Here are 5 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, pastor, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
Here are 8 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, pastor, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
If you get a group of pastors or church leaders together and ask them about their biggest challenges, volunteers and leaders will come up. The idea of recruiting volunteers is overwhelming and difficult at times. There never seems to be enough people, and the ones who are serving are often tired and feel like they are the only ones serving.
In light of that, there are some crucial things to keep in mind as you invite people to use their gifts and talents at your church and keep them engaged in those roles. Note, the words you use are incredibly important.
1. Know who you are and what you need around you. Many times we are simply looking for a warm body, and no one wants to sign up for a role that anyone can do. When you are inviting people to use their gifts, you need to know if they fit who you are, the team you have in place and the role you are inviting them into. This means as a leader you need to know your personality, strengths and weaknesses so you can effectively build around you. You need to know the makeup of people already on your team, what kind of personalities they have and what is missing. You also need to know what kind of people you need on your team.
2. Don’t say no for anyone. This is easier to do than you would think. We have a need or opening, and we have in mind the perfect person. But they are busy, so we don’t ask. Yes they are busy, but that doesn’t matter. Don’t say no for anyone. Let them say no. Remember, if you don’t ask you rob them of an opportunity. Who knows, they might say yes.
3. The most high capacity and talented people are busy. This is a truth that took me awhile to figure out. The most talented and high capacity people in your church are probably busy, but that’s because they are high capacity and talented people. Notice, I didn’t say they were doing too much, I just said they were busy. They do a lot because they are talented and have a higher capacity than other people. Just like #2, these are the people you want but won’t say anything to. Don’t. Ask them.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask. Hopefully you are picking up on a theme of what it takes to get the right people on your team at your church. Ask.
Remember: People don’t sign up to volunteer because of a big announcement; they say yes because someone asked them.
We have this idea in churches that if we show enough videos, make enough pleas from the stage, guilt and shame, then maybe people will sign up. But you don’t want those people. They won’t stay, and then you’ll have people on your team that don’t fit and don’t want to be there because they signed up because they felt bad.
Now I’m not saying you don’t use announcements, but they aren’t as affective to building your team as you often think they are. They help make a need get on someone’s radar.
But the people you want are the people you need to ask.
I said this to a room full of volunteers at our church once and got some pushback. Then I asked everyone to raise their hand who served on their team because of a stage announcement and who served because they were asked by someone. Over 90% served because someone asked them.
5. Why you do something is more important than what you do. This is how you get people on your team and keep people on your team.
When most team leaders invite someone to join their team, they talk about what they’ll do, how they’ll do it, expectations, etc. Those are all well and good.
But people only serve and stay because of why you do something.
In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons volunteers burnout and quit; they don’t remember why they are doing something.
One thing I do every week is pull every volunteer at our church together and remind them in just a few minutes why we are doing something. That it will be someone’s first day at church today, and we need to be ready for that. I also thank them for what they do and how hard they work.
When was the last time you did something nice for your team? When was the last time you said thanks to them?
We all have things about ourselves that we hate; things we do, things we think, things we feel and things in our past. We spend a lot of energy trying to change these things. We hope that something will be different tomorrow. Maybe we’ll magically stop looking at porn, stop being so desperate for love, stop feeling lonely, stop saying things at the wrong moment. Maybe that memory will finally go away.
So, we read our Bibles.
Struggling with sin is the normal Christian experience. Not because we don’t have power over sin, we do have power because of the work of Jesus on the cross in our place and rising from the dead. We have the power through the Holy Spirit to battle our sin and win, but we often lose.
In Romans 7, we see this struggle in Paul. Tim Keller lays this out as to why this is the present Christian experience:
To move forward in freedom, it is important to name, to confess, those things you do that you hate. Those struggles you battle with. To admit what dwells in you. Often we have an inflated view of our goodness, but to experience grace we must understand the depths of our brokenness. Otherwise, what do we need God’s grace and forgiveness for?
I think the process Paul walks through in this passage is instructive for us as we hate our sin:
Here are 5 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, pastor, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
Often times it is hard to know what our longings mean. They can be sinful and good. They can reveal things about us, past hurts, pain, things we hope and dream for the future. They can be hard to trust, and they can also reveal who we really are, who we wish to become, and sometimes the people we wish to leave behind.
Our longings, though, also reveal deep within us what God has in store for us.
Our longings are a reminder that God has something more, something different; that our bodies and our world are broken and not how God intended them to be.
G.K. Chesterton, who lived in the early 1900’s, is believed to have said, “A man knocking on the door of a brothel is knocking for God.”
Our lives reveal a longing.
This week let me give you a challenge as you think about your longings and what they reveal about you. Here are some questions to ask:
1. What do you most want out of life? Out of this week and month? Many of us do not spend enough time thinking about what we want out of life. These desires, as we’ll see in a minute, not only reveal a lot about us, but they can also be from God. He created desires in us, desires for relationships, for joy, for hobbies and for the place we live.
2. What would truly make you happy in life? This begins to get to the heart of our desires. Does it have to do with relationships, housing, a trip, hobbies, a career, your body? Again, right now don’t judge if it is sinful or not. Simply list out the desire you have.
3. Is that a sinful desire? This is the moment we begin to evaluate our desires and what they show us. Is that desire selfish, for my glory, about my wants? Is it destructive to others? Does it serve me or God? Is this desire all encompassing in my life right now? Does it drive me like an addiction?
4. What do I do if it is a sin? Many of our desires are sins that we need to handle, confess and bring before God. Our desires also reveal our need for God and His grace in our lives. The desires you are convicted of, confess those to God. Confess those sins where you need to, and ask God to change your desires if need be. But don’t hold on to them; bring them to the cross.
5. What do I do if it isn’t a sin? Not all desires are bad. In fact, many of the greatest things people have done for God have been borne out of desire. Those are things that bring passion to our lives and joy that are from God. They are also God’s good gifts. It is good to enjoy a good meal with friends. It is destructive to make that an idol our lives revolve around.
Good leaders never say, “I never saw that coming”, because leaders anticipate what is next.
Now leaders cannot see the future, they do not know how everything will work out when they make a decision, how things will go in the world or what will happen next. They aren’t fortune tellers. That would be nice, but it’s not true. But the point still exists.
This is one thing that separates leaders from followers. It is also what separates great leaders from simply good leaders.
But why do some people miss things?
They aren’t looking for what is next. Many leaders are simply trying to survive the week. Many pastors are just trying to get through Sunday. When this happens, you don’t look up. You have no vision, no plan, no dream, nothing that you are moving towards. So when what’s next comes down the pike, you are helpless to grab the opportunity.
Another reason is that what we see in front of us, what we know, is comfortable. Anticipating the future is difficult and pushes us into new arenas, new skills and possibly even changing something.
So if you want to be a leader, how do you anticipate the future?
1. Stay current. One of the reasons pastors and churches find themselves out of date on things is that they don’t stay current on what is happening. I’m not talking about current events as much as I am thinking through how to reach the world around you. Many times pastors don’t know the questions people are asking, so they preach sermons that are irrelevant to their audience. Churches don’t ask who lives around them and how to best reach those people. They ignore them, and consequently the world around them ignores the church.
2. Be willing to ask hard questions. At least once a year (I’d say more than that, but at least once a year) ask some hard questions about your church. Are we reaching our goals? Are we healthy as a church? Are our leaders healthy? Are we seeing lives changed? Are things clear at our church? Do people know their next step, how they fit into our church?
If you never ask hard questions, you’ll continue on the same path, which is usually the easy path of least resistance. If you do this, what’s next will sneak by you.
3. Be willing to look at data you don’t like. Your hard questions will probably bring to the surface things you’d like to ignore about your church. You might see that you have some leaders who need more training, a leader who doesn’t fit in their role; you might see a staff member that isn’t able to keep up. You might even see some areas in your leadership that you need to grow in. This is painful but good. Don’t ignore data, even if it hurts. Data is your friend.
I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. This is my 13th summit and every year, God stretches me and challenges me. So much wisdom and inspiration wrapped up into two days. I always blog my notes, so if you can’t attend or missed something, I’ve got you covered.
Horst Schulze is the President of Ritz-Carlton, so he has a lot of wisdom that churches can learn from as it relates to guest services and be excellent.
Here are some takeaways:
I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. This is my 13th summit and every year, God stretches me and challenges me. So much wisdom and inspiration wrapped up into two days. I always blog my notes, so if you can’t attend or missed something, I’ve got you covered.
Here are some takeaways from Danielle Strickland’s talk using Judges 6 as her outline: