Category Archives: Books I’ve Enjoyed

Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm by Mark Sayers

I kept hearing about Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm by Mark Sayers on different blogs and at different conferences and then a leader I respect said it was the best leadership book he’d ever read. I decided at that point, it was time to pick it up.

I was not disappointed.

One thing you will notice quickly, it is unlike any other leadership book out there. It has history, stories, art and a lot of soul in it.

The point of the book of the book is to show how leadership has changed, how culture has changed and what leadership looks like moving forward. I am thankful as Sayers points out, we are moving away from deconstruction in our leadership and culture and moving towards rebuilding. I’m hopeful Christians get this idea as many leaders seem to be behind the times and keep talking about deconstructing.

Leadership now is about rebuilding, not deconstructing.

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Here are a few things that jumped out:

  • Leaders are men and women who can influence a group of people toward a common goal. Their leverage comes from their ability to envision, communicate, and embody a better future. They see something wrong and want to change it. Yet for a group to be motivated they must come to some level of disillusionment with the status quo; they need motivation to change. The difficulty for those of us who are called into leadership in this era, in a society of the spectacle riddled with passive spectatorship and intermittent distraction, is made increasingly difficult.
  • Before we can lead others out of the culture of illusions, our illusions must die.
  • For leadership to be awoken, the modern myth that, like Nemo, we can hide away from the storms of life in comfort must be cast aside.
  • Our understanding of leadership is markedly shaped by the myth of the hero, the idea that through sheer effort and determination we can reshape reality. The myth of the hero tells us that dynamic, charismatic, and glorious individuals can heal cultures through their personal guile, skill, and glory.
  • The age of the image has created a whole industry that specializes in managing the public perceptions of leaders.
  • As leaders, influencers, and creatives, we all have dreams. Would we be satisfied if God made those dreams come true but we received no personal recognition?
  • Without realizing it, leaders can paint their own dysfunction over churches, ministries, and mission fields. All too easily, the effort to preach the gospel becomes about appeasing fears and insecurities, turning leadership into a tool used to primarily gain a sense of personal meaning. 
  • Emptiness seeks out thrills and excitement to escape the mundane. When this happens in Christian circles, churches recast mission, ministry, and leadership as adventures. 
  • Christian leadership is a strange beast. In its truest form it runs counter to almost everything the world has taught us: To create ourselves by accumulating riches, experiences, and relationships, and, most importantly, to broadcast them to the audience that will mirror back to us the messages we wish to hear. 
  • At its heart, biblical faith is a creed of the antihero. It is the story of men and women who come to the end of themselves and must discover God. 
  • Leaders do not avoid the storm when it comes, instead they step into the storm and discover the one who comes in the storm. 
  • Biblical leadership is so much more than just leading people. The biblical leader is a symbol who lives at the intersection of God’s breaking into history, into life. The leader can never be distant from God, His word, or the world. 
  • Those who avoid God’s holy storms fail to feel their pain, but they also fail to grow.
  • It is easier to reimagine church structure than it is to reimagine what it means to live a life fully devoted to God in modern culture.

Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church by Scot McKnight

I recently read Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church by Scot McKnight, which definitely stretched my thinking in a lot of ways about the kingdom of God.

Here are some things I liked or was challenged with:

1. There is no good for the common good until humans surrender to King Jesus. I love the way McKnight put this because so many in my generation want to do the common good and associate the common good with being human, spiritual, doing “kingdom work” and yet, we separate it from the gospel and under Jesus. We also make it sound like Jesus doesn’t care about the common good, or we make it sound like the church doesn’t care about the common good. I loved the connection of the common good to the gospel under King Jesus.

2. The story of redemption is not C-F-R-C. Instead, it is A-B-A. I think this pushed me the most and will push the thinking of most leaders the most too.

Here’s what McKnight had to say about this:

Plan A has four characteristics: God alone is King. Humans, from Adam and Eve to Abraham, are to rule under God. Humans usurp God’s rule. God forgives the usurpers and forms a covenant with Abraham.

So there are six elements in Plan B: God alone is (still) King. Israel is to rule God’s created world under God. Israel wants to usurp God’s rule. God accommodates Israel by granting it a human king. The story of the Old Testament becomes the story of David. God continues to forgive Israel of its sins through the temple system of sacrifice, purity, and forgiveness. A human king for Israel is Plan B in God’s eyes.

Here, then, is Plan A Revised: in Jesus, who is called Messiah (which means king), who is also called Son of God (which also means king), God establishes his rule over Israel one more time as under Plan A. Here are the major elements: God alone is King. God is now ruling in King Jesus. Israel and the church live under the rule of King Jesus. Forgiveness is granted through King Jesus, the Savior. This rule of Jesus will be complete in the final kingdom.

3. Kingdom mission is church mission. This carries closely to the first point, but I loved how McKnight connected kingdom work and church mission. They go hand in hand and are seeking to accomplish the same thing. Loved this.

4. King Jesus. This may seem obvious depending on your church background, but I appreciate the emphasis that McKnight places on Jesus as King. My church background seems to focus on Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, which He is and leave the King part until the end of the world. Yet, Jesus is King, now and forever.

5. Understanding the kingdom in the first century context. I’ll be honest, until I read what McKnight had to say about what a first century Jew would’ve thought of when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, I hadn’t really thought about it. Yet, this has to influence how we think about the kingdom of God. He said, “’kingdom’ in the Old Testament refers to both realm and governing (or ruling), sometimes emphasizing one and sometimes emphasizing the other, but always having a sense of both.” He goes on to talk about how it involves land, people, laws, etc. “A people governed by a king”—this is how the Old Testament uses the term “kingdom.” This context is important about how we think about the kingdom of God today in our world, as well as eternity.

While I haven’t gotten into the theology of the kingdom of God, how much of it is now and how much of it is in eternity, but McKnight handles that well and this blog post is not a sufficient place to unpack that. I found this book challenging, although I didn’t agree with all of it, it was definitely a good read.

The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection

Most of the books I review tend to be helpful and provide good insight into a topic I find interesting. A few books I read would fall into the truly life changing, life altering category. Books that shape me and my preaching, marriage, leadership or life. To fit into that category, it must be a book that I think everyone should read. Tim Chester’s book You Can Change: God’s Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions was one. The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass & Jim Cofield is another one.

The authors walk through why we fail at relationships so often and show how that begins the before we are even born, but then our inability to deal with what our lives have been like and how to move forward. Many people cannot work well with others, can’t engage in their family or marriage, struggle to make work connections and all because of something in their past that has not been deal with. This isn’t to say that it is easy, only that, to live in true freedom and be our “true self” as the authors put it, we must deal with those things.

We are designed for and defined by our relationships.

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For me, this book was incredibly eye opening into my own heart and relationships.

Here are some things I highlighted:

  • Loneliness is one of the most universal experiences.
  • We are designed for and defined by our relationships.
  • We are structured by and for relationships. Our relationships determine whether we have and enjoy life.
We are structured by and for relationships. Our relationships determine whether we have and enjoy life.

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  • To be appropriately close in relationships flows out of our capacity to trust others and ourselves well.
  • how important people in our life feel about us is remembered not “in words, but in our emotions, body, and images in our gut-level way of knowing.”
  • Not every emotion needs expression, but every emotion needs recognition.
Not every emotion needs expression, but every emotion needs recognition.

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  • God chose to create us with the capacity for relational connection. God also chose to develop and nurture this capacity by relational connection. Reflect on that for a moment.
  • It’s impossible to change what is false if we don’t take responsibility for it.
  • We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.
  • God longs for us to express our giftedness and to believe that he delights in us.
  • We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.
  • Our truest identity is not a self we create but the self that God creates and freely gives to us in Christ.
  • The greatest gift any of us can give another is a transforming, receptive presence.
  • True-self living requires the willingness to embrace and tell our story. All of our story.
  • Our story is composed of three things—events, emotions (surrounding the events we experienced) and interpretations (what we think we learned from the events and emotions of our lives). Events and emotions don’t become a story without an interpretation. Our interpretation is the script of our lives. It becomes my identity, and I become my interpretation.
  • Whatever we do not own will eventually own us.
Whatever we do not own will eventually own us.

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  • God sees and knows us more fully than we can see or know ourselves. His interpretation of me leads me into a truer way of being me. His interpretation of me reinterprets my interpretation of me. What we discover from God’s story is that God longs for me and I long for God. We discover our true self in Christ.
  • We cannot make peace with others without making peace with our past.
  • we are nurtured by relationships. In the community we learn what it means to live out the story of redemption. In the community the Spirit of God resides, encouraging, teaching and guiding its members into a deeper love for God and others.
We cannot make peace with others without making peace with our past.

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  • Soulful relationships are a gift that requires our intentionality.
  • Strong relationships are the fruit of doing certain things well.
  • We learn to give love by first receiving love.
  • We cannot engage well with others without accepting our limits and losses.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This is one of those books that you should stop reading what you are reading and buy this book.

5 Habits of Effective Churches

Peter Drucker’s book The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization in my opinion is one of the most helpful books out there for pastors and church leadership teams.

The 5 questions are:

  1. What is our mission?
  2. Who is our customer?
  3. What does the customer value?
  4. What are our results?
  5. What is our plan?

Why this book matters for pastors is many churches are aimless in what they are trying to accomplish. Yes, they quote the great commission or great commandments or say something like, “We exist to love God and love people.” While all of that sounds nice and biblical, it creates some fuzziness for the people in the church. What does that look like? What things should we do to accomplish that? Because of fuzziness around question #1, churches end up doing too much. In fact, Drucker points out in the book that churches could stop doing 50% of what they do right now and immediately become more effective. I totally agree.

Where I think many churches would benefit has to do with the other questions: who are we trying to reach? While most pastors will not like Drucker’s language of customer, I think it is helpful. Who are you as a church trying to serve and reach? The answer is not everybody, even though you think it is. Your church is uniquely equipped, wired and placed in a particular context to reach a particular context.

Here are a few other things that stood out to me in my reading:

  • The mission inspires; it is what you want your organization to be remembered for.
  • The danger is in acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.
  • If you have quick consensus on an important matter, don’t make the decision. Acclamation means nobody has done the homework.
  • A mission cannot be impersonal; it has to have deep meaning, be something you believe in—something you know is right.
  • The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it.
  • Your core mission provides guidance, not just about what to do, but equally what not to do.
  • To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.
  • The best companies don’t create customers. They create fans.
  • Our business is not to casually please everyone, but to deeply please our target customers.
  • What does the customer value? may be the most important question. Yet it is the one least often asked.
  • One of the most important questions for nonprofit leadership is, Do we produce results that are sufficiently outstanding for us to justify putting our resources in this area? Need alone does not justify continuing. Nor does tradition. You must match your mission, your concentration, and your results.
  • Leadership is a responsibility shared by all members of the organization.
  • The leader does not sit on the fence, waiting to see which way the wind is blowing. The leader articulates clear positions on issues affecting the organization and is the embodiment of the enterprise, of its values and principles. Leaders model desired behaviors, never break a promise, and know that leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it.
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How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman & Greg McKeown is a book every leader should read. In it, the authors compare what they call Multipliers and Diminishers. They look at how some leaders are able to get maximum effort from their teams and people and how others don’t even scratch the surface.

Multipliers make us better and smarter. They bring out our intelligence. While diminishers drain intelligence and capability out of the people around them. Their focus on their own intelligence and their resolve to be the smartest person in the room had a diminishing effect on everyone else. For them to look smart, other people had to end up looking dumb. So the question this book asks: How do some leaders create intelligence around them, while others diminish it?

Simple ways to make everyone around you smarter and better.

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According to the authors, there are 5 things that set Multipliers apart from other leaders:

  1. They attract talent.
  2. They liberate their teams to reach their potential and beyond.
  3. They challenge their teams.
  4. The create healthy debate in their teams and meetings.
  5. They invest in their team members.

Here are some specific things I learned about becoming a Multiplier from my reading:

  • The biggest leadership challenge of our times is not insufficient resources per se, but rather our inability to access the most valuable resources at our disposal.
  • Leaders rooted in the logic of multiplication believe: 1. Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2. All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3. Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment.
  • Multipliers don’t necessarily get more with less. They get more by using more—more of people’s intelligence and capability. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and I am one of the few really smart people. They then conclude, other people will never figure things out without me.
  • Multipliers lead people by operating as Talent Magnets, whereby they attract and deploy talent to its fullest regardless of who owns the resource. People flock to work with them directly or otherwise because they know they will grow and be successful.
  • Multipliers establish a unique and highly motivating work environment where everyone has permission to think and the space to do their best work.
  • Multipliers operate as Challengers by seeding opportunities, laying down a challenge that stretches an organization, and generating belief that it can be done. In this way, they challenge themselves and others to push beyond what they know.
  • Multipliers make decisions in a way that readies the organization to execute those decisions. They operate as Debate Makers, driving sound decisions through rigorous debate. They engage people in debating the issues up front, which leads to decisions that people understand and can execute efficiently.
  • Multipliers deliver and sustain superior results by inculcating high expectations across the organization. By serving as Investors, Multipliers provide necessary resources for success. In addition, they hold people accountable for their commitments. Over time, Multipliers’ high expectations turn into an unrelenting presence, driving people to hold themselves and each other accountable, often to higher standards and without the direct intervention of the Multiplier.
  • Talent Magnets are attracters and growers of talent and intelligence. Leaders who serve as Multipliers provide both the space and the resources to yield this growth. But Talent Magnets go beyond just giving people resources. They remove the impediments, which quite often means removing the people who are blocking and impeding the growth of others.
  • Talent Magnets remove the barriers that block the growth of intelligence in their people.
  • Diminishers are owners of talent, not developers of talent.
  • How smart you are is defined by how clearly you can see the intellect of others.
  • Multipliers understand that people grow through challenge.
  • Multipliers invest in the success of others.
  • When leaders fail to return ownership, they create dependent organizations.
  • The Diminisher operates from a very different assumption: People will never be able to figure it out without me.
  • When you delegate, you probably let people know what you are expecting of them. But take this to the next level and let people know that they (not you) are in charge and accountable.
  • When we protect people from experiencing the natural ramifications of their actions, we stunt their learning.
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Walking with God Through Pain & Suffering by Tim Keller

One of the books I read for our series at Revolution on Habakkuk called Waiting on God was Tim Keller’s book, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. It is by far the most helpful and most thorough book on the topic of pain and suffering and where God is when life hurts the most.

To give you an idea, when I read a book I would say I average highlighting anywhere from 25 – 40 things. In this book, I highlighted 160 passages.

Keller starts off the book by telling us why it matters so much,

Suffering is everywhere, unavoidable, and its scope often overwhelms. If you spend one hour reading this book, more than five children throughout the world will have died from abuse and violence during that time.3 If you give the entire day to reading, more than one hundred children will have died violently. But this is, of course, only one of innumerable forms and modes of suffering. Thousands die from traffic accidents or cancer every hour, and hundreds of thousands learn that their loved ones are suddenly gone. That is comparable to the population of a small city being swept away every day, leaving families and friends devastated in the wake. When enormous numbers of deaths happen in one massive event—such as the 1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or the 2010 Haiti earthquake—each of which killed 300,000 or more at once—it makes headlines around the world and everyone reels from the devastation. But statistics are misleading. Such historic disasters do not really change the suffering rate. Tens of thousands of people die every day in unexpected tragedies, and hundreds of thousands around them are crushed by grief and shock. The majority of them trigger no headlines because pain and misery is the norm in this world. We are always looking to make some sort of sense out of murder in order to keep it safely at bay: I do not fit the description; I do not live in that town; I would never have gone to that place, known that person. But what happens when there is no description, no place, nobody? Where do we go to find our peace of mind? . . . The fact is, staving off our own death is one of our favorite national pastimes. Whether it’s exercise, checking our cholesterol or having a mammogram, we are always hedging against mortality. Find out what the profile is, and identify the ways in which you do not fit it. No amount of money, power, and planning can prevent bereavement, dire illness, relationship betrayal, financial disaster, or a host of other troubles from entering your life. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic.

With that in mind, here 13 things I learned or was reminded of in this book that I hope will be of encouragement for you:

  1. When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.

  2. At the heart of why people disbelieve and believe in God, of why people decline and grow in character, of how God becomes less real and more real to us—is suffering. The great theme of the Bible itself is how God brings fullness of joy not just despite but through suffering, just as Jesus saved us not in spite of but because of what he endured on the cross.

  3. the central image of suffering as a fiery furnace. This biblical metaphor is a rich one. Fire is, of course, a well-known image for torment and pain. The Bible calls trials and troubles “walking through fire” (Isa 43:2) or a “fiery ordeal” (1 Pet 4:12). But it also likens suffering to a fiery furnace (1 Pet 1:6–7). The biblical understanding of a furnace is more what we would call a “forge.” Anything with that degree of heat is, of course, a very dangerous and powerful thing. However, if used properly, it does not destroy. Things put into the furnace properly can be shaped, refined, purified, and even beautified. This is a remarkable view of suffering, that if faced and endured with faith, it can in the end only make us better, stronger, and more filled with greatness and joy. Suffering, then, actually can use evil against itself. It can thwart the destructive purposes of evil and bring light and life out of darkness and death.

  4. Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.

  5. Christians don’t face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God.

  6. Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story. Suffering is the result of our turn away from God, and therefore it was the way through which God himself in Jesus Christ came and rescued us for himself. And now it is how we suffer that comprises one of the main ways we become great and Christ-like, holy and happy, and a crucial way we show the world the love and glory of our Savior.

  7. If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.

  8. God is sovereign over suffering and yet, in teaching unique to the Christian faith among the major religions, God also made himself vulnerable and subject to suffering. The other side of the sovereignty of God is the suffering of God himself.

  9. Suffering is painful “at the time” but later yields a harvest.

  10. It is one thing to believe in God but it is quite another thing to trust God.

  11. If you believe in Jesus and you rest in him, then suffering will relate to your character like fire relates to gold.

  12. We should not assume that if we are trusting in God we won’t weep, or feel anger, or feel hopeless.

  13. The way you live now is completely controlled by what you believe about your future.

If you are walking through a difficult season or are struggling to trust God as you look at the pain in our world, this is the one book I’d recommend you read.

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How to Have a Crucial Conversation

Conversations move life forward. They can also stop things from moving forward. Relationships end on conversations and begin. Teams are formed and broken apart. Goals are made, expectations laid out, visions happen, all around conversations.

Feelings get hurt in conversations, lies are told, deception, betrayal, all of these can happen in conversations.

Enter the book Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. I heard Joseph Grenny, one of the authors speak on this topic recently at the leadership summit and got a lot out of his session.

But what is a crucial conversation and is that different from a regular conversation? Here’s a simple diagram:

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All of us know the feeling of this kind of conversation and we know that this is where life changes.

Here are 10 things I got from the book that I have found helpful in my life and leadership:

  1. When we face crucial conversations, we can do one of three things:  We can avoid them, We can face them and handle them poorly, or We can face them and handle them well. At the heart of almost all chronic problems in our organizations, our teams, and our relationships lie crucial conversations—ones that we’re either not holding or not holding well. Christians and church staffs are notorious for avoiding crucial conversations. This is why churches often split, people leave hurt and visions never move forward. Instead of doing the hard work in a conversation, they are avoided. When in reality, because of what is at stake (salvation) and because of the calling of Jesus, we should do a better job of having crucial conversations.
  2. Individuals who are the most influential—who can get things done and at the same time build on relationships—are those who master their crucial conversations. We all know this to be true. If you aren’t very good at dialogue, you sit back in wonder at those who are. They are able to gain more influence, get more done and people want to be on their team and a part of what they are doing. This is why raising the value of this skill and getting better at it matters so much. Things move forward or stop around conversations.
  3. The mistake most of us make in our crucial conversations is we believe that we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend. Grenny said this at the summit and it grabbed my attention. This is one of, if not the main reason, most conversations stop and things do not move forward. Fear. Fear of a relationship ending, something stopping, getting fired or hurting someone. Yet, if we don’t tell the truth, we often can’t be a friend.
  4. People rarely become defensive simply because of what you’re saying. They only become defensive when they no longer feel safe. The problem is not the content of your message, but the condition of the conversation. If you are a boss and want honest feedback and conversation, people can’t fear for their jobs or that you will yell at them. Recently, there has been a lot of writing online about pastors abusing people, creating a culture of fear, yelling at staff members, elders and volunteers and it blows my mind. If you are known for that as a pastor, you should be embarrassed.
  5. Be careful not to apologize for your views. This can be easy to do and it often happens as a way to soften your opinion or the blow in a conversation, but you shouldn’t apologize for what you think. It is what you think. It might be hard or unpopular to say, but don’t shy away from it. You may be wise to change how you phrase it, but always be willing to share what you think in a conversation.
  6. One of the ironies of dialogue is that, when talking with those holding opposing opinions, the more convinced and forceful you act, the more resistant others become. I done this very easily in the past. Yet, this practice keeps people from buying in and helping to make something happen. When we do this, we don’t understand why people aren’t on board. The reason is the harder we push our way, the harder they push their way.
  7. Speaking in absolute and overstated terms does not increase your influence, it decreases it. The converse is also true—the more tentatively you speak, the more open people become to your opinions. The more harshly we speak or the more we give the impression that there is only one way, the less likely it becomes that people will speak up. Now, on issues like vision, it must be clear and have agreement. But, in conversations, if we give the impression that something has been decided or that we aren’t open to suggestions, we will kill discussion.
  8. When we feel the need to push our ideas on others, it’s generally because we believe we’re right and everyone else is wrong. This is another way the previous one. If you find yourself pushing your ideas, you aren’t having a good dialogue and instead are simply giving out orders. That may be your leadership style, but it won’t accomplish a healthy team environment and in the end, your church or business will never reach its full potential.
  9. The more you care about an issue, the less likely you are to be on your best behavior. As a leader or a person in a relationship, you must learn this well. This was an eye opening insight for me. I get very passionate about things, as most people do, and when I do, I can shut down dialogue and end up hurting people. We do this, often unintentionally because we care about something, because we believe we are right and have the only way forward.
  10. The fuzzier the expectations, the higher the likelihood of disappointment. When a crucial conversation ends, there must be clear expectations and guidance moving forward. It cannot be fuzzy or gray. Otherwise, a conversation has not ended, it is simply on pause.

All in all, this was an incredibly helpful book. Some of it covered things I already knew but showed some helpful insights. I’ve already seen a change in some of my conversations with leaders at my church and in my family through this book. Definitely one I’d recommend.

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Leadership Lessons from Dave Ramsey

 

Recently, I read through Dave Ramsey’s leadership book EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches. The title is right. There is tons of wisdom in this book and it is incredibly practical and helpful.

Here are 11 things I learned or was reminded of that I think are helpful for other pastors:

  1. The very things you want from a leader are the very things the people you are leading expect from you. Credibility, empathy, integrity, passion, vision. We want these things from leaders and our followers want them from us. The standard we hold people to, is the standard others hold us to. Step up to it.
  2. You cannot lead without passion. Passion causes things to move, and passion creates a force multiplier. The longer I lead Revolution, the more I am reminded of this. The times when we lacked momentum or energy, I lacked momentum and energy. This doesn’t mean a leader needs to be a loud cheerleader or an extrovert or can’t be tired sometimes. It does mean that you need to take care of yourself so that you are excited and energized. For a pastor, you need to make your schedule work so that on Sunday morning your game face is on and you are ready. This may mean you do very little on Saturday’s, but whatever you have to do, do it.
  3. The mission statement is one way we create culture. If you can’t give a clear win for your church, close your doors. You should be able to give a clear win for everything you do, this is what motivates people and pushes them to give their time, talent and treasure to something.
  4. Just because an idea is a good idea does not mean it is good for you or your company to take it on. Keep your eye on the ball. Pastors are notorious for not following this. Churches get complex, a powerful elders wife has an idea so you feel pressured to do it, the loudest person won’t stop complaining about why you don’t have a certain ministry. Someone says, “If we do ___, we will be able to reach people” and so the ideas seems sound. We can reach people? Then we should do it. The problem is, all kinds of things reach people, that doesn’t mean every church should do them all. TV ministries work at reaching people. Should every church have one? No. Focus on what you can do well and do that. The reason this is hard is because by staying simple and focused, you will lose people, but you will be more effective and healthier as a church in the end.
  5. If you spend fifteen minutes planning your day on paper every morning, you will add 20 percent to your productivity. I’ve come across this idea in a number of books recently and have put it into practice and seen a ton of results from this. By clarifying my wins for the day, I know where to spend my energy and time. I also know at the end of a day that maybe has little to show for it, that I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. This helps to put wind in your sails for the next day.
  6. The larger your dream, the larger the organization, the more complicated and emotionally draining your decisions. Leaders with small dreams don’t lay awake at night worrying and praying about their church. The ones who have things they feel called to, things that overwhelm them, they sweat the decisions they make. Hiring is now not just about filling a role, but can make or break a ministry for years. Where you meet, when you make a change, all of these decisions carry more weight.
  7. You put all you dream about in jeopardy when you are indecisive. Because of the season of growth and hiring that Revolution is in, this statement stopped me when I read it. While you should not rush things, you should take time when you can to make a choice and look at as many possibilities and angles as you can, at some point, you must decide. If you as a pastor are paralyzed about something, your church stops. That can’t happen. You can’t second guess something, you must decide and move forward.
  8. If you don’t have any good options then you don’t have enough options; search for more. If you are like me, it is easy to focus on one thing and just do it without finding good options. I realize others are in the other end of the spectrum of finding too many options and then aren’t sure how to move forward. I’ve always felt like I need to make a choice, when in reality, I could wait and find better options and that is a choice.
  9. Team members leave, or are let go, most often because they should never have been hired in the first place. Every pastor knows this is true. They have volunteers that shouldn’t have been given leadership roles, staff members that they want to fire or are firing that they should never have hired.
  10. Hire people you like; you will be trusting them and spending lots of time with them. I’ve made this mistake in the past and it hurt me. I overlooked something, whether in ability or simply personalities clashing and it hurt my team every time. Now, I spend lots of time with people before I hire them. I went to see someone in another state once just to get a feel for them before bringing them to Revolution.
  11. People whose first question is about pay are not people you want. I had a mentor in college tell me this, so I never brought money up in an interview. Now that I’m interviewing people, it tells me a lot about someone. While pay matters, buy in to a vision matters more. Sometimes people will sacrifice pay to be a part of something great. This doesn’t mean you pay people pennies, but it means the DNA and vision lining up is more important.
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What Pastors can Learn from TED Talks by Carmine Gallo (2014)

If you preach on a regular basis or give any kind of lesson or business presentations, the one book you need to read this year is Carmine Gallo’s book Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. I’ve been a fan of his since I read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, another great speaking book.

In his latest book, Gallo gives nine lessons every speaker can learn from the best TED Talks. Here are 9 lessons I took away for pastors:

  1. The world was and still is clearly hungry for great ideas presented in an engaging way. While many lament the changing culture and the lack of morals and change of opinion towards Christians. This is all true. Yet, the world is still looking for hope. Whether they are a follower of Jesus or have never walked into a church, those who show up on a Sunday are looking for hope, they are looking for change. They are hungry for the gospel.
  2. If you can’t inspire anyone else with your ideas, it won’t matter how great those ideas are, because great communicators reach your head and your heart. Pastors tend to reach either the head or the heart of someone. They are either incredibly smart so they engage them intellectually or they have a passion and can tell stories so they reach the heart. You have to reach both. Depending on your ministry background and theological camp, you know which one comes naturally for you. For me, I can reach anyone’s head. The speakers I listen to so that I can grow as a communicator tend to be the seeker-church guys (Andy Stanley, Perry Noble, Craig Groeschel, etc). Why? They know how to do something that doesn’t come naturally for me and I want to grow.
  3. You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. For many pastors, they preach because it is Sunday, not because they have something to say. This has to do with their own heart, devotional time, sleep patterns, eating habits and how they are protecting themselves. Your church knows if you are inspired by what you are sharing or if you are just giving a sermon. Take care of yourself, prepare your heart, confess your sin and preach because you can’t keep it in any longer.
  4. Positive leaders are perceived as more effective and therefore more likely to persuade their followers to do what they want their followers to do. While their is a time for seriousness in a sermon, people must walk away feeling hopeful and knowing you believe what you said and knowing that you believe the gospel has the power to do what you said it can do.
  5. If you start with something too esoteric and disconnected from the lives of everyday people, it’s harder for people to engage. Always, always start with something that connects to real life. You have 30 seconds to convince people to listen to you. Showing them that you understand where they’re coming from and that you can help them move to a place they want to go goes a long way in raising the interest level in your sermon.
  6. Giving a presentation that truly moves people takes hard work. Let’s face it, many pastors are lazy. They become a pastor because it seems easier, they read a lot and most people don’t have a high expectation for a sermon to be great (sadly). They are simply hoping for short. Preaching is hard work. If you aren’t willing to put in the hard work, don’t preach. At the end of the day, someone pays a price for a sermon, the pastor or the church.
  7. Authenticity doesn’t happen naturally. This seems counterintuitive, because authenticity just happens. It takes practice. It takes learning how to share, what to share and when to share it. Sometimes, pastors in an effort to be authentic sound creepy. Sometimes, they skip it and sound like they never struggle with anything they are preaching on. One question I ask each time I preach and seek to answer in my sermon is: How has this passage affected and changed me?
  8. When you walk into a classroom you have two jobs: one is to teach and the other is to recruit everyone in that classroom to join the pursuit of truth. Let’s face it, preaching is about moving people to action. It might be for them to take a next step, follow Jesus, get baptized, start giving, work on an area of their life or join the mission of a church. A sermon is a call to move from where you are to somewhere else.
  9. If you can’t explain your big idea in 140 characters or less, keep working on your message. I’ve talked a lot in blog posts about having 1 big idea, one thing you are trying to get across. Not 3, 5 or 7. A pastor recently asked me to critique a sermon and after listening to it I asked him, “What was the main point?” He couldn’t recall it. Neither could his church. I love how Gallo says, “Every talk should be a twitter headline. If it can’t fit, you aren’t ready to talk.” For some great examples, just listen to Andy Stanley preach. By having a twitter headline, you are able to help control and influence what people walk out knowing.

As I said, if you speak, this is the one book you need to read this year. So, so good.

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11 Ways Churches Can Improve Hiring

The church I lead is in the process of hiring two new staff members so I’ve been reading blogs, articles and books on hiring this summer. There is a ton of incredibly unhelpful stuff out there, but also some great things that applies greatly to churches. One of them is It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz.

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I think people applying for a job should do a better job of interviewing the boss they’ll work for and understanding the church culture, but churches need to have a clearer hiring process as well.

Here are 11 things I learned from It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best:

  1. Success is rooted in relationships, in the people around you. You are hiring to make your church more effective, to move the gospel and the mission forward. Hiring should take a large part of your time if you have open positions. Yes, use other staff members or hiring firms, but you can’t delegate the whole thing. You must spend time on it if you are the leader.
  2. Humans aren’t programmed to make great people decisions. The first step in surrounding yourself with the best is to recognize—and correct—your own failings. Churches are notorious for being too nice and overlooking their tendencies. It is amazing to me how much of this book was about how to get past your personal biases. We have them and they hinder us from effectively finding leaders, volunteers and staff members. Studies show that adults gravitate toward those with whom they share something, whether it’s a common nationality, ethnicity, gender, education, or career path—even the same first-name initial! It is important to recognize these in ourselves and put a team around us to help us make these choices so we don’t fall into traps.
  3. Overconfidence in predictions is a pervasive human bias that has a dramatic impact not just on our financial or weather forecasts but also on our people decisions. I can easily make a choice right away based on my bias and be wrong. All leaders do this. We need to make sure we stick with our process that we laid out and not jump forward too much. One of those he pointed out was, “Unconsciously, we make choices based on what we already know.” Again, our bias gets in the way.
  4. Most of us are bad and slow at getting the wrong people off the bus. This is true of almost every church. Our goal is to serve, care and love people so it makes sense this would be a struggle. Yet, when this choice must be made, we must make it. For the sake of the church and the person. If they aren’t meeting expectations, it isn’t good stewardship to keep them in a role. If they need help or coaching, we need to do our best to make that happen. Sometimes though, a person’s time is done and they need to get off the bus and that is okay.
  5. Why hiring matters. At most companies, people spend 2 percent of their time recruiting and 75 percent managing their recruiting mistakes. Take the time to make the right choice, even if it means your ministry suffers some in the short term.
  6. Should you hire from inside or outside of your church? It is popular now to hire only from inside a church and sometimes this is the right move. Sometimes, you need an outside perspective to shake things up or take things in a new direction or add an element you don’t have on a team right now. Most churches though, do not evaluate the same. We simply don’t work as hard to evaluate insiders—not only in cases of CEO succession but in all appointments—and this is especially true when things are going well.
  7. Schedule interviews correctly. Don’t simply schedule an interview, make sure it is at a time when you are awake, alert and can focus. Great decision makers never schedule endless back-to-back meetings, and they never work hungry.
  8. Interview 3 people for a position. My expectation was that a larger pool of people interviewed would increase the stick rate, and that happened up to a point. But after three or four candidates, it rapidly declined, confirming that too many options generate suboptimal decisions. So three to four seems to be the right number, just as it is with the interviewers you involve in your key people decisions.
  9. Most people assume that the best hiring strategy is to find the best performers in a given field and get them on your team. I found this fascinating in that someone can be a star at one company or church, but not at another. The DNA, culture and systems of a church can often help someone and if those things aren’t at a new church, their star can diminish. This is important to keep in mind. Also, you don’t always need a star.
  10. Identifying potential should be our first priority. Most people look for a proven track record, and that is important. A proven track record is also attached to someone usually set in their ways, committed to one way of doing things and sometimes you have to untrain someone. This reminder of looking for what someone could be is crucial.
  11. Team effectiveness explains perhaps 80 percent of leaders’ success. Leaders, if you needed a reminder of why hiring matters, this is it.

If you’re hiring, you must read this book. I haven’t found a more helpful book out there on the topic.

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