Thursday Morning Mind Dump…

mind dump

  • Got back late last night from California.
  • Exhausted, but also excited about the things God is doing in my life, in Katie’s life and the ways He is moving in Acts 29 West.
  • First, as soon as church ended Sunday, we headed to Phoenix to fly to LA.
  • Katie and I are going through a 3 year training called The Leaders Journey with Jim Cofield and Rich Blass from Crosspoint Ministries.
  • Their the authors of The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection.
  • The Leaders Journey is a training on leadership health.
  • It deals with connection, attachment, family of origin issues, brokenness in your life and how that hampers your leadership, how to find wholeness in Christ so you can help others find wholeness in Christ.
  • It is incredibly helpful and incredibly exhausting emotionally.
  • Sometimes I feel like the Christian walk is 1 step forward and 2 steps backwards.
  • Meaning, the more I grow closer to Christ, the more light shines on places I still hold on to or sin patterns I want to fall back into.
  • In God’s providence, I’m talking about dealing with shame, guilt and regret this week from Romans 10.
  • I’m blown away by how much those things shape people and how much we won’t let go of them.
  • Even if we want to.
  • One of the things I’m excited about is between now and the next leaders journey session, there are a lot of exercises and readings I’m supposed to do around prayer.
  • Prayer is something I always want to get better at, but always seem to fail at.
  • So I’m excited for that much needed kick in the pants on that.
  • Yesterday, we got to spend the day walking through Acts 29’s new assessment process and being trained to be assessors.
  • I’m really excited for the changes our network is making in this area.
  • I think it will help a lot of potential planters either hold off on planting (never a bad thing) and help those who should plant be more ready for the road ahead.
  • I’m doing a crossfit competition on Saturday at the box we go to.
  • I’ve never actually done one of those before, so we’ll see how it goes.
  • Of course, the first lift has to be a snatch ladder, one of my weakest lifts. Followed by a chipper, so I can redeem myself on that.
  • I’m hopeful that it’s a fun time, regardless.
  • I often get asked what books or podcasts my team is listening to or reading.
  • We’re about to start discussing this book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, which I’m really excited for.
  • We’re in the process of finalizing Katie’s tattoo and have the appointments set for October.
  • Can’t wait.
  • I love the story behind it and what it represents in her life.
  • I have one day to wrap up my sermon and after all that travel and being away, I’m excited that tonight is family movie night!
  • Back at it…

How to Build a Team

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.

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.

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.

Being a Pastor’s Wife: “Just” a Wife & a Mom

pastor's wife

Many churches (and pastors for that matter) do not know what to do with pastor’s wives, how to treat them, what role they play or how important they are. It is a hard role to live in and stay in. Everyone has a lot of their own expectations of what the wife of a pastor should be like, yet, they are all different.

While Revolution (and myself) has struggled just like every other church to figure this out, I believe Katie and I have figured some things out that we have put into place which will prove to be invaluable in the future. While this is not exclusive to pastors, any leader in a church and for that matter, any husband can do better in understanding their wives and how to engage them.

Over the next month, I’ll be sharing some of the things we’ve learned that I hope will be beneficial for you.

If you missed them, you can read Pastor Your Wife as Much as You Pastor Your ChurchWithout Her, You Fall ApartWhat Role a Pastors Wife Plays in the Church and Spiritual Warfare in the Home.

I talk to many wives and Katie and I have had this conversation as well. In our culture, it is seen as a step down to be a wife and a mom (in some Christian circles it is seen as a step down if a wife works, but that’s another post for another day). I have watched people ask Katie what she does and for awhile she felt embarrassed to say she was a wife and a mom. As if someone who is a wife and a mom is incapable of doing anything else with their lives.

Or, as someone asked me, “Why would Katie give up her dreams to be a wife and a mom?” I think that question is the crux of it all. To be a wife and a mom requires a sacrifice, a sacrifice that I do not fully understand, but do my best to fully appreciate and hold up.

A woman who pours into her husband and kids does make an enormous sacrifice. They are women who don’t simply buy into “doing whatever they want” but seeing how their gifts can be used for an eternal perspective.

How do I know that? If Katie had stayed in school and finished her math/engineering degree (another misnomer is that if you stay home you must be stupid, think again), we either don’t get married or we get married and live in Missouri while she finishes school, which means I don’t get my master’s or go on staff at the church I worked at in Maryland. This changes the complete trajectory of our lives.

There have been several times in my marriage (maybe not enough) that I’ve looked at Katie and said, “Thank you for sacrificing your dreams to be part of a dream of raising our kids for them to make in impact. Thank you for supporting me and sticking by me to get Revolution off the ground.” I always joke with Katie that her house will be bigger in heaven but I am now convinced that she will also get to live in the gated community while I live in the slums. Still in heaven but she will have to invite me over for a visit. 🙂

So, the next time you see a woman who is “just” a wife and a mom know that she is holding onto a bigger, eternal dream. That is what is driving her. Husbands, do not let anyone say your wife is “just” a wife and a mom.

And, always, always tell your wife thanks for the work she does. Without Katie, what I enjoy and love about life does not exist. That’s a perspective I don’t want to forget.

Does every pastor’s wife do this? To be a successful pastor’s wife, should you not work?

The answer is that it depends. For many, they won’t. I also don’t want it to sound like the only role a wife and mom can play is staying at home. Many, many women make a big impact while working outside the home.

One thing that makes pastoral ministry unique is that many churches want the pastor’s wife involved in ministry. For our church, we have always said a pastor’s wife should be like any other Christian woman. She should be encouraged to use her gifts, talents, be plugged into an MC and serve as she can (based on the stage of life she is in). That changes as life changes. Because ministry can be an all consuming job, it can be difficult for a pastor’s wife to work outside the home. Not impossible, but difficult.

For many pastor’s families, the need for money and security is high. Most churches think it is important keep their pastor’s poor (which is a sin on the church’s part), or a pastor has school debt and the need for extra income is there. If this is the reason for a pastor’s wife working, I think a pastor needs to educate his elders and his church about his needs, how much a pastor should get paid and move towards that. Many elders struggle with this because it is hard to gauge what to pay a pastor. One year as we were discussing raises at Revolution, an elder said we shouldn’t give anyone a raise because no one in our economy was getting raises. I pointed out, that may be true, but our church was growing, giving was going up and we were asking more and more of our staff. Elders board sometimes have to separate their situation to be a good elder and this can be hard.

In the end, finances and church staffs are a sticky situation. But one a healthy church must navigate and one a healthy pastor’s family must walk through.

The Other Side of the Coin

There is another side of this struggle that I think is true for all married women, but in particular for a pastor’s wife. Many pastor’s wives have poured their entire adult life into their husbands ministry. Helped him get through seminary, maybe helped him plant a church and possibly followed him to countless churches (since the average pastor stays at a church for 18 months). Because of this, many of her dreams, desires and talents are put on hold for the good of his ministry and what the church needs. Because of moving around, a feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness sets in, which we’ll look at in a future post.

Husbands and pastors have a responsibility to help their wife find their talents, gifts, what fires them up and help them do that. It doesn’t mean a business or work, although according to Proverbs 31 that can be a good thing. It does mean setting aside some of his passions and desires for her so that he can serve her. Many men at this point will talk about their calling and how that super cedes everything. True on one hand, debatable on the other. Your first calling is your wife and kids, and then your ministry. Many men because of being a Type A leader get this backwards and their wife feels the pain of this.

My goal with this post and all the posts in this series is to educate a church about the unique struggles that a pastors wife has. There might even be some education to a pastor about what his wife is going through as some can be oblivious to this. I also hope to create some good conversations among couples about what it looks like to have a healthy marriage and be in ministry.