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 9 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, preacher, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
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:
When it comes to real estate, the old cliche of location, location, location is king. Your location matters. There is a corner near my house that no matter what restaurant goes into that corner, it never survives. I’m sure you have something like that in your city.
The same is true for churches.
Location matters.
Not only in terms of space and what kind of ministry you can do, but what and who is around you.
If you attend or lead a church, I want you to think for a minute about where your church is located and who is around that location. The people who live there, are they old or young? Hipster or middle age? Are they wealthy, middle class, below the poverty line, or a mixture? Think in terms of nationality and ethnic backgrounds.
It is easy to overlook this as a church and keep humming along.
A good missionary, though, thinks about who is around them.
Now the second question: Who are you as a church and as a leader best suited to reach?
This is a hard question and can feel like you are picking and choosing who to reach (which you aren’t). You are simply asking who you are as a leader and who your church is.
Often God lines up who we are with where we are.
I have a friend who planted a church in a bilingual community where almost everyone lives below the poverty line. Why? He grew up in a community like that and understood the struggles. I have another friend who planted in one of the most suburban places in America. Why? He grew up in one of the most suburban places in America and understood the idols and struggles of that community.
Here is the tricky part: What if who you are best suited to reach is not where your church is?
This happens to older churches who watch a neighborhood change around them.
You have two options at this point: one, change things to reach those around you, or two, move to where those people and cultures live.
The question a leader and a church must answer is which path to take. Both can be right.
While this is something church planters and missionaries think through as they embark on their leadership, this is something churches and pastors must continually consider as their church grows and ages. This is being a good missionary as a leader, and as your city changes it will mean some changes to your church and maybe even some hard decisions.
The other day I asked a friend why he thought leadership and being a leader is so hard. He looked at me and said, “That’s why only a few people aspire to it and only a few people ever do it.”
To cast a vision. To stand against a tide. To say that you are moving forward to a place that no one has ever been and you don’t know how you will get there, but you know you are going. That is hard.
To challenge people to become all that they can be. To withstand the criticism that comes with leadership and the misunderstanding that comes with being confident and purposeful. That is hard.
Romans 12:8 says if you have the gift of leadership you should lead with all diligence. Diligence means, “A zealous and careful nature in one’s work, a decisive work ethic, budgeting one’s time, to guard against laziness, putting forth full concentration in one’s work.”
That is leadership. That is what makes it hard. Leadership challenges. Leadership and vision divide because they say, “This is where we are going and this is what the win is, and consequently, that over there is not where we are going and that is not the win.”
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:
That title may startle some, the benefit of a church crisis. Nobody likes a crisis. No one likes bad news or being disappointed or being uncomfortable. We like when things work, when things are easy, when things go our way.
Yet if you are a leader, at some point you will walk through a crisis with your church.
It could be financial, you may struggle with where you are meeting, it might be relational with another leader or someone in your church. It might involve your sin or the sin of another leader. It might be that you have someone on your staff who does something stupid, and you have to pick up the pieces of that situation.
In that moment you have some options as a leader:
1. You can run. Many pastors when they hit a crisis run from it. While no one likes conflict, relational conflict in a church can be especially painful. We put off conversations we should have, we avoid people we need to run into. Or, many pastors leave when a crisis hits. I heard one pastor say that an average church has a crisis every 18 months, and the average stay for a pastor at a church is 18 – 24 months.
A crisis is where leaders have the opportunity to shine. It is the moment they are needed the most.
2. You can pretend it isn’t happening. Many people in their personal relationships act like a crisis isn’t happening. Couples pretend they aren’t hurt by the other or that they aren’t angry. Many pastors, when a crisis hits, pretend nothing is going on. Instead of looking at hard numbers (i.e., our attendance is dropping, less people are serving, less people are joining small groups, giving is going down, we aren’t seeing people come to faith), they simply keep doing business as usual.
Another sign of this is making it everyone else’s fault. The culture is hard, people aren’t dedicated anymore, no one is listening. So the blame game continues to get passed.
The reality is: numbers are your friend. Numbers may be painful and reveal some truths you don’t want to look at or want to pretend aren’t real. But numbers are your friend.
3. You can outlast the crisis. Hopefully you are picking up a theme in this post.
Leaders shine in a crisis. Leaders don’t shine when things are going well because they aren’t needed as much. They are needed, but a crisis is when it shouts for leadership.
Leaders outlast the crisis. Does this mean that people who leave aren’t leaders? I would say yes.
No one said leadership is easy; simply look through history. It is filled with people who rose to the occasion in spite of great difficulties.
4. You can learn from it. Never waste a crisis.
As soon as possible, begin learning from the crisis:
Make no mistake, a crisis is when leaders shine. A church crisis in many ways is a wake up call to a church. It is God’s grace to a church. It causes a church and its leaders to see what is most important.
It can also cause leaders to take a step of faith they should have taken but maybe were too afraid to take. Many times in my leadership a crisis has pushed me and our church out of our comfort zone. That is hard and painful, but it’s also good.
“Exercising leadership might be best understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” -Ronald Hiefetz
I had a mentor tell me when I first started out in leadership, “Every leader on a daily basis should disappoint someone; if not, you aren’t really leading.”
There’s a part of me that likes this idea. It means I’m moving something forward, creating change or pushing against the status quo.
The other side of me hates it because I want people to like me. I don’t want to disappoint people. I want them to love what I’m doing, be a part of it and think, “I never want to leave the church Josh is leading.”
The reality is, leaders do disappoint people, and if you aren’t disappointing people, you aren’t really leading.
Why?
Disappointment can look like frustration, bristling at changes that are made, challenging people to step up and lead, take ownership or challenging someone in a counseling session to deal with their junk.
All of those things disappoint people because it pushes on something in those people.
I’m calling disappointment; when you as a leader make someone uncomfortable, lead a church where they don’t think it should go, make a change that they wouldn’t make.
Now, to be clear: disappointment is not the goal of leadership, but it is a byproduct of it.
It is the reality of what you are doing.
Disappointment also comes in another form and from another place: past hurts.
When you hear things like, “You’re moving too fast, you’re changing too much, you’re building your kingdom and not God’s”, two things might be happening. One, they might be true and you need to listen to them. Two, someone is looking at you through the lens of a past hurt and past disappointment; you are reminding them of a leader they once followed or a church they were once a part of.
Where does that leave you as a leader?
Leaders do a few different things with this:
1. They run from it. Many leaders have enormous wounds from their past that shape their present and future, and the idea of disappointing anyone keeps them from leading. Many leaders want everyone to love them, which keeps them from making bold decisions, praying big prayers or making any changes. The slightest hint of conflict or an unwillingness to move into a new future from anyone in their church, and they are done as a leader. Many pastors fear the Monday morning emails that come in, so they look towards the status quo and simply surviving.
2. They revel in it. Some leaders genuinely enjoy making people mad or disappointing them. In a sick way, it is a badge of honor. “I made this change and we lost __ blank people, but I’m being bold.” Maybe you’re bold, but you might be brash and kind of a jerk. How you talk about people’s reactions to change reveals a lot about you as a pastor. If you enjoy people leaving over changes, that can reveal some broken things in you.
3. They learn from it. Leaders are learners, bottom line. It is not just about reading books and blogs (thanks for reading this one) and listening to podcasts. Do you learn from the reactions to your leadership? Do you learn from how you make people feel when you walk into a room or how you speak to them? Any time you disappoint someone, you should find out why. What can you learn from that?
4. It makes them stronger, better leaders. If you allow disappointing people, turning people’s anger into learning as a leader, you will become a stronger, better leader. This creates resilience to keep leading. The strongest leaders I’ve met are the ones who have lived and led through some pretty big storms.