Posted on Thursday, August 11, 2016

Alan Mulally on “The Art of Working Together” from the Leadership Summit 2016

by Joshua Reich

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.

Session 2 was with Alan Mullaly where he talked about The Art of Working Together.

Here are some takeaways:

Working together principles and practices

People first.
Everyone is included.
Compelling vision, comprehensive strategy and relentless implementation.
Clear performance goals.
One plan.
Facts and data are important.
Everyone knows the plan, the status, and areas that need special attention.
Propose a plan, positive, “find-a-way” attitude.
Respect, listen, help and appreciate each other.
Emotional resilience – trust the process.
Have fun – enjoy the journey and each other.

Posted on Thursday, August 11, 2016

Bill Hybels on “The Lenses of Leadership” from Leadership Summit 2016

by Joshua Reich

I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. 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.

In session 1 Bill Hybels talked about The Lenses of Leadership. He had 4 different lenses on stage, that represented how leaders look at the world around them and the organization/team they lead: the passionate leader, shattered lenses (which shows a leader who doesn’t know what could exist), performance lenses, and lenses with a review mirror to see what is behind you (legacy lens of leadership).

Here are some takeaways:

Armed with enough humility can learn from anyone and that is an enormous key to leadership.
Leadership is leading people from here to there.

Leadership is leading people from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ @BillHybels

Leadership is moving people, energizing people.
Leadership is moving people to a preferred future.
For team members to pay the price to go from here to there, they will have to feed off the passion of their leader.
The highest inspiration for team members is to work for and around a passion filled leader. This is more important than money, benefits and everything else.

How does a leader get passionate?

Passion is derived from mountains of a beautiful dream or the depths of frustration that is going terribly wrong.
Have you encountered something that frustrates you? That you can’t stand anymore? That’s your dream.
Question to consider: How full is your passion bucket?
Question to consider: Whose job is it to keep your passion bucket full?

Shattered people lenses

Many leaders have shattered lenses who don’t know how to be emotionally healthy and creating a healthy team.
An organization will only be as healthy as the top leader wants it to be.

An organization will only be as healthy as the top leaders wants it to be. @BillHybels

The leader can choose if the culture will be high functioning and caring.
Religion is all the things you do to appease a God you know you’ve disappointed.
What this world needs is not more pastors of churches but pastors who lead their businesses, schools and the military well.
The job of the leader is to destroy transactional noise. The talk that keeps people from performing well and kills morale. Transactional noise is when someone who is a jerk and gets promoted and people are mad (water cooler talk).
Leaders need to develop the skill of talent observation.

The Performance Lens

Speed of the leader, speed of the team.
The leader must help the team maximize team performance.

The leader must help the team maximize team performance. @BillHybels

A leader must lay out challenges and goals.
Team members always want to know what the leader thinks of how they are doing.
Don’t have too many goals because it will lead you to work in ways you aren’t proud.
You also can’t simply be faithful to your calling and have no goals. That’s laziness.
Are you thriving, healthy or underperforming as a team or organization?

Are you thriving, healthy or underperforming as a team or organization? @BillHybels

It is cruel and unusual punishment for a leader not telling his team how they are doing.

It is cruel and unusual punishment for a leader not telling his team how they are doing. @BillHybels

The Legacy Lens

What people remember about you when you are gone. Everyone will leave a leadership legacy.
Leadership is not about time, it is about energy. It is about where you spend your energy (what you think about, focus, decision making).

Leadership is not about time, it is about energy. @BillHybels

Leadership can become a legal drug that other things will have a hard time competing against.
God never intended for our vocations to crowd out other parts of our lives.
When you look into the rearview mirror, do you like the legacy you are leaving behind?

When you look into the rearview mirror, do you like the legacy you are leaving behind? @BillHybels

Legacies can change in an instant with a simple choice.
Leadership matters and it matters disproportionately.
Question to consider: How do you need to get better? How do you need to grow as a leader?
Question to consider: What is your passion? What is your dream? Are you feeding your passion? Are you keeping your vision bucket full?
Question to consider: How many of you have shattered people lenses? Do you know what a healthy team culture looks like? Feels like?
Question to consider: Do you need to slow your organization or team down? Do you let your team and organization flounder? Do people know what hill to climb? Does your team know if they’re winning?
Question to consider: Is your legacy one you are proud of? One your kids and spouse will be proud of?

Posted on Monday, August 8, 2016

How to be Thankful as a Leader

by Joshua Reich

Most of the time on blogs like mine or other leadership and ministry blogs you read about how tough ministry is, how difficult people can be and how hard it is to be a leader. All those things are true.

At the same time, if you are a leader, especially if you are a pastor, you have a lot to be thankful for. At the same time, as a follower of Jesus, growing in your thankfulness is a sign of your faith but also of your maturity. I know for me, when I am pessimistic, only seeing what isn’t working or how things aren’t what I want them to be, it makes me a poor leader, a poor husband and father, and honestly, a poor human.

So I sat down in the middle of a pity party, when things didn’t go how I wanted them to go at church and someone was mad at me, and wrote out things I should be thankful for. For you this list might be different, but here’s what came to mind for me:

How to be thankful as a pastor.

1. My church still exists. This might seem like a weird one, but on a weekly basis I hear about another church that closed their doors. When we moved to Tucson and started Revolution church, there was a window of three years where over 20 churches were planted in Tucson (of which we were one), and only three of those are still going (of which we are one). Why? That’s God’s grace towards us.

The fact that your church exists is a sign of God’s grace towards you.

2. I get to use my gifts. Most pastors overlook this gift. If you ask most people what their gifts, talents and passions are, they don’t know. They don’t know how God has wired them, the talents they have, how their family of origin and story have gone into making them who they are and the passions they have, but many pastors do. They get out of bed with a burning passion to see something happen for God. That isn’t a small thing.

If you know why you are on this earth, you are in the minority.

3. My marriage. If you’re a pastor, your wife deserves more credit than you do. She endures more than you do. I know, I know. Your life is so hard as a leader, the stress, the pain, the emotional side of ministry. I get it. Yet it is nowhere near as difficult as the role your wife plays. While you can bury yourself in work and ministry as a way of letting off steam, she doesn’t have that opportunity. She endures more than you do, and you should tell her thanks. She takes the brunt of your emotional roller coaster, she walks on egg shells around you sometimes, she hears people talk behind your back, she sees the glares you don’t see, she hears what things are said about your kids that you don’t hear, she worries about you in ways you don’t understand. And yet she has stuck with you. She is your biggest cheerleader, your biggest prayer warrior.

A pastor’s wife often endures more than a pastor does.

Protect your wife to your church. Speak highly of her always, on stage and off. I talk about Katie in such a way that I want to communicate, if you speak badly about my wife, stab her in the back, you get papa bear, and you don’t want that. Too many pastors are weak when it comes to their wives and how they defend them in their church. Sadly, you have to do this because people can be mean.

4. My kids. The same goes for your kids. It is hard being a pastor’s kid. Way harder than being a pastor, so don’t put it in the same category. Don’t put more pressure on them than is already on them. When someone says in disbelief, “I can’t believe your kid jumped off the stage and over the communion table” (true story in the Reich family), shake your head, laugh and say, “What did you expect a five year old boy to do? Did he clear the table?” He did and didn’t get hurt.

I am my biggest protector of my kids. I want them to enjoy being kids. I want them to enjoy being a pastor’s kid as much as they can. When people try to put something on them that I think is unfair, I fight to take that expectation away.

5. My team. I’m thankful for my team. Most leaders are visionary, hard driving, goal setting people, which makes us difficult to be around and be friends with. The fact that people endure you as a leader is something to be thankful for. They help you, mold you and make things better. Sadly, most leaders don’t like their teams, which is the fault of the leader. You get what you allow or create.

6. I’m not 300 pounds anymore. I’m thankful for my health. When we started our church I weighed almost 300 pounds, and in the first 18 months I lost 130 pounds and have kept it off. I know it sounds silly to be thankful for your health and very cliche, but if you’re healthy, that’s a gift from God. Not everyone is.

7. God loves me. Lastly, if you are a follower of Jesus, God loves you, and because of His love for you He sent his Son Jesus to die in your place so that you could have a relationship with Him. Never get far from this truth and reality as a pastor.

7 things I’m thankful for as a pastor. What are you thankful for?

But what do you do when it is hard to be thankful and ministry is hard? That happens.

One thing that was helpful was something I came across in Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth, where the author said to give yourself 24 hours to mope, throw a pity party and then get back on the horse and lead.

Posted on Thursday, August 4, 2016

Leaders Make Decisions Others Don’t

by Joshua Reich

While leadership is many things, vision casting, team building, strategic thinking, developing leaders, leadership can also be boiled down to one very important thing: decision making.

Now to be fair, all people, bosses, employees, volunteers, and pastors, make decisions in a church or organization. But one thing sets leaders apart: they make decisions others don’t.

Leaders are the ones who are faced with making decisions that will be unpopular, that will decide what is right and wrong in a church or organization, and that will affect others.

3 decisions leaders make that others don’t.

Here are a few:

1. Vision decisions. It is the job of a leader to cast vision, to set direction for a preferred future. This is best done in teams, with the buy in of key leaders, but there are also times when a leader must say, “This is it; that is not it.” Vision divides, vision clarifies. Vision also unites. Vision says, “We’re going here, not there.” Vision says what the win is, which also means vision says what the loss is.

These can run up against “what has always been done”, what used to work, and sometimes what is still working but isn’t what needs to be done.

Vision also decides how resources are allocated, what money is spent on, what staff and volunteers are needed and not needed. This can be incredibly difficult.

Many people in leadership roles simply skip this. They don’t push to make a clarifying decision, which is still making a decision, but it is the one of least resistance.

2. Being willing to be unpopular. Ronald Heifetz says, “Exercising leadership might be best understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” This also means that as a leader, you must be willing to be unpopular with someone at some point. Now as a leader you don’t set out to make people mad or be a jerk (although some do), but sometimes that happens. It should never be a goal, though.

This means that to be a leader you must develop tough skin. You must develop clarity as to who you are, who you aren’t, where you want to go and where you don’t want to go. You must know which hills you will choose to die on, because you will die on those hills. Not every hill is worth dying on, but you must know which ones are.

Leaders know which hills are worth dying on.

3. Decisions that affect others. The last thing that separates leaders is that they are willing to make decisions that affect not only themselves but others. These are the decisions that keep me up at night. Ones about hiring or firing, setting salaries, making budget decisions that will have an impact not only on the financial situation of someone else, but also their happiness if we stop doing something as a church that they love.

These are incredibly difficult, and too many pastors are unwilling to make these calls. They aren’t easy, but being a leader isn’t supposed to be easy.

These decisions, when taken together, are some of the things that make someone a leader. Are they willing to make decisions others are not willing to make?

3 decisions that set leaders apart.

Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2016

5 Ways to Get the Most out of Reading Your Bible

by Joshua Reich

One of the ways we battle condemnation, guilt, regret, shame, and hurt is through our mind. Our minds are incredibly powerful things. They determine our steps, our feelings, what bothers us, what we think, and the decisions we make that have an enormous impact on the people we become. We often think our minds aren’t that important, that we are feelers, or emotional people making emotional choices.

But we aren’t.

Our minds drive much of what we do. In fact, the New Testament often talks about the battle of our mind, and in numerous places the apostle Paul encourages us about what to think. In Philippians 4:8 he writes, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Why? Because what we think about determines so much.

So, how do you change your thinking? How do you battle your sin in your mind? This is important because much of our sin comes from thinking. We often think we sin and “it just happened.” But it didn’t. We chose to be there, chose to open that website, chose to say those words, chose that person as a friend.

In the same way, through the power of Christ, we can choose to not be there, to say no and not hang out with that person.

To do that, though, requires intentionality and putting on the mind of the Spirit. (Romans 8:5) The best way to do this is through reading the Bible, words inspired by God, authoritative, true and sufficient for our lives. One of the things I love about our church is that we produce daily devotional questions to go along with the sermon that you can subscribe to by emailing here.

5 questions to ask if your bible reading has grown stale.

As you read through your Bible, it can be daunting. Here are some questions I use to put on the mind of the Spirit:

What does this passage say (not to me, but actually say on its own)?
What words or phrases stood out to me in this passage?
Why do I think those words or phrases stood out?
What is God trying to show me through that?
Are there any sins I need to confess, changes I need to make or steps I need to take because of what I’ve read?

How to get the most out of reading your Bible.

Posted on Monday, July 18, 2016

When You’re Stuck in Sermon Prep

by Joshua Reich

At some point in writing a sermon you will get stuck. This also happens when it comes to writing a book. Every pastor and author knows this feeling. We dread it. We pray against it. We do whatever we can to avoid it, and yet on a regular basis, it comes.

We sit in front of a computer watching a blank screen and a cursor that doesn’t move. We look at our Bible and commentaries, read blogs and listen to podcasts in hopes of any inspiration.

Ever feel stuck during sermon prep?

And…

Nothing.

So what do you do when you’re stuck?

6 things to do when you’re stuck in sermon prep.

1. Pray. While you would think every pastor is doing this all throughout their sermon prep, I can say from personal experience we don’t pray as much as we should. There are times when you work from your own ability and ingenuity. So stop and pray. Ask God, plead with God for what He wants to say through the passage. What is He saying to you personally? Not just to your church. A sermon is for the pastor first, then the church.

A sermon is for the pastor first, then the church.

2. Confess sin. You may have some sin in your heart that is preventing God from speaking to you clearly. Confess that. Think through your heart, your motivations, your desires, your innermost thoughts. Bring those before your Savior. He already knows. Often when I can’t see things clearly in the Bible, whether for sermon prep or my daily devotions, it is because of unconfessed sin.

After working through the heart issues, you can try something else, but don’t skip to #3.

3. Read the passage in different versions. Most pastors preach from a certain version. I preach from the ESV and love it. Reading the passage through in the NIV or The Message always brings out something I didn’t see before or triggers an idea that I couldn’t think of. Simply changing it up brings a new perspective.

4. Do something active. While doing sermon prep, I get up and walk around every 52 minutes. That simple break gets my blood moving, helps me feel better, and the fresh air brings new energy and ideas. I also have some of my best blog and sermon ideas while doing Crossfit. When I run I’ll have great sermon ideas as well. Doing something active helps reinvigorate an idea. This is also a great time to go back to #1 and pray.

5. Talk to someone else about it. Another thing that is helpful is to talk through the passage with someone else. Katie will often read what I am preaching through and give me her ideas on it. I’m also thinking through how to better include younger communicators and other pastors in what I’m preaching and working through the passage as a team. I have a friend that meets every Wednesday with four other men in his church to talk through the passage he’s preaching on. This brings all kinds of perspectives and ideas you didn’t have before.

6. Just preach what you have. Finally, you might be done with your sermon prep. Yes, I know, a sermon is never done. You could spend 80 hours on a sermon. You could also have all that you need, and reading one more commentary, looking for one more thing might not be what you need. You might just need to preach what you have and say, “God, I did the best that I could; You do the rest.”

6 things that will help with this week’s sermon.

Posted on Thursday, June 16, 2016

5 Books Every Pastor & Church Staff Should Read

by Joshua Reich

The old adage “leaders are readers” is true. The same goes for a leadership team or staff team at a church. Yet with so many books on the market, it is hard to know which ones to read as a team and which ones will be helpful. When I’m asked about books we have read at Revolution or ones I think are particularly helpful for pastors and church planters, I find myself going back to the same ones.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick Lencioni

The Advantage is all of Lencioni’s books wrapped up into one. I think it is one of the most thorough and helpful books for a leader to read. The discussions around clarity and organizational health are something most churches struggle with, and if they got it right it would not only help take their churches to new levels, but it would also help them reach more people.

5 books every pastor should read.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins

If you run in leadership circles, you have probably read Good to Great, but the wisdom in it seems incredibly timeless. I have read through this book multiple times, and the images that he uses to get his point across are incredibly helpful.

5 books every church leadership team should read.

Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game by Mark Miller

This book was a game changer for me. This is a book that explains what happens in a church at each growth barrier without the church or its leaders knowing. If you are facing a growth barrier or can’t figure out why something isn’t working, start with this book.

Lasting Impact: 7 Powerful Conversations That Will Help Your Church Grow by Carey Nieuwhof

Carey’s book helps you as a leader and a team have conversations you need to have about why your church isn’t growing, why people don’t want to serve, why the next generation isn’t that interested in the gospel and what to do about it.

Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership by Warren Bird & Ryan Hartwig

This is the best book on teams in a church. The authors lay out what a healthy team looks like, what they do, how they operate and how to move your team to becoming a team that thrives.

Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2016

How we Distort the Gospel & God’s Love for Us

by Joshua Reich

I shared this on Sunday in my sermon on Romans 5:3 – 11 from The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters by Sinclair Ferguson:

Why did Jesus die?

This comes to expression when the gospel is preached in these terms: God loves you because Christ died for you!

How do those words distort the gospel? They imply that the death of Christ is the reason for the love of God for me.

By contrast the Scriptures affirm that the love of God for us is the reason for the death of Christ. That is the emphasis of John 3:16. God (i.e. the Father, since here “God” is the antecedent of “his…Son”) so loved the world that he gave his Son for us. The Son does not need to do anything to persuade the Father to love us; he already does!

The subtle danger here should be obvious: if we speak of the cross of Christ as the cause of the love of the Father, we imply that behind the cross and apart from it he may not actually love us at all. He needs to be “paid” a ransom price in order to love us. But if it has required the death of Christ to persuade him to love us (“Father, if I die, will you begin to love them?”), how can we ever be sure the Father himself loves us – “deep down” with an everlasting love? True, the Father does not love us because we are sinners; but he does love us even though we are sinners. He loved us before Christ died for us. It is because he loves us that Christ died for us!

How do I know God loves me?

Posted on Monday, June 13, 2016

How to Prepare a Sermon

by Joshua Reich

I’m often asked by other pastors or church planters about how I prep a sermon. While these aren’t so much things you should do, these are things that are principles for me and shape how a sermon goes from nothing to something.

6 things that go into preparing a sermon.

1. Plan ahead. My goal is to know 18 months in advance what I plan to preach on. This is crucial to my process. I’m a big believer that the Holy Spirit is just as likely to talk to me about a sermon 18 months before I preach it as He is the day before I preach it.

I start by getting away and praying through what am I learning right now, how God is challenging or convicting me personally, and if there is anything in that for my church or is it just for me. I also keep a list of questions I get asked by people in our church through emails and conversations and look to see if there are any common themes to them. During this time I also look back to see what we’ve preached on, what books we’ve covered, how long has it been since we preached through an Old Testament book or a gospel, and when was the last relationships series. I’ll ask leaders in our church about conversations they are having, questions they have, and books they think we should preach through.

One of the keys to a great sermon is planning ahead.

Then I take all of these notes and pray over them, seeing what jumps out. I’ll read through certain books of the Bible to get a sense of what God might want to say to our church. After spending several weeks praying and thinking through this, I’ll share with our team what I’m thinking. At this point it is between penciled in and permanent marker.

We’ve changed series at the last minute and tossed something we had been planning to do for over a year. That happens, and you have to be flexible.

I’ll be honest; this step is by far the hardest part of sermon prep. It takes the most time and has the least amount of immediate payoff, which is why most guys don’t do it. I meet so many guys who are just week-to-week or month-to-month.

2. Research. Once I have a sermon outlined, meaning I create what passages I’ll do on which week, how I’ll break up a book of the Bible, I go to work on researching it. I’ll create a notebook in Evernote and then a notebook in that folder for each week of the series. When I come across an article, a podcast or a blog, I simply hit the shortcut button on my chrome bar and put it into the folder. This is incredibly helpful when you are preaching on a controversial topic like homosexuality. At this point I might read the article, but I’m just gathering things. This is one of the biggest advantages to planning ahead in preaching.

For example, in the summer of 2017 I’m planning to do a series on spiritual practices or disciplines. So right now I’m pulling stuff on how habits are formed, looking at spiritual disciplines and how to best communicate and practice things like reading your Bible, fixed hour prayer, silence and solitude, fasting, etc.

3. A few months out. At this point, I start reading books that cover some of the topics I’ll be preaching on. I started preaching through Romans in March 2016, and so towards the end of 2015 I began reading books by John Piper and others on the book of Romans and some of what is covered in the book.

4. The week of. The week of a sermon is what most people think of when they think about preparing a sermon. And while I spend about 20 hours a week on sermon prep, as you can see, it is not all dedicated to the current sermon.

On Monday morning I spend a couple of hours preparing my heart by listening to worship music, reading some soul reading (John Piper or someone who has been dead for centuries) and reading through the passage I’ll preach on. I write out what stands out, what God is saying to me through the passage, etc. I think the most powerful part of a sermon is when the pastor says, “And here’s how this passage has been working on me this week.”

Monday or Tuesday I’ll start working through commentaries. When I started out I would read 8 – 10 commentaries and gather so much information that I never used it all. Most commentaries say the same things. Go to www.bestcommentaries.com and buy the top ones. My favorites are the NICNT or NICOT, The Message series by John Stott and the NIV Application Commentary. I’ll veer from that depending on reviews, but those are typically the ones I use.

I’ll also pull up the Evernote folder at this point and look through it. What is helpful, what can I use, etc.

My goal is to have all of my sermon stuff largely done by Wednesday at noon. This gives our team time to edit what goes in the program, what is on the screen and to make sure our next steps stuff is all ready to go.

At this point the sermon isn’t done, but is cooking.

5. Saturday. Every week I make a playlist on Spotify of the songs that the band is going to be doing. On Saturday afternoon I’ll take a run, listen to that playlist and pray through my sermon, the people who will be there, the things on my heart. This is such a crucial time for me and what God is doing in my heart as I prepare.

6. Sunday morning. I try to be sitting at my computer by 5:30 on Sunday morning. This is a final time to prepare for the day. I look at my heart, confess sin, and listen to worship music, go over my notes and edit them down. I also do my best to memorize my intro and conclusion. How will I present the gospel? How will I lay out the challenge? While I try to not look at my notes, I want the beginning and the end to be as solid as possible.

Then like all pastors, I drive home on Sunday with things I wished I had said or said differently.

But then I get to do it all over again the next Sunday!

What you can learn from how one pastor prepares a sermon.

Posted on Friday, June 10, 2016

20 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Pastor & 4 Other Ideas to Grow Your Leadership

by Joshua Reich

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:

How Sleep Benefits a Leaders Brain by Charles Stone
Encouragement is 51% of Leadership by Dan Reiland
A Different Take on Reaching Millenials by Carey Nieuwhof
20 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Pastor by Brandon Hilgemann
Seven Ways to Improve Your Preaching by Kevin DeYoung