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Every church starts with the desire to be a healthy, growing church that helps change the community around it with the gospel. No church begins with the desire to be an insular community that has “a country club mentality.”

The longer a church exists, the more difficult it becomes to keep the original vision and excitement. Families grow up, leaders get older, and communities around the church change. Slowly, the leadership team that was bustling with new ideas starts to recycle old ones. What was once new starts to feel stale. 

And many times, the church and its leaders are unaware of the shift that has occurred within them, the church, and the surrounding community. 

The question becomes, what is a church supposed to do? If a church is beginning to decline, can it reverse the decline and return to the glory days? Or are those days past? And if you are in a church that isn’t declining, how do you know if it will begin to decline?

Can a church reverse the decline? Or are the best days behind your church?
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If, as Jim Collins says in Good to Great, “Leadership begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and act on the implications,” then we as church leaders must confront the brutal facts about our churches and act on the implications. 

Often, the leaders of churches in decline do not want to face the brutal facts. This can happen for several reasons. One, the brutal facts are uncomfortable. It means admitting that what was once a thriving church no longer is. It might mean admitting that they led the church into decline. Two, it means acknowledging that the community around the church has shifted and changed, and the church didn’t change with it. Third, it means facing grief and loss—the loss of influence as a church, the loss of staff and members. Facing the brutal facts means facing reality, and for many people within churches, that brings a lot of discomfort, and we’d rather focus on the positive. 

3 reasons we don’t confront the brutal facts in our churches.
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However, the second part of Collins’s challenge is equally difficult: Act on the implications.

Not only are we to face reality, but we are also to act on what those facts reveal. As we will see, this means praying and asking God for what He has for the church’s future, dreaming together, and experimenting. It might mean ending specific ministries, changing how you do small groups and make disciples, or it might mean changing how the people in the church relate to each other. It is just as uncomfortable as, and possibly more painful than, facing the brutal facts because acting on the implications is the moment of change. 

Acting on the implications is challenging for a church and its leaders. For many leaders, the culture shift is difficult because they are often unaware of it or unprepared to address it. They are blind to the change happening in the community around their church and to the needs of those people. 

How do you face the brutal facts? How do you do that, especially if you are a new leader at your church? Charles Stone says there are five ways to define reality:

1. Take your church’s pulse. 
2. Decipher the unwritten code.
3. Discover the wounds from the past.
4. Clarify the church’s overall health stage. 
5. Match strategy to situation. 

5 ways for pastors to define reality for their church.
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These steps of defining reality help pastors understand the first steps of revitalization, how to move forward, and how to help their people navigate the steps to rebuilding. 

How to define reality for your church when no one wants to see reality.
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Each Friday I share some posts that I’ve come across in the last week. They range in topics and sources but they are all things I’ve found interesting or helpful that I hope will be interesting and helpful to you. Here are 9 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, pastor, husband and father:

1. My Big Predictions For Social Media In 2017 by Steve Fogg
2. 5 Questions to Up Your Parenting Game by Sherry Surratt
3. How to Be a Real Leader And Great Manager by Lolly Daskal
4. Why Kids (and Parents) Need Routine by Jenna Scott
5. 7 Ways To Live Out The Gospel in a Post-Truth, Post-Fact Culture by Carey Nieuwhof
6. Three Probing Questions every Pastor should Ask Himself by Charles Stone
7. Leaders Answer the Questions No One Asks by Jonathan Pearson
8. 6 Things Millennials Need From Pastors by Joe Hoagland
9. How Senior Pastors Can Schedule Their Week For Maximum Impact by Brian Jones

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Here are 8 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, husband and father this week. I hope they help you too:

1. How to Know if ‘Kids Sports’ has Become an Idol? by Jim Elliff
2. 10 Confessions of a Millennial to Older Leaders by Zach Yentzer
3. 6 Reasons Church Offerings are Struggling by Thom Rainer
4. Creating a Path to Healthy Church Growth by Tony Morgan
5. 6 Habits of the Best Conversationalists by Stephanie Vozza
6. 3 Morning Habits to Boost Brain Power by Charles Stone
7. 5 Key Differences between Church Shoppes & the Unchurched by Carey Nieuwhof
8. The 7 Keys to Public Speaking by Nick Morgan

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Here are 6 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, husband and father. I hope they help you too:

1. Why the 8-Hour Workday Doesn’t Work by Dr. Travis Bradberry (Talent Smart)
2. 4 Temptations Leaders Face by Dan Reiland
3. How to Design a Message Series that Engages Unchurched People by Carey Nieuwhof
4. 3 Boundaries Every Leader Needs with Critics by Charles Stone
5. Why You Shouldn’t Pursue the Work-Life Balance by Shawn Murphy
6. 8 Secrets of Great Communicators by Dr. Travis Bradberry (Entrepreneur)

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It’s that time of year again, time to share my top lists of the year. If you are a regular on this blog, you know that I love to read. You can read my recent reviews of books here.

Each year, I post a list of my favorite books of the year. To see my list of favorite books from past year, simply click on the numbers: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. To me, I love this list because it shows what has influenced me in the past year, where I’m growing and what God is teaching me. If you are a leader, you should be a reader, there is no way around that.

To make this list, it does not have to be published in 2014, I only needed to read it in 2014. As always, this list was hard to narrow down, but here are the top 14 books of 2014:

14. What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done | Matthew Perman

What sets this book apart from others on productivity: Its emphasis on understanding how the gospel impacts productivity, How the gospel frees us to be productive, and it also brings together some of the best ideas from other books on productivity to show a better system that combines the strengths of different systems.

13. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know | Meg Meeker

To me, this is such an empowering book for fathers. We often feel unsure, at a loss of how to relate to our daughters, how to treat them differently than a son, or how to feel like we are moving forward in a relationship with them. This book is about what a daughter needs from a father that a mother cannot give. This book gave me such a clear understanding of how to interact with our daughter, how to build a relationship with her and prepare her for the life ahead of her. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to Dad’s of daughters.

12. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds | Carmine Gallo

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. This is the best preaching book of the year.

11 The Catalyst Leader: 8 Essentials for Becoming a Change Maker | Brad Lomenick

One of the things I’ve been chewing on from this book all year has been, “To get to the top and to be successful at the top requires two different skill sets.” Such a helpful book for younger leaders.

10. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration | Ed Catmull

This book was so good and eye opening, it took me 3 posts to share all that I learned from it. You can read those posts here, here and here.

9. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less | Greg McKeown

Two things stood out to me in this book that have shaped a lot of my life: If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will and If it is not a definite yes, then it is no.

8. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God | Timothy Keller

I debated between this book and Keller’s book on suffering for this list. Both were helpful and meaningful in different ways, but his book on prayer opened my eyes on how to pray to God as Father and how to meditate on Scripture in deeper ways. If prayer is a struggle for you, this book is well worth working through.

7. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers | Ben Horowitz

Even though this is not a church planting book, it is by far, the best church planting book of the year. So many insights from this small business guru that is relevant for churches and church plants.

6. Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church | Scot McKnight

This book challenged me in some ways I didn’t expect. How to read the Bible through the lens of Jesus was one and how to see how God worked through all of history instead of jumping from Genesis 3 to Matthew 1 when we read the Bible. The other was, seeing Jesus as King when I think about him. 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. Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You | John Ortberg

If you love what Dallas Willard has to say but have a hard time understanding what he says, this is a great book. I found myself challenged, encouraged and challenged some more. It is a mix of how to care for your soul, how to rest and ultimately, how to connect with God at a deeper level.

4. Hacking Leadership: The 11 Gaps Every Business Needs to Close and the Secrets to Closing Them Quickly | Mike Myatt

This was the most relevant and helpful business leadership book that pastors should read this year. Myatt covers the gaps that exist in any business (church) and how to overcome them. This is a leadership book that I will re-read in years to come. I found it that helpful.

3. People-Pleasing Pastors: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Approval-Motivated Leadership | Charles Stone

This book is unlike any other I’ve read. First, it hits a topic that every pastor or leader (and probably most humans) struggle with: people pleasing. This is an enormous deal for pastors and churches. Second, it combines stories and real life examples with a ton of helpful research on how our brains work and what drives leaders to care what others think. Third, it ends with some incredibly helpful insights to fight people pleasing in your leadership.

2. Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm | Mark Sayers

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.

1. The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection | Richard Blass & James Cofield

I’ve read maybe 3-4 life altering books. This was one of them. 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.

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This past week I read Charles Stone’s new book People-Pleasing Pastors: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Approval-Motivated Leadership (kindle version).

This book is unlike any other I’ve read. First, it hits a topic that every pastor or leader (and probably most humans) struggle with: people pleasing. This is an enormous deal for pastors and churches. Second, it combines stories and real life examples with a ton of helpful research on how our brains work and what drives leaders to care what others think. Third, it ends with some incredibly helpful insights to fight people pleasing in your leadership.

I can’t recommend this book high enough.

Here are a few things that jumped out in my reading:

• Healthy and successful leadership has little to do with what I can do to get others to like me.
• Chronic criticism is, if anything, often a sign that the leader is functioning better!
• Christians, perhaps uniquely so, struggle with people pleasing because we’re “supposed to” be sweet and nice. And some professions, by their very nature, draw people into them because they offer opportunities to help others. Ministry and politics both fall into that category. Both pastors and politicians, if rightly motivated, want to help and serve others. However, that very desire often makes us most susceptible to people pleasing.
• I wonder how the decisions I made that were motivated by a desire to please somebody in the church resulted in missing God’s best.
• What makes people-pleasing, approval-motivated leadership so detrimental? It’s subtle, often counterintuitive and stifling to a spiritual leader’s passion and joy if left unchecked.
• The ultimate test to determine whether or not our people pleasing is wrong is whether or not it promotes the gospel.
• We know we’ve pleased others in a healthy way when they are better off when we do it and when we sense God’s peace in our hearts.
• As a leader, when I seek consensus or appeasement in a situation, rather than lead from a place of principle and vision, I abdicate my authority and nobody “wins.”
• People-pleasing leadership gets its direction and behavior from outside (people we strive to please) rather than from inside (personal values, convictions and vision).
• Our emotional response to a church event or a difficult relationship issue often does more to raise our anxiety than the event itself.
• When we refuse to give in to people pleasing, those pushing us to change lose their power over us and over our ministries.
• A pastor who understands and accepts how God uniquely fashioned him won’t be as motivated to seek others’ approval.
• We are affected by the emotional influences from our past, and I believe the Bible’s genealogical lists reflect this. The more we learn about generational influences the better we can free ourselves from their unhealthy patterns, especially people pleasing, because it often finds its roots in prior generations.
• The following family dysfunctions often contribute to people-pleasing patterns: Perfectionistic parents who set the bars so high that their children seldom received affirmation and love from them. Affirmation in these families was conditional. Nagging “oughts” and “shoulds” still whisper in the minds of those children long into adulthood. Being super nice or compliant garnered approval from parents. Pastors who came from these homes subconsciously think that being nice in their churches will likewise make people happy. Growing up in a home where one or both parents were alcoholics. Having parents who excessively doted on their children or extravagantly praised them.
• When a pastor doesn’t pay attention to the emotional blips in his own soul, he can set himself up for needless pain and diminished leadership effectiveness.
• A ministry leader’s least healthy responses to anxiety most often show up as emotional reactivity—that is, not being able to restrain emotions.
• A leader’s mood profoundly influences those around him as people tend to reflect their leader’s tone, whether it’s good or bad.

To see other book notes, click here.

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A leader’s mood profoundly influences those around him as people tend to reflect their leader’s tone, whether it’s good or bad. -Charles Stone, from People-Pleasing Pastors: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Approval-Motivated Leadership

One of the things many leaders forget is the power of their attitude, presence and words.

Here’s some examples:

• Chris is a energetic and excited, about everything. He exudes confidence that everything his church attempts will work.
• When Tim talks to volunteers about his ministry, he downplays how great it is. Instead, he talks about how much of a sacrifice it is to serve, how hard it is.
• Linda always has a listening ear. No matter who it is, or what the topic, she will listen, give advice, pray with you and then check back in with you.
• Patrick recently hit a physical wall. He struggled to turn off his phone, take his days off and unplug from ministry. Consequently, he had nothing left to give. While his team picked up the slack as he took a few weeks off, when he arrived back rested and ready to go, he lost several key leaders because they were now too tired.
• Tom sat in a meeting and threw out an idea. At the time, he didn’t think anything of it or think it would happen. The following Sunday, he walked into the kids ministry and saw signs and decorations up that were exactly like his idea.

Each of these leaders are people I’ve met. What they failed to realize at the time is everything they do reverberates as a leader. In the same way that a skyline reflects in water or a person reflects in a mirror, a ministry, church or team become a reflection of the leader. 

As a leader of an organization, every word you say carries weight, so you have to be careful and wise with your words. -Dave Ramsey

I talked to a children’s pastor recently who told me, “The kids ministry I lead is so bad, I wouldn’t bring my kid to it. There’s no excitement at all.” One of the other pastors looked at him and said, “You’re the leader, fix it. If you don’t like the ministry you lead, you are the only person with the power to fix it. You also have no one else to blame for its lack of excitement or ineffectiveness.”

What many leaders fail to realize is that they hold the power to fix the attitudes, relationships, excitement and movement within their church or ministry.

Given enough time, a church or ministry simply become a reflection of the leader. 

I learned this several years ago when I didn’t manage my emotions well. I got tired and had very little to give. Several months after this episode, when I was starting to feel healthy, I noticed there were others who weren’t handling their emotions well and were burning out from giving too much without rest.

They were reflecting what they saw me do.

This is similar to John Maxwell’s law of the lid. This law states that as a leader, if you are an 8 on a scale of 1-10, you will only attract and keep at best, 7’s. The law of the lid relates to this, in that, no one will be more bought in or excited than the leader. You are the lid for your church.

You as the leader, are also the reflection (humanly speaking) of your ministry.

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