Every leader knows that they are the chief visionary of their team, church, or organization. Vision is one of the things that energizes leaders the most. We love to think about vision and strategy. We love to dream of the future, the things that don’t exist yet. We can see them, and we can’t wait to bring others along.

But there is a flip side to this coin.

We move on to the next thing quickly.

What starts as a vision series at a church, ends up becoming a few pictures on the wall. What starts as a building campaign, slowly gives way to programs. Eventually, a church looks up and can’t remember why they began that program or ministry. They can’t tell you why they do what they do on Wednesday night. No one can remember why they started that camp or that outreach program, they just do it.

Most leaders think, if it is clear to me, it is clear to everyone. If I know why we do something, then everyone knows why we do something.

The reality though, tells us this is not true.

I remember sitting with a group of leaders from a church, and we were talking about why they did what they did, what their vision was. In that conversation, no one once recounted the mission of the church. The statement that “their whole ministry was built on.” Instead, they talked about how they did things, what they did each week.

It wasn’t that they forgot why it just didn’t matter as much as how or what.

Here is what leaders can’t forget: The moment that you think everyone knows the vision or why is the moment you need to share it again. 

I know what you are thinking. You are tired of talking about it. It is ingrained in your head, so surely it is ingrained in their head. And besides, not only do you do a vision series every year, but it is plastered on the wall, with pictures and catchy slogans and verses!

Amid ministry and life, it is easy to forget. While planning new programs and recruiting and training volunteers, we get focused on what we are doing and how it needs to be done. This is hard for the leader who didn’t think of the vision or wasn’t there when it was created. Yes, they signed up for the vision, but you need to help them know it and care about it as much as you do.

You do this through stories, showing how this person’s life change or this opportunity for your church connects to the vision. Pastors need to continually say, “Because we are about ______, we are doing _______.”

This becomes especially important as a church grows or as it hits a crisis like we did this year.

As a church grows, new ministries get started, and slowly the pastor who was involved in many decisions is no longer in those meetings, so the clarity of vision becomes even more critical because it is being multiplied. Do your staff members have the vision embedded in them so that it influences their decisions?

Here’s a simple way to know: Do you and your teams use your vision to evaluate anything? Often, when we talk about an event or a church service, we talk about the number of people who showed up or how we felt about it, etc. But your vision is where you should start. Did we accomplish it? Did this event or service help us to move that forward? To accomplish why we exist?

Too many churches miss what is right in front of them when it comes to their vision. It not only helps you to make decisions, but it helps you to know if you are accomplishing things and are on the right track.

This is why this is the one thing every leader needs to remember and remind themselves and their teams.

If you are a pastor, you need some kind of accountability. You know it. You also need friends, people who care for you, shepherd you and walk with you and your wife. This is becoming even more and more obvious as pastors fall out of ministry, burnout, or also take their own lives. It is all tragic.

As pastors, we stand up and talk about the need that people have for community and accountability. The problem is that it can be challenging for a pastor to find community and accountability. Who can they turn to? Who can they trust? Some of this comes from the culture of a church but also your own experience as a pastor. On a deeper level, it shows up in your family of origin.

For pastors, the people who are most eager to be your friend or your accountability partner are usually the last people you want to fill those roles. They typically have agendas or are expecting things you won’t be able to deliver.

Here is the rub for a pastor. Men can vent about their bosses or someone at work. But, if a pastor opens up in their small group  and says, “I’m frustrated at work right now.” Or he says that to an accountability partner, the game has changed. Who is the pastor talking about? Are there sides to take? Who got on the wrong side of this leader?

The same goes for a pastor when they need accountability for purity, integrity, want to talk about their marriage, their kids, or their struggles. Not just anybody can fit this role.

Here are a few things to look for in an accountability partner or someone to walk with you as a pastor:

Someone you trust. If you can’t trust your accountability partner or friend, you are off to a bad start. You won’t be honest, and the relationship won’t bring about the goals it sets forth. You have to trust the person completely. This is why many pastors don’t have an accountability partner or close friends.

Someone who understands your role. Being a pastor is different than being a doctor or a landscaper. The person who walks with you through life or holds you accountable has to know this. They have to understand the spiritual and emotional side of ministry. All work is hard work. Ministry work is just different hard work. Not harder, just different. The people closest to us have to understand this.

Someone who loves you. They must love you as a person and want what is best for you. This doesn’t mean telling you what you want to hear, but it does mean wishing to see you succeed and become the person God created you to be. Loving you means saying hard things to you sometimes.

Someone who isn’t begging for it. If someone is begging for this role in your life, it is usually not a good idea. When people want to get close to a pastor or his wife, there is typically an agenda you want to avoid at all costs. Not always, but you need to have wisdom in this.

Someone who is a big fan of yours, but not too big. They must cheer for you, but can’t be over the top. All of us need cheerleaders in our lives, and pastors are no different—people who celebrate when you celebrate, who get excited when you get excited.

Someone who might not attend your church. They might be outside of your church. At the very least, you should have another pastor, you can vent to and get advice about things you can’t get from someone who attends your church. If you want to share frustrations about your church and something you are walking through, it is often best to have a person who is outside of your church.

Someone you are not married to. Your sole accountability partner should not be your wife. Period. You should be open and honest with your wife, keeping no secrets, but someone else should hold you accountable. Too many men, of all jobs, their only friend as they get older is their wife, and that places too much of a burden on her and creates loneliness for you.

The last idea, some of the best people I have found for this in my life, have been other pastors. They know what you walk through, the challenges you face, and the hurts you carry. They have a unique perspective that can be helpful. They know what your wife and kids experience and how to pray and encourage you and them.

A crisis does many things.

It clarifies things; it creates stress and anxiety; it pushes us to do things we have been putting off and a whole host of other things.

One thing that a crisis does, though, is magnify reality, what is wrong and right in our teams, relationships, and organizations.

Here’s what I mean.

If your church was growing and had momentum, there is a good chance you kept that. If your church had a strong leadership pipeline and discipleship strategy, that has continued if your church had a clear win, why you exist as a church, that continued.

If your marriage was healthy, yes, this has made it hard and brought stress into your life, but you had a foundation to continue to build on.

If your marriage was on the rocks before the crisis, before Covid-19 hit, your marriage is most likely continuing down that road.

If your church did not have a clear win before the crisis, the crisis only magnified that lack of clarity.

What often happens in a crisis is we simply continue to do what we did before, whether it worked or not. And the reason is that it is what we know, it is what is comfortable for us.

At this point, in this season of quarantine, we see what we spent our lives building. We see it in our relationships and churches and teams. That doesn’t mean you can’t pivot if things aren’t going well. It doesn’t mean you can’t come out of this stronger, but it does show you what you have to work on.

One of my favorite books that I always quote to my kids is The Compound Effect. In it, the author makes the point that our life becomes the sum of our choices. Like compounding interest in a bank account, each decision build towards something when things are stripped away, when the world shifts, like right now, we see what we have built towards.

Having a schedule is excellent. Nothing changes in our lives without a change to our schedule.

When it comes to emphasizing your health, whether that is physical, emotional, spiritual, or relational, you have to look at your schedule. If you don’t schedule when you will workout, spend time with your spouse and kids, when you will grow and read books, it won’t happen.

But, what if a schedule was only part of the battle?

I mean, you can change your schedule and only marginally move the ball forward. Meaning, you can make a schedule, but what if it scheduling the wrong things?

More important than a schedule is a plan, a strategy.

Too often, though, we confuse a schedule with a plan or a strategy.

A schedule is not the same thing is a plan, and in leadership terms, it is not the same thing as a strategy.

Just because you schedule emails or social media posts, does not mean that you have a plan or a strategy.

A strategy is the “why” that influences your schedule.

How do you know the difference?

Here are two simple questions:

1. What do you hope to accomplish?
2. What will it take to accomplish that?

When I weighed 300 pounds and wanted to lose weight, I went to the doctor and told him that I wanted to lose weight. He said, “That is a terrible goal. Make being healthy your goal and do that for the rest of your life,” and it changed everything.

So I set out to be healthy. It changed my mindset on things, and that strategy, that plan shaped my schedule. It affected my sleep because many people attempt to lose weight without doing anything with their sleep. But if being healthy is a goal, then sleep matters.

In your work, life, and relationships, what do you hope to accomplish? Write it out; be clear on that. A month from now, six months to a year from now, what will be successful? Be clear on that, so you know what you are trying to accomplish. Is there a number you can attach to it so that it is even more explicit in your mind? Too often, I don’t think we clarify what it means to be successful in life and leadership.

Second, what will it take to accomplish that goal?

Ten years ago, Katie and I looked at our marriage and realized that we didn’t have the time for each other as we wanted, and we found ourselves not being on the same page, which created easily avoidable frustrations. So we laid out what we thought would be a success for our marriage and family and some things it would take for us to accomplish it: weekly date night, weekly calendar sync, discussing finances once a month, to name a few. Now, we don’t always hit those each week and month. We have something to shoot for and have a way to know if we are moving towards our goals.

A strategy and a plan form your schedule in life, leadership, and relationships. It creates the way forward for you.

It is becoming more and more common to work remotely. Not only in offices but for churches. Especially with the rise of church plants, more and more pastors find themselves working from coffee shops, their house,s or shared workspace.

In our world today, more and more companies are sending workers home to stop the spread of coronavirus.

The transition to this or starting your own business in your house can be difficult. I’ve worked from home for at least half of my week for the last decade and, through trial and error, have found some things that have worked (and not worked).

Here are seven ideas to work from home successfully:

1. Get dressed. It is tempting to get up, throw on a hat and stay in your pajama pants, but fight this urge. Get a shower, eat a good breakfast, grab some coffee, and go to work. The more you can make it like work, the better. Getting dressed gets your blood moving and helps you to move into “work mode.”
2. Have a designated workspace. Depending on your set up, this can be hard, but you must have a workspace. If you can have a room with a door, this is ideal but not completely necessary. I’ve had seasons where my office was a kid’s bedroom, and that is part of it. But have a space set aside where you do work. If it is at the dining room table, it makes it challenging to stop working or disconnect mentally.
3. Have a clear start and stop time. Some jobs that work remotely have this built-in. I have a friend who works for a call center but does it in his house, so he has to sign in at a specific time. For others, like a pastor, this isn’t as clear. It is crucial to define, especially if you are married and have kids, when you will start and when you will stop. This will help to prevent working more than you should and having a clear boundary.
4. The water cooler factor. If you work in an office, interruptions are part of the day. People are stopping by, you getting up to walk around. These can be helpful and intrusive. You must plan for these to work from home. I try to break my day up into 90-minute increments and have a break in between that could be as simple as getting more coffee. Getting up to move around is. Not only helpful for your body and brain, but also creative thinking.
5. Stay focused. It is easy to work from home and not stay focused. After all, you can see other things that need to be done, and no one is looking over your shoulder telling you not to look at blogs, Facebook, or the news. You must have a system to stay focused on the task at hand. One of the things I installed was Chrome Nanny and put in particular websites that are blocked during my work hours, like social media sites, to help me stay focused.
6. Handling interruptions. Working from home, you will still have interruptions. Kids are knocking on your door, your spouse asking you to do something. This is part of the flexibility of not being in an office, but you have to have a system for handling them; otherwise, you won’t get any work done. There are times when my door is locked, and the kids leave me alone and times when it is open, and they can do schoolwork or play on my floor while I work.
7. Disconnecting from work. If you work from home, you walk out of your home office and your home. You don’t get that 30, 60-minute commute to disconnect from work, listen to sports radio, or have some silence before you connect with your family. I used to work, and as soon as I was done, go into family mode. This doesn’t work as I can be on edge or still thinking about work. Now, I workout, take a walk, or read some sports blogs and then go into family mode. You have to learn how to make your commute happen without having a commute.

If you are a leader, one of the things you must always think about is culture. The culture of your church or business. The culture of your staff and team.

The problem with culture, though, is that it isn’t always written on the wall. As one author put it, What You Do Is Who You Are. Which means you are continually building culture. 

You are creating it through your interactions, personally and in meetings. You are creating it through how you spend your money and time. You are creating it through how people work in meetings. You are building it through how you handle your own emotions. You are creating it through whether or not you burn out or if you are healthy.

While culture is a squishy thing, a leader must pay attention to it because if you aren’t, your culture will get away from you.

The reason is: Whatever culture you create at work, people will emulate.

If you look around and see dishonest, burned out, or backstabbing people. That’s the leadership and culture.

If they’re honest, balanced, and humble, that’s leadership and culture.

If the marriages in your church are falling apart, that’s leadership and culture.

Those closest to the leader emulate the leader and his or her life and pass those things on. Yes, people make decisions along the way, and a leader isn’t responsible for everyone’s personal choices, but the reality is that a leader shows what makes someone successful or what is allowed.

For example, very quickly in a new job, you learn what it means to be successful somewhere. Can you be late on things? Who holds the real power at a church (hint: it isn’t always the person with the title)? How do things get done?

All of this goes back to culture.

That’s why Henry Cloud famously said: “A leader gets what he or she created or allows.”

Culture will end up determining if you are successful in reaching your goals. But it will also determine where you end up as a leader or a church.

And this is the most important reason to pay attention to it. Because you may not like where you end up, you may not like the church you become.

If you are in leadership or ministry long enough, you will have seasons and moments of disappointment. It might be someone you are counseling that walks away and doesn’t want your help. It might be a leader who decides they aren’t on board anymore, and they leave. Some will create division or hurt in your life. Maybe someone is mean to your wife or kids. The list is endless.

What do you do in those moments? For many, these moments are when someone leaves for a new job — explaining how God has called them to a church that will be easier, with fewer problems.

I don’t think that is the answer. Instead, here are five things you can do when you face disappointment in ministry.

You’re still called. Remember that you are called to where God has you. The moments that are the hardest in life and ministry are typically when God is trying to teach you something, your church, family, or team. Is God trying to grow you in an area? Is there sin in your life or something you need to deal with? Falling back on your calling and the leader God created you to be is often one of the essential things to cling to when ministry is hard. 

Stay focused in your area. When leading is hard, everyone else seems to have an easier time. When a Sunday is mediocre for you, go on Twitter, and you will find 20 guys who just had a revival while you preached to the sleeping masses. Don’t look over the fence. Don’t brush up on your resume. Don’t look up churches looking for a pastor. This isn’t the time — water the grass in your church so that it grows. If God wanted you to have what those other pastors are experiencing, he would give it to you. Faithfulness with what is in front of us is one of the most overlooked things when it comes to pastoring in an Instagram world. 

Keep everyone focused. If you are disappointed, it will eventually bleed into your team. You, as a leader, must keep them focused on the vision and away from disappointment. Celebrate whatever you can think of. The energy that you bring to your team, positive or negative, will multiply.

Don’t sin. When you are at a low point in life, sin is right around the corner. Whether it is jealousy, gossip, or falling into an addiction, keep your guard up, be aware. Don’t fail amid disappointment.

Take a break. When you are disappointed, it might be time for a vacation. You may be burning out, running out of things to give those around you, and you need to get a better handle on life and ministry. Pulling back and taking a break is a great way to help gain perspective and be able to continue in what God has called you to.

Know this: disappointment does not last forever. Ministry can be hard, and there are many valleys along the way, but there are also many places of flat walking and mountaintops. Keep pressing forward.