Category Archives: Healthy Leadership

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How to Handle Someone who is Not on Board with a Change

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book

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak at Exponential on the topic of transitioning a church with small groups to a church with Missional Communities. A few asked for some notes on it and thought I’d do a few blog posts on it.

The first step in this process is to start with why and the win of this transition. The second step is to get essential leaders on board.

The moment you begin to get essential leaders on board with any change or transition is the point of no return for a leader, they have now gone public.

I would say this is one of the most crucial moments of a change because of this. It is also when leaders derail themselves without realizing it and it is because they don’t handle someone who is not on board correctly. 

Think of this scenario: a leader has spent weeks, months and some times years thinking about a vision or a dream, a way forward. They begin sharing this dream with leaders and decision makers. Most people are excited because they love the leader or the direction or both.

Then, something happens: they meet someone who is not excited.

They ask questions, give pushback and generally do not seem excited about what the leader is proposing. The leader, because they are the leader starts to get defensive, pushes back even harder and both people sit across the table and dig their heels in.

Who is right in this situation?

Possibly both people.

Leaders will look at this person, whether they met in person or heard through the grapevine that someone isn’t on board and they will see a person who is being divisive or not submitting to authority.

Leaders forget that they have had the opportunity to process a change of direction or new initiative or ministry for a long time, this person just heard about it and has not had as long. It isn’t that they aren’t supportive, wanting to be on mission or not submitting, they are just reacting to a change and almost always are first reaction to a change is to be defensive.

If the leader fails here, most changes get derailed. For the simple reason that the person who seems unsupportive usually wields greater influence than the leader.

As a leader, here are some ways to handle this person:

  1. Stay humble. Do you need this person to make this change? Who knows. But God has placed you as the leader to shepherd this person through this change, so care for them. Stay humble, otherwise, God will oppose you and that will be worse than this person opposing you.
  2. Ask questions. Ask what their fears are, why aren’t they excited about this. Often, it is the loss of something that makes us defensive about a change, not because we don’t love the possibilities of something new, it is that we are mourning what we are losing.
  3. Listen. Don’t get defensive or seek to win. 
  4. Have resources for them to listen to or read. Have something to give them. Pick the thing that pushed you over the edge, the most influential piece to give to them and say, “This helped me. Before you decide, would you listen to this or read this and consider the possibilities?”
  5. Ask them to pray about it. They may or may not actually pray about it, but ask them to. If they do, give the Holy Spirit the opportunity to do what only the Holy Spirit can do, change them.

In the end, if God wants whatever change you are making to come to pass, it will. The person who seems the most against something at the beginning can often be the biggest supporter of it by the end if they are led well.

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How to Get Essential Leaders on Board with Change

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book

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at Exponential on the topic of transitioning a church with small groups to a church with Missional Communities. A few asked for some notes on it and thought I’d do a few blog posts on it.

The first step in this process is to start with why and the win of this transition. The second step is to get essential leaders on board. This is simple change theory and applies to any change a leader is thinking about making, but it is incredibly important as we talk about transitioning a church from small groups to missional communities.

The reason is: groups and MC’s are so different that it will change everything about your church. It is not simply adding “missional” to your church, but changes everything. 

When you make any change or transition you need to be able to answer these questions: Who needs to know? When do they need to know it?

A few other things to ask: What leaders will be the most crucial to making this transition happen? Who are the people in this church (leadership by title or leadership by influence) who can keep this transition from happening that I need to get on board early?

Too many leaders when they make a change think they can bulldoze through it because “they’ve heard from God” or “are the leader.”

When we transitioned from groups to MC’s, we made a list of everyone we thought who could be an MC leader and I met with them to cast the vision, invite them into the process and join in being a part of this. By the time we announced the change to our church, almost 30% of our church knew about the change, why we were making it and were on board with it.

This is the moment the change becomes real because you invite people into it. 

Up until this moment, the change or transition is simply a dream, a hope, a prayer in your mind. This moment is when you put the flag in the ground and bring others into it.

To get the leaders on board that you need, you will have to make sure the change is clear, thought out and you can answer questions.

In short: be as clear as possible. 

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Why You Make Bad Decisions in Life & Work

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bad decisions

In today’s culture, organizations and churches must be flexible, nimble and quick. Otherwise, you will be left in the dust. Opportunities come flying at you that you don’t want to miss.

This is true.

Here is something that makes leadership in this day and age difficult: fast decisions are usually poor decisions. 

Fast decisions are usually poor decisions.

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Most of the time, when we make fast decisions it is because we haven’t done our research and have waited til the last minute. I’ve told my leaders before, if you come to me with an idea and say, “I need an answer now” without letting me think about it, the answer will always be no.

Are there exceptions? Sure, there are almost always exceptions.

Think in your life, most decisions you had to make were often poor decisions. They weren’t though out, they didn’t see the downsides, the alleviated the wrong things, maybe bringing short term comfort instead of a long-term win.

Instead, smart leaders look ahead and plan ahead. They aren’t caught running behind or having to make last minute decisions. They plan well.

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Making Decisions for with Your Target in Mind

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church

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been exploring the ideas of vision for a church and if a church should have a target, what having or not having a target does for a church and how to determine that target.

One of the struggles for churches is to continue making decisions with their those they are best suited to reach in mind.

Here’s why: the church gets older.

All of a sudden, a church plant that started out reaching college students and single adults now are married, with kids. Families start attending. The crazy ideas they once had now seem ludicrous when you consider the businessmen, nurses, dentists and teachers that attend.

If a church isn’t careful, the leadership of the church will not have any decision makers who are the age of who they say their target is.

What do you do then? Make sure you have some decision makers that are in your target. 

For example, if you are hoping to reach 20-40 year old men, you need to make sure that some of those are decision makers in your church. If you are wanting to reach 50 year old women, you need to know what speaks to them. Whoever you are trying to reach, it is a good idea to run ideas by those in that age bracket, those who have a worldview different from yours.

The older you get, no matter how hip you think you are, you are out of touch. I’m in my 30’s and I feel out of touch with 21 year olds. This is why I spend time developing leaders who are in college, have students and singles in my community. I’ve even run some ideas by 20-25 year olds to see what they think of sermon or video or song ideas.

What I’ve discovered is they have drastically different opinions than a 45 or 55 year old. This is not right or wrong, it just is. And, if your target is clearly defined, you know which way to go.

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Preaching on Topics You Aren’t Passionate About

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preaching

If you listen to enough of a pastor’s sermons you will hear a few things:

  1. What he is passionate about.
  2. What he struggles with.
  3. What he wants to become.

Pastor’s tend to stick with what they know or like. If I had my way, I’d preach on a New Testament letter every time. Other guys would preach from a gospel whenever given the chance. A few will throw in some Old Testament wrath of God.

Sunday, as we are going through Galatians, we got to a topic that I haven’t preached a lot on. It isn’t because I don’t care about it or don’t think it is important. Truthfully, it hasn’t come up in any of the series we’ve done. It’s the topic of approval.

Now, we all struggle with approval to some degree. We all care what people think, to some degree. It is just different for everyone.

For me, my struggles center around control and power. I don’t care too much if you like me, but I do care a lot if I lose.

If a pastor isn’t careful, they will only preach on the things they find important. This can be good and bad.

It’s good because it should mean a pastor is passionate about what he is communicating. It’s good because his sermons will tend to be more thorough because it’s on a topic he likes or has read a lot about (because he struggles with it).

If you aren’t careful though, you will end up missing an enormous part of your church. Your church doesn’t have the same struggles you have. They don’t have the same temptations or history or baggage that you do.

Because of that, they need to hear sermons about things you aren’t as passionate about.

This is one of the benefits to preaching through books of the Bible. You can’t skip anything. Now, choosing to preach through Galatians, I knew I was going to hit the topics of legalism, approval and moralism. It is the theme of the book. It is one of the reasons we chose it, because we haven’t had a lot of sermons on those topics.

Pastors will also stay away from topics they don’t want to talk about. Maybe a pastor is more of a shepherd than a vision caster, so he won’t preach a lot about vision. This will lead the church to be aimless. Or, he’s a vision caster who can’t stop talking and no one gets cared for because he never preaches on it. A pastor isn’t an evangelist, so there is no talk on evangelism, just discipleship and growing. Or the other way around.

If you simply talk about what you like, care about, are passionate about or things you know about, you will keep your church from hearing all that God wants to teach them.

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How to Determine the Target of Your Church

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church

So far in this blog series, we’ve looked why every church has a target (defined or not) and why every church needs to have a target (and the benefits of a target).

The question then, if you believe me so far (and I hope you do as a strong leader who reads this blog) is: how do I determine the target of my church?

This can come from a variety of places:

  1. Who lives around the church you pastor.
  2. Who already attends the church you pastor.
  3. A group of people or segment of the population God has placed on your heart.

Here’s a question to ask that few churches ask but shows who God might be calling you to reach: Who are we best suited to reach?

 

The next question a leader or a church must answer is: Are we willing to do whatever it takes to reach this person?

This might mean some changes are made to the church, new things are started, old things are buried and not used anymore. This also means that you don’t alienate others. This is one of the reasons many churches shy away from being clear about who they are best suited to reach. This is important. You want to reach everyone, but you as a person, you as a church are best suited to reach a specific person.

As our church has thought about this, here are some things this means for us as we seek to reach unchurched people in our city, particularly men.

  • Sing songs men will sing. Men don’t want to sing a love song to Jesus and they don’t want to sing high. Men also don’t usually like to clap and sing (they will only do one). Most of our songs are low, mid-tempo and about the greatness and power of God. Men resonate with these themes.
  • Portable church. Being portable is hard work and tiring. Set up and tear down is also where the majority of men serve. Most men don’t want to teach, lead a class or greet, but they will move stuff.
  • MC’s and classes have end dates. Men like end dates and our culture is set around end dates. Too many churches have groups and classes that meet until Jesus returns. Men don’t sign up for that.
  • Simple church. We don’t do a lot, we aren’t complex.
  • No women’s ministry (or men’s for that matter). I’ve written about this before so I won’t belabor this point, but if you want to reach men, a women’s ministry will unintentionally stand in the way of that. You can disagree with that, and some people do, but we’ve found this to be an inhibitor to reaching men that we don’t have one.
  • Logical sermons. Men are logical. Yes, they like stories and they like to be moved emotionally, but not as much as they want to figure things out logically. Preaching emotional sermons to women is easier, which is why many pastors do it. It is why most pastors preach from the gospels instead of a NT letter. Yet, logic wins men.
  • Preach through books of the bible. Men want to see how something fits together. That doesn’t happen in a topical sermon, but it does when you preach through a book of the Bible. It also causes you to have to preach on everything. Men want you to hit the hard topics. They want you to man up and preach tough things and answer difficult questions and wrestle with them through doubts.
  • Resources to help men lead their families. One of the reasons men don’t lead their families or read their bibles is they don’t know how to. Men will not do things they don’t think they will succeed in. So help them. Give them resources to accomplish what God has called them to accomplish.
  • Male leadership. This will sound sexist and I’m not saying it isn’t: men follow men. It is a simple truth. This doesn’t mean a church should have no female leadership. In fact, if you don’t have female leaders in your church, you will be missing out on some great ideas and balance as a church. If you want to reach men though, you need to have male leaders that are worth following, men that other men want to be like. Here are some examples of a vision that we give to men for their lives: http://www.tucsonrevolution.com/fight/ and http://www.tucsonrevolution.com/versus/.
  • Always take a next step. Men are action oriented, they want steps and they want to take them, as long as they are clear. Every week, we challenge our church to take some kind of next step. It might be to come back, to follow Jesus, get baptized, forgive someone. It is always an obvious one (or three) from the sermon.

Is this a lot to do? Yes.

When we unpack for someone new at our church, who we target and why. If they don’t like it, they almost always say, “But I appreciate it that it is clear and you thought through it.”

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The Slowness of God’s Timing

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God's Timing

In the spiritual life God chooses to try our patience first of all by His slowness. He is slow; we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and He has been for eternity…There is something greatly overawing in the extreme slowness of God. Let it overshadow our souls, but let it not disquiet them. We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait. He does not go their road. When He comes, go with Him, but go slowly, fall a little behind; when He quickens His pace, be sure of it, before you quicken yours. But when He slackens, slacken at once: and do not slow only, but silent, very silent, for He is God. -Frederick Faber

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Why You Need to Define Your Target

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church

I’ve been doing a series of posts on churches and the target they have (or don’t have). You can read part 1 on the fact that every church has a target (whether defined or not) here.

Once you determine that you will have a target, the question then becomes, who is it? How do you define it? How specific should it be?

Before you can answer those questions, maybe you are still on the fence about this whole idea. Having a target as a church sounds like a business, or that you don’t like certain people or that you are catering to someone.

As I mentioned already, you have a target, it just might be defined yet.

Here’s what happens in churches without a clearly defined target:

  • Every idea is a good idea. If you don’t have a clear target, every idea has to be put on the table for discussion and kept on the table. You will struggle to say no to anything, because your only reason will be “you don’t want to do it” or “we’ve alway done it this way.” Should we have a drama team? A puppet team? A quilting fair? A small group for coin collectors? Should use drums? Sing hymns? Preach topically or expository sermons? The answer to the above is yes. Do it all.
  • People burn out. Which leads quickly to burnout. When you don’t have a target and say yes to things you should say no to, you end up with a busy church calendar.
  • No one knows what the win is, so excitement and momentum are low or nonexistent. This is why church is so sad to me. I talked to a friend recently who quit his job at a church after “asking for almost 2 years for the lead pastor to define the win for our church. I even told him if what I was doing didn’t fit, I’d stop doing those things. I just wanted to know what the win was.” If you don’t know what the win is as the leader, no one else knows. If no one else knows, no one will know where you are, how you are doing and if it is worth their time, money, and effort. Without this knowledge, they are simply showing up. And no one enjoys just showing up. People will do it for a little bit out of a sense of duty, but they will walk away soon enough.
  • Budgeting is often a battle. If every idea is a good one because there is no target, no defined win, budget meetings are filled with people arguing for their pet projects and ministries they care about. If you don’t define the win, people will make their own.
  • God moves in other churches. I can’t prove this, I have no data on this. I can only look at the church I lead and the times the win was not clear there is a definite absence of God moving compared to the times the win was clear. This is convicting to me as a leader as I think about Revolution. It spurs me to stay as clear as possible, to never let me passion wane.

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When You are Most Likely to Sin

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sin

Ever wonder why you sin? What if there was a specific time that you were most likely to give in to temptation? What if you could see negative emotions, thoughts from your past, addictions you thought you were free from coming a mile away?

You can.

In his book Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You, John Ortberg shares this:

Psychologist Roy Baumeister has coined the term “ego depletion” to describe a level of fatigue that goes beyond mere physical tiredness. People living in this depleted condition report more tiredness and negative emotions, but those are not the only effects. Depleted people who watch a sad movie become extra sad. When facing temptations like eating chocolate chip cookies, they are more likely to give in. When faced with challenges like an especially difficult assignment at work, they are more likely to fail or turn in lower quality work. The brain area that’s crucial for self-control (the Anterior Cingulate Cortex) actually experiences a slowdown.

The reality is, you and I sin at specific times. Those times are most likely going to be when we are tired, worn down, exhausted. For a pastor, that is most likely on a Sunday night or on a Monday. We are tired at other times, but follow me.

When are you most tired? What time during the day do you feel the weakest in terms of your will to fight sin and temptation?

Let me apply this to pastors and help you understand why this as. I’ve learned while pastors are good at helping others fight sin in their lives, we tend to lack self-awareness.

On Sunday night you have preached hard, led worship hard, sat with people, hugged them, cried with them, counseled them, prayed with them. You have gone to battle for them and with them. You have had hard meetings with people who told you they are leaving the church, that you don’t live up to their standards of things, that you don’t preach the gospel, use too much Bible, are too deep, not deep enough and your head feels like it is spinning because you can’t please them all.

If you aren’t a pastor, you have a day of the week that simply runs you down. You come home exhausted, barely able to stand, let alone think and certainly not up for fighting sin and temptation.

This is the moment we must be aware of.

Often, the reason we fall into sin is because we don’t see it as a battle, or, once we feel tempted we feel like we have already lost the fight with sin so we simply give in to it.

Don’t.

When you see that moment coming, go to sleep, hand your smartphone or table to a spouse, pick up a banana, turn off the TV. Fight the sin you are facing by removing the temptation in your moment of weakness.

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Every Church Has a Target

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church

If you were to ask most pastors, church leaders or people who attend church, who the target of their church is, this is the answer you will most likely get, “We’re trying to reach everybody.”

This sounds nice, it sounds Christian and loving, but is impossible.

No church is trying to reach everybody. 

Here’s how I know: One, it is impossible. Two, it is impractical.

Think about it like this: the way people dress at your church, the style of preaching, the length of a sermon, the style of music, if you have small groups, MC’s or sunday school classes, the age of people on stage, the look of your building, all of these things decide who will come to your church.

One of the problems churches have is they feel like it is wrong or unloving to have a target.

Churches in the New Testament had a target based on who was there and they contextualized the gospel to their culture and target (who they felt called to).

What is incredible to me is that if you ask a company (Starbucks, Old Navy, Google) who their target is, they know. If you ask a church, the organization with the life saving, life altering truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ who their target is, they don’t know.

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