them.

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Lie #2: My happiness is my top priority. From our earliest age, many people are taught that they can win at everything, do whatever they want, get a trophy for showing up, so life becomes about my happiness and what I can get. This isn’t reality. This becomes a litmus test for how we feel about our marriage. In fact, the moment that we are unhappy we assume something is wrong. Something might be wrong but you might also be married. Marriage doesn’t always bring happiness but it does bring joy, which is very different but more important because joy is long lasting and not fleeting.

Being unhappy might not mean something wrong in your marriage, you might just be married.

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Lie #3: There is only one right person for me to marry. This is born in fairy tales that somehow there is one person on the planet for you to marry and if you marry the wrong person the entire axis of the universe will be thrown off. Few people say this, but many people subtlety believe it before and after they get married. They put enormous pressure on “finding God’s perfect person for them” that they are paralyzed from experiencing community and relationships. After they get married, couples struggle when hard times hit and they wonder if they married the wrong person. First off, how arrogant do you have to be to think you could marry the wrong person and start a cosmic destruction? This also gets into figuring out God’s will (which is another post but I think we put too much pressure “God’s perfect will” for our lives). Let me say, there are so many things you can do for God that instead of sitting around wondering if it is God’s perfect will, you should just start doing something.

Instead of wondering if it is God’s perfect will, you should just start doing something.

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Lie #4: What I do on my own time won’t affect my marriage. This gets at the selfishness many people feel in their lives. The idea that once you get married, you still stay a single person, you just happened to be married now. This is why many couples keep separate bank accounts, their own calendars and “do their own thing.” The reality around separate bank accounts is that you are always keeping one foot out the door, not letting go of some trust issue in your past. And, if you don’t trust your spouse to share a bank account, there is a deeper issue that needs work, the bank account isn’t the issue. The reality is, how you spend your time, money, how you think about yourself, whether you protect yourself to stay pure in your marriage has an enormous impact on your marriage.

Everything you do affects your marriage. For good or bad.

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Lie #5: A great marriage doesn’t take work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this after a sermon or counseling a couple and every time it is heart breaking. Often, we look at couples who are happy, handling the ups and downs of life well and wonder how they did it. Like seeing the success of Steve Jobs without any of the struggles. Idealizing marriage can be like that. It takes work. It is hard. In fact, I would say there is not a great marriage on the planet that was not filled with seasons of difficulties.

All great marriages have experienced difficult seasons.

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Lie #6: My past has no impact on my marriage. This is one I encounter a lot in premarital counseling. The thinking that your past relationships, porn addiction in college, the father issues you have not dealt with yet, the divorce your parents went through or you went through; that those things will have no bearing or minimal impact on your present and future marriage. Not true. All those things have an enormous impact on how you see yourself and your spouse. If you are a woman and all your life men have broken promises and used you, that is exactly what you will expect your husband to do. If you grow up and are abused and see sex as something dirty or something that is a way to live out selfishness instead of a place to give and serve your spouse, that will have an enormous impact. Lastly, most of what people do in a marriage is either a reaction against what their parents did or what they saw their parents do. It is what we know, so until we see that, see it for what it is, evaluate if that is healthy and then deal with it, we will continue the cycle of the past.

Most people in marriage react against what their parents did.

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Most people in marriage mindlessly do what their parents did because that’s what they know.

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Lie #7: You can’t choose who you love. Typically when someone tells me this lie they have already sinned or are about to. It is often used to excuse why they are getting divorced or committing adultery. Yet, when we take this lie to its fullest extent, we would never want someone to love us this way. We wouldn’t want our spouse, kids or Jesus to show us love only when they feel like it. Yet, for many couples this is how they live their married life. The reality, the truth is that many days you will wake up in marriage and have to choose to love your spouse because they will not be lovely, they will not be easy to love, there will be a big piece of you that does not want to love them because you want to be selfish, you want them to stop doing something or at the very least, you want life to be easier. But love is a choice followed by an emotion.

Love is a choice followed by an emotion, an act of the will.

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While there are many more, these are just a few I’ve encountered that bring a lot of hurt and damage.

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How to Find the Right Boss

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boss

The church I lead is hiring 2 new staff members right now and while I’ve learned a ton about hiring (a post coming soon), I have also learned a lot about how to pick a boss. Often, when someone talks about finding a job or a career, we simply look at the company, the perks, the pay, location and the values and mission of the church or organization and decide on that. Yet, studies show people leave jobs more because of their boss than anything else. In fact, people will take less money to stay with a boss they love.

One of the questions I ask each person we interview is this: Tell me about your ideal lead pastor. What can he do to help you succeed? What things can he do to hamper your growth? These questions tell me a few things: do they know what they are looking for in a boss? Do they know themselves well enough to know what they need to succeed?

I believe, one of the reasons we don’t succeed or move forward in life is because we aren’t sure what that looks like.

If I was telling someone looking for a job who would not be the boss, but would have a boss I would tell you a few things:

  1. Know who you are. This means that you need to understand your gifts, talents, personality, strengths, and weaknesses. This may seem like an obvious thing, but many are unsure of how they are wired. If you aren’t sure how you are wired, you won’t know how will you fit with a boss or a culture. Do you like teamwork, working alone? Do you want a strict office or more laid back policies? Each church has a different culture based on its leaders, city and history and you need to understand this. I was on staff at a good church in Wisconsin and it was a terrible cultural fit. They wanted high extroverts who wanted a casual business dress with regular office hours. Doing student ministry at the time, this was not a good fit for me. Others would have loved it.
  2. Know what you need to succeed. This follows closely with the first one, but know what environment and kind of boss you need to succeed. Do you want a micro manager who one who is hands off? How much say do you want in the vision and culture of the church? What things are non-negotiable things for you and what are more open handed issues and beliefs? These questions will help you determine if someone or a church is a good fit. Otherwise, you will choose on location, style and pay and those are not always the best reasons to choose a job.
  3. Find someone worth following. If you are not the CEO, Lead Pastor or lead whatever, one of your main concerns is finding a leader you want to follow. That leader will decide so much about your career, livelihood, excitement, passion and happiness in your life that finding the wrong can be devastating. It adds stress, disappointment, hurt, possibly abuse and pain. I can’t emphasize enough that you need to spend time figuring out the kind of leader you want to follow, if the person you are interviewing with or working for right now is the leader you want to follow and make a choice. I think more leaders who not be the lead pastor need to spend more time thinking about the kind of person they are working for or following instead of judging a job based on salary and perks.

In the end, finding the right boss can be just as important as finding the right job. When you find the right boss, I would encourage you to think hard before you go looking for a new one. They aren’t easy to find, as anyone who has worked for the wrong boss can attest.

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Culture Trumps Strategy

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strategy

One of the reasons that churches fail to change or be effective is the leaders change the wrong things.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. -Peter Drucker

In their book Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches, Peter Greer and Chris Horst point out corporate culture is tough to pin down. It’s difficult to define. But it sure is easy to feel. Culture is just “what happens.”

Every church says their strategy is to welcome new people, help people meet Jesus, grow in their relationship with Jesus, develop leaders and plant churches. Yet, for a very few churches is this reality.

Most churches do not see guests, new believers, baptism’s or disciples.

Why?

Their culture fights it.

So what do you do? How does a pastor change a church?

Go for the culture. Define the culture you want. Then go for that.

Don’t tell me that your strategy is the great commission if you aren’t seeing anyone start following Jesus.

Peter Greer said, “Leaders cultivate corporate culture within faith-based organizations just like they cultivate their own spiritual lives.”

You must create boundaries, policies, rules (whatever you want to call them) to keep the culture you are going for clear and on track.

You must celebrate the things that matter most, that help you accomplish your culture.

If your culture that you are going for has new Christians in it, celebrate when that happens. If it is baptism’s, celebrate when they happen. Tell stories. Show videos. Preach sermons.

Don’t leave it to chance. Too many pastors seem content to leave their desired culture to chance and hope that a strategy will enable to accomplish their vision.

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Shouting So They’ll Listen

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In his book, A Call to Resurgence, Mark Driscoll shared some eye opening stats about our culture:

  • 88% believe Jesus existed.
  • 78% believe God exists.
  • 73% believe in evolution.
  • 71% believe in karma.
  • 68% believe in heaven and hell.
  • 67% believe spirituality exists in nature.
  • 65% believe in angels and demons.
  • 59% believe Jesus rose from the dead.
  • 53% believe in the devil.
  • 46% believe in extraterrestrials, aliens, or UFO’s.

This is the culture we live in, work in, play in, and pastors, this is the culture you preach to each week.

So how do Christians tend to communicate to this culture? By shouting.

We don’t necessarily walk up to people and start screaming, although, I’ve seen people with signs stand on a corner and shout at people.

Have you ever seen someone try to communicate to someone with a language barrier? Americans when they encounter someone who doesn’t speak English, they talk louder. As we’ve brought Judah into our home from Ethiopia, we have a language barrier to overcome as he speaks little English and we speak very little of his language. Our boys, in an effort to get him to play with them or do something, simply talk louder if he doesn’t respond.

That’s what Christians do.

We don’t change what we are saying, we simply say the same things only louder and with more force.

Yes, but the message doesn’t change.

That is true. The gospel is the same. Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. We never stop talking about the glorious news of Jesus’ sinless life, our brokenness and need for a Savior and how Jesus met that need by dying in our place and rising from the dead and sending us the Holy Spirit. We never stop talking about that.

But, we can change how we talk about that.

Instead of shouting, find common ground, a common language. Answer questions and needs that people have.

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Look Before You Lead: How to Discern & Shape Your Church Culture

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bookEvery Tuesday morning, I review a book that I read recently. If you missed any, you can read past reviews here. This week’s book is Look Before You Lead: How to Discern & Shape Your Church Culture (kindle version) by Aubrey Malphurs.

I can’t even begin to describe how good and helpful this book is. The appendixes alone are worth the price of the book as they essentially give you Malphurs consulting toolbox.

The struggle many pastors have when it comes to leadership, making changes, preaching, leading their staff, working with volunteers is that they don’t understand the culture they work in. They are simply trying to put ideas into place, move things forward or make a difference. Until you understand the culture you have as a leader, those you lead, the world around your church and the world inside your church, you won’t be able to move anything. This book is particularly helpful for pastors about to move to a new church as Malphurs has an entire checklist of questions to ask a church board who is interviewing you. I found that extremely helpful from the other angle as it gave me questions I need to know for Revolution and questions I would ask a leader to determine if they fit our culture.

The reality is that every church is different. Every church has a different history, different set of leaders. So what works in California doesn’t work the same way in New York. In the same way that what works in one part of a city doesn’t work in another part of a city.

But what is culture? According to Malphurs, “The church’s congregational culture as the unique expression of the interaction of the church’s shared beliefs and its values, which explain its behavior in general and display its unique identity in particular.” And, “a primary responsibility of today’s strategic church leaders is to create, implement, and re-implement an organizational culture that rewards and encourages movement toward the church’s mission and vision. Every pastor must understand that to a great degree his job is to lead and manage the congregational culture, but if he doesn’t understand that culture as well as his own, he won’t be able to do the job.”

Here are a few other things that jumped out:

  • The organization’s beliefs and values intermingle and are seen in the church’s behavior or outward expression of itself. This is the first layer that is represented by the apple’s skin. Churches express themselves through their behaviors and outward appearance.
  • The behaviors and outward expressions are what an observer, such as a visitor, would see, sense, and hear as he or she encounters a church’s culture. Some examples are the church’s physical presence (facilities), language (multi- or monolingual), clothing, symbols, rituals, ceremonies, ordinances, technology, and so forth.
  • Churches are behavior-expressed but values-driven. The inward values drive and explain the church’s outward behavior. These values explain why the church does what it does at the first behavioral level and why it doesn’t do what it should do. When a church culture acts on its beliefs, they become its actual values. Until then they are aspirational in nature and inconsistent with the church’s actual observed presence and expressed behavior.
  • Churches are behavior-expressed, values-driven, and beliefs-based.
  • These three elements of organizational culture—beliefs, values, and their expression—work together to display the church’s unique identity.
  • Congregational culture as a church’s unique expression of its shared beliefs and values.
  • “The most important single element of any corporate, congregational, or denominational culture . . . is the value system.”
  • A ministry based on clearly articulated core values drives a fixed stake in the ground that says to all, “This is what we stand for; this is what we are all about; this is who we are; this is what we can do for you.”
  • An organization’s core values signal its bottom line. They dictate what it stands for, what truly matters, what is worthwhile and desirous. They determine what is inviolate for it; they define what it believes is God’s heart for its ministry.
  • Core values are the constant, passionate shared core beliefs that drive and guide the culture.
  • The key to understanding what drives you or your ministry culture is not what you would like to value as much as what you do value.
  • To attempt change at the surface level is problematic and disruptive. People persist in their beliefs and resent the change because leaders haven’t addressed it at the beliefs level. Thus the leader or change agent must discover the basic beliefs and address them as the church works through the change process.
  • Every thriving, spiritually directed church is well fed and well led.
  • We cannot do anything we want, because God has designed us in a wonderful way to accomplish his ministry or what he wants. Only as we discover how he has wired us will we be able to understand what specifically he wants us to accomplish for him in this life, whether it’s through pastoring a church or some other important ministry.

As I said, if you are a pastor, this is an incredibly helpful book to work through.