Tag Archives: elders

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How Does Your Church Make Decisions?

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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).

Facing a decision at work? Here’s how to make the right one.

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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?
A grid to help your church staff make decisions.

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How to Build a Team

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If you are a leader, one of the most important things you will ever do will have to do with the team you build around yourself. It doesn’t matter if you are paid, volunteer, if you work at a church or in a for-profit, your team will determine the success you will have.

Your team will determine the success you will have.

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The question then becomes, how do you build a team that not only works well with you, that you will work well with, but will also help you accomplish the goals you have as a leader?

Before getting to those things, let me tell you two truths you have to know up front about being on a team:

  1. Being on a team can be and will be one of the most rewarding aspects of ministry and life.
  2. Being on a team can be and will be one of the most painful aspects of ministry and life.

My hope for you is that you will experience the truth of number one. Here’s how:

1. Know yourself first. I’m amazed at how few leaders and pastors are self aware. Most don’t know the gift mix, personality type and how that affects their leadership. One of the most surprising things many leaders do when they build a team is simply filling roles without any thought to who they are as a leader. Are you organized? Creative? Black and White? Extrovert? Introvert? This is basic stuff but if you miss this, you will build the wrong team, you will build a team you don’t need.

2. Build around your strengths and weaknesses. This goes with the first one and if you don’t build around your strengths and weaknesses, but simply fill roles as many pastors do (with volunteers, elders and staff), you will build a great team for someone else. Any time you hire someone, bring on a volunteer, you should ask, “What does my team need?” Recently, the church I lead hired two new staff members that would be on my leadership team. One of the things I set out from the beginning was, they both had to be highly relational. We needed to find someone who was extremely organized and strategic. Why? While we are organized as a church, we don’t have someone whose primary gifts is in that area. Thankfully, we found all that our leadership team needed and roles we had to fill.

Know yourself so you can build the team you need, not the team someone else needs

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3. Have a clear vision and win (and make sure everyone agrees). This is where teams get off track, when they start building their own empires or reaching for personal goals or visions. Many times, the win for a team or organization is unclear, when that happens, people do and spend their time on what they think they should. You start pulling on the rope in different directions.

4. Be willing for things to not get done. This is crucial to building a team and incredibly difficult. To build the right team, you may need some patience as you wait for those people to come and that means some things might not get done. Now, if they are mission critical, keep the lights on kind of thing, they need to get done. But maybe you don’t attempt something or have music the way you want or kids ministry isn’t as robust as you’d like. It is better to wait for the right person than put the wrong person in charge that you’ll have to remove.

5. Have clear rules for how the team operates. Every team has rules for engagement and how they operate. Many of them are unsaid or simply made up, but have clarity on those rules. I ask each person on my team to agree to three things, three promises I make to them and promises I ask them to make to me and the other members of the team:

  1. Always make everyone on the team look good.
  2. Never surprise anyone on the team.
  3. Always have each other’s backs.

If things are agreed upon at the beginning, it creates accountability and keeps a lot of hurt and frustration from happening. Which leads to the last one…

6. Be accountable. You must have a plan for how you will hold your team accountable. Recently, we began implementing an annual plan. This not only helps me know the vision and goals of everyone on my team, it creates accountability from me, but also with the entire team. Each month, we will go over our plans, see where we are and how things are going.

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The Sins of a Pastor || Lazy

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Pastors, like any person sin. While this may be surprising for some people as they put their pastors and their wife on a pedestal, it is true. Because of the nature of being a pastor and the life they live, their sins are often not obvious and ones that no one will ever know about. In fact, some of the most hurtful and dangerous sins are ones that a church and elders can unknowingly encourage. These sins are not in any particular order, just the order I wrote them in.

So far we’ve covered:

  1. Your Bible is for more than just sermon prep.
  2. A pastor being untouchable.
  3. The pastor’s family. 
  4. The need to be needed. 
  5. Giving away too much at home.

The sixth sin that many pastors deal with is the sin of being lazy.

Not exercising or eating well. Pastors are notoriously overweight. The reasons for this are many. Most of our meetings happen at Starbucks or over a meal. There is snack sitting around at every church function and feeding more than 4 people is hard to do in a healthy way. This may be a symptom of poor planning, bad eating habits or a lack of self-control. I speak from experience on this as I used to weigh 300 pounds.

Not making enough money. Many pastors are underpaid. This can be because the church doesn’t have the money. Or, as is often the case, the church doesn’t pay well enough. Too many elder teams still hold to a poverty theology when it comes to their pastors, as if this will teach them humility. If you think your pastor needs to learn humility, you shouldn’t have hired him in the first place. 1 Timothy 5:17-18 says: “The elders who are good leaders should be considered worthy of an ample honorarium, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, ‘Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain and, the worker is worthy of his wages.” By no means should a pastor be overly wealthy and most pastors do not go into ministry for the money, but they should be paid well. A pastor should be paid like others in his church.

Not having structure in the church to stay on task. Many pastors do not stay on task well. They struggle to close their office door and get things done. You should have times that cannot be interrupted. If you need to get out of your office to not be disturbed, do that. Go to Starbucks or work from home on your sermon. Set a time that you begin work and end work and stick to that. Decide when you are most alert and creative and do your sermon work then. For me, that is the morning. Nothing intrudes on my morning. All my meetings happen in the afternoon and evening because the elders have stated to me the most important thing I do centers on my sermon.

Here are a few ways to fight this:

  1. Make an exercise and eating plan. Find something, join a Crossfit box, make an eating plan and stick to it. Decide that you will start losing weight and eating better. One of the ways to do that when you go out is to know what you are going to eat when you go to a restaurant so you don’t even need to see the menu and the tantalizing pictures of food you shouldn’t eat. When you eat out, order first so you aren’t swayed by what others order (this has huge implications if you order after someone), try it sometime.
  2. Get accountability on that plan. Go public with your plan. If you are planning to eat a certain or exercise, tell others about it. Have them hold you accountable.
  3. Ask for a raise. If you need to make more to provide for your family, ask for it. Lead up in this area to your elders. If they are a stone wall and want to keep you humble, pray that God will change their hearts. If they stay closed off to you and you feel God has released you, look for a new job.
  4. Elders and money. If you are an elder and have the power to give a raise to a pastor, ask yourself, “How would I want this elder team to treat me and my finances if I was the pastor?” Changes the discussion when you put yourself in the position of receiving money. Bottom line for elders, one of the main reasons pastors leave churches is so they can provide better for their families. Before you get angry about that, everyone in your church switches companies for the same reason.
  5. Create structure. Have a start and end time to work. Have a to-do list, the 2-3 things you have to accomplish everyday for today to be worth it and get those 2-3 things done each day.

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Why Pastor’s Should Take a Summer Preaching Break

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I am coming off of my summer preaching break at Revolution. When we started the church 5 years ago, I preached almost 100 times in the first 2 years. While it seemed necessary at the time, it was not unwise and certainly not sustainable.

It is always interesting to me when pastors hear about the break I take each summer. They often tell me how they could never do that or what they would do if they did that. I’ve talked to church members who don’t know what to do with a pastor taking a break. I get quizzical looks and then they say, “It would be nice for me to take 4 weeks off.” Which totally misses the point, but it would be nice to take 4 weeks off.

Here’s what I do on my break & why you as a pastor should take one:

  1. Rest. During my break I go on vacation, spend longer time with Katie and the kids than I normally do. I take more retreat days to be alone with Jesus and work on my heart. In the flow of a ministry year, it is easy to get busy and drown out the voice of the Holy Spirit. While I take my day off each week and try to take a retreat day each month, it is easy to skip these. A break gives me no excuse. During a break, I’m able to read my bible longer and journal more, pray more and work on me as a man, a father, a husband and a pastor. If this were the only thing a pastor gained from his break, his church would be better off, but there’s more.
  2. Let the church hear from other communicators. I would love to think I’m the greatest communicator my church has ever heard, but that isn’t true. In fact, they get tired of me, how I say things and what I say. I start to run out of interesting things to say, my stories get dry and don’t connect and I get tired of the series we are in. This happens every series we do, 10 weeks into it I’m ready for the next one. A break lets other people preach, which develops other communicators who God is calling into ministry or preaching. It allows my church to hear a different way of preaching, a different lens of reading the Bible and new insights and stories. Depending on how well they do, it might also give your church a greater appreciation for you. Some notes on guest speakers: they must line up with you theologically, don’t preach heresy on your week off. They must be good. I knew one pastor who booked speakers who weren’t as good as he was so when he came back people were excited he was back. I want Revolution to be great 52 weeks a year, regardless of who is preaching.
  3. Get your love and passion for preaching back. Preaching is hard work. It is tiring and draining. I love to preach and prep a sermon. It is one of the favorite parts of my job, but it is physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally tiring. Pulling back for a few weeks is incredibly important. Two weeks into your break, you will want to preach again and have the itch. This is good, then enjoy the last 2 weeks. For me, I’ve learned that I need to take a week off from preaching every 10 weeks. Every pastor is different, but that seems to be my limit.
  4. Evaluate the church. Andy Stanley calls this “working on the church, not in the church.” When I’m not working on a sermon, it gives me a chance to pull back and look at everything. This summer we and my leaders spent a great deal of time evaluating Missional Communities, talking about our first Revolution Church plant and what that will look like, and how we will get from 250 to 500 in attendance and what needs to change for that to happen and what will change because of that. In the normal flow of a ministry year, it is hard to have these meetings because they take time, but the summer is the perfect time to pull back and evaluate.
  5. Look ahead. Right along with evaluating your church, you can look ahead. You can read for upcoming sermons and series. You can work ahead on things. This summer, I started to work on the series we will begin in January. This is a huge help to our church because it allows us to have resources, daily bible study questions, mc guides, and study guides to educate our people in Scripture. None of these things happen at the last minute.
  6. Grow your leadership through books and conversations. Taking a break gives you extra time to read outside of sermon prep. I love to read and it seems I am always reading 5 books, but a summer break helps me read more and from a wider variety of books and topics. It also helps me have time to talk to other leaders, ask them questions, learn from them to benefit our church. This summer, I’ve spent time talking to pastors of church that are in that 350-500 range to see what is next. I’ve talked with pastors who have planted a church and what they learned in the process.
  7. Gives you energy for the fall. In most churches, the fall is the second biggest growth time of the year. The spring is the biggest for Revolution. Taking a break in the summer, pulling back gives you the energy for the season that is coming. If you go into the ministry season at 85%, you will burnout and not make it. If you go in at 100% you will push through and be of greater use to your church and Jesus.

If you are an elder or a church member who has the power to encourage your pastor to do this, do it. The benefit to your pastor, his family and your church is enormous. If you are a pastor, stop making excuses about this. Educate your elders, vision cast and lead up. I had to at the beginning as my elders didn’t understand why I’d do this. To them it felt like I was taking a month off. That’s okay, but don’t let that stop you.

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