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Category Archive: Pastoral Leadership

The 4 Habits Every Great Leader Needs To Practice

Posted by on June 22, 2016

One of the casualties of living in this digital age is the warmth of human relationships. No, I’m sorry a like on Facebook, or a retweet or even a text message can’t replace being there with the person. With limited face time leaders have to become extremely effective in connecting with their team. John Rampton has a great post:

“You don’t need to be told that leadership takes presence. But in my experience, leaders today have arguably fewer opportunities to show it. Particularly if you head up a digital business or lead teams spread out across multiple locations, you’re faced with generating “remote” influence at the same time that the people right there in your own office need to be kept motivated, too.”

Changing Missions Paradigm

Posted by on June 17, 2016

The one thing that has never changed about missions is that God has always been seeking people to know Him and then to make Him known. The unchanging message of the gospel started in a garden and will end in a city full of people from every tribe and nation on the earth.

The great commission was given to the early church and they immediately began to carry the message to every part of their known world. This message was primarily being shared not by a professional ministerial class but by average believers who had a personal story to tell about what Christ had done in their lives.

During the middle ages the formal church was the focal point of representing God to the world. The emphasis had shifted from individuals to organizations and the world suffered greatly in this period of isolation from the truth.

The reformation gave the scriptures back to the people and set the stage for all that followed in the modern mission’s movement where individual believers once again committed their lives to go into whole world with their message of hope. However these individuals became part of much larger organizations that took the lead in spreading the good news.

Today the major emphasis is still upon organizations, denominations, mission agencies and other groups that represent primarily the trained professionals who maintain the old paradigms that have existed for hundreds of years. These groups do a great work and will always play an important role in touching the world.

An exciting new movement is developing where committed Christians are once again being used by God in incredible ways and places where the professional worker model cannot work. They are using their career calling as a platform not only to make a profit but also to make an eternal difference.

If you want to learn more Great Commission Companies is a great book that points the way to how God is using globalization to break down barriers and effectively create genuine communities of new believers.

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The Role Of Pastoral Leadership

Posted by on April 24, 2016

I hear a lot of people playing the blame game when churches are not growing and reaching their potential. The blame usually falls into one of two camps, the pastors who are not leading well or the people who will not follow.

After observing this for many years and spending time both in the pew and behind the pulpit I have reached some personal conclusions. Overall, the majority of times when there are serious problems the churches have not had effective pastoral leadership.

The ultimate tragedy is that in most cases the issues have nothing to do with theology. It comes down to the character and spiritual immaturity of the man or simply poor leadership skills in the area of knowing how to work with people.

With that said an even greater tragedy is when churches react to poor pastoral leadership by assuming the role of pastor and becoming a lay lead church. All great churches have strong key men and women who help lead the church but there is only one God called person that has been delegated the role of being the pastor of the church.

Romans 13 makes it incredibly clear that God in every aspect of life works through designated human authority to accomplish his will. Ephesians 4 also states that God gives church’s pastor leaders to help equip the laity for the work of the ministry.

If your pastor is not leading well then give him all the help you can and if that does not work then fire him and find God’s man. The one thing you must not do is change God’s plan. Once you do that you might as well hire a permanent interim and stop playing the games because your church will never be successful again.

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Hire Winners Not Whiners

Posted by on March 28, 2016

In the old days of the Industrial Age model of leadership everything was pretty simple. The leaders made all of the decisions and the followers did all of the work. There were very clearly identified lines of authority and policies and procedures for everyone.

The major goal of the company culture at the end of the day was to prevent failure. Therefore if you had a problem with two people that were chronically taking too long for lunch breaks then you would design a system where everyone would have to sign out and sign back in.

Then it became some middle managers job assignment to monitor the system until it became a part of the new and improved culture for the company and that would solve the problem with lunch breaks. This cycle was repeated over and over again and the best people in the organization were always assigned the duty of cleaning up the mess produced by the worst ten percent of workforce.

Today you better have your best people working on your biggest opportunities or you competition will eat your lunch and you will not need to sign out and in anymore. You must move from a culture that tries to prevent failure to one that ensures success.

This means that you define success not by how the process is managed by what type of results your people are achieving. The leaders number one responsibility now is to hire great people and set the vision for the organization.

The winners will take care of the strategy and it will produce results but you will probably have to live without your weekly employee lunch report. You will not need it any more they fired the two people.

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The Target Has Changed For Churches

Posted by on March 17, 2016

Any time you talk about some group of people being your primary target most people in the church get offended. It is if they are concerned that because they are not in the target group their needs are not going to be met. This of course should not have to be the case at all.

For over fifty years at least the same target group has existed from a demographic and psychographic standpoint. They were the adults that made up the World War II and the Baby Boomer generations. We developed programs and services to meet their needs and they would bring their children to church with them.

A typical adult conversation on the way home would be how did you like the message, music and the lesson? If both adults had a good experience, then they would deal with whatever issues the children had and bring them back the next Sunday.

Today the overwhelming majority of adults under the age of forty are not coming to church any more. They have a different world view about God and the need for role of the church in their lives.

When they do come because someone has relationally connected with them at work or in the neighborhood the conversation on the way home has completely changed. Now the major thing that matters is what type of experience did their children have and do they want to come back again?

If the answer is yes, the adults are now willing to make the adjustments and they will be back. If the answer is no, then regardless of what happened to mom and dad they are not going to give you a second look.

If your preschool, children and student ministries are not world-class in your church then you cannot expect to reach families in today’s culture. The conversations on the way home have changed and your target group must change with it as well.

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To Stay Relevant You Must Keep Learning

Posted by on March 14, 2016

There is no doubt a part of me that knows far more than I am actually applying in my life. However, as a leader in every area of my life, I must become a life long learner or I will never reach my true potential. This post by Pat Wordes for the HBR drives home this important reality for all of us:

“It’s not about learning a set of skills and then being “prepared” for life. It’s about learning to continuously learn over the course of your whole career. As AT&T CEO and Chair Randall Stephenson, recently told the New York Times, “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop….People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning will obsolete themselves with the technology.”

Great Leaders Practice Feedforward

Posted by on March 4, 2016

Almost every serious organization uses some form of feedback to evaluate the performance of their top leadership team. This usually works best in a 360 type environment where the person receives feedback from superiors, peers and subordinates as well.

The concept of feedforward was developed by Marshall Goldsmith in his best seller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, which is about how to coach senior executives. He encourages every leader to identify core behaviors that need to change through feedback. Then apologize for your mistake and commit to change that character quality in the future.

The primary way he recommends to accomplish this is through the four disciplines in feedforward:

Identify Target Behavior—choose the one behavior that your colleagues have told you about that you consider to be at the top of your list for change. The number one issue among the thousands of people he has worked with is to be a better listener.
Enlist Accountability Partners—the key here is to secure a personal commitment from as many people as possible to help you in this particular area. This should include family members as well as various levels of people within the organization where you work. They will all commit to help you focus on this one specific area and help you with ongoing feedback.
Solicit Specific Suggestions—ask everyone in your accountability circle for at least two suggestions that might help you achieve a positive change in your selected behavior. The key ground rule here is that there should be no mention of mistakes in the past but every comment is about the future.
Practice Active Listening—take appropriate notes if necessary but make sure you are really listening to each and every suggestion to the point that you can put it into practice. Also it is very important regardless of the quality of the input to be sure to graciously thank everyone involved who will take the time and emotional risk of telling you what you really need to hear.

Instead of waiting six months for the next performance review cycle, get feedback when you need it so you can become a better leader.

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The False Choice Between Top-Down And Bottom-Up Leadership

Posted by on February 22, 2016

Wow, this is the nail on the head for the tension between directive and collaborative leadership. It proves the case for situational leadership where the leader is constantly adjusting their leadership style based on the competency and commitment of their team. This is clearly not an either/or approach but a both/and:

“In management circles, leadership tends to get reduced to two opposing models: You’re either a traditional top-down leader who believes in the organizing power of clear chains of command, or you’re a collaborative, bottom-up leader who puts more faith in flat organizations, holocracies, and approaches that put leaders in more of a facilitator role. Advocates of either approach will tell you why theirs works best, and why the alternative is a disaster.”

Leadership Demands Authenticity

Posted by on January 27, 2016

There are many generational issues that have to be resolved between the Baby Boomer generation of existing leaders and the Next Generation workforce that is coming onto the scene. The old positional power model of simply telling everyone what to do and they automatically follow with no desire for involvement in the process is gone.

Potentially the single greatest leadership quality new leaders are looking for from those in positions of responsibility is authenticity. They place a high value on working with people that are real and genuine compared to others who like to play mind games.

A leader must know who they are personally and what they believe are the core values for themselves and the organizations they lead. Then when the hard decisions must be made and there are many of them today, everyone on the team will trust their motives instead of questioning them.

Jack Welch placed a very high value on authenticity for his top leadership team. In his book Winning he wrote, “Leaders can’t have an iota of fakeness. They have to know themselves-so that they can be straight with the world, energize followers, and lead with the authority born of authenticity.”

There is nothing better at the end of a long day than to look back and know that all your actions were consistent with your character. No more playing games just keeping it real.

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Growth Barriers For Churches

Posted by on January 26, 2016

There are many things that can keep a church from growing and reaching its potential. The most obvious is for whatever reason God is not able to bless the work and all you are left with is human effort and nothing supernatural can happen.

The list of other real issues includes lack of resources in the areas of staffing, programming and facilities that will prevent you from reaching the next level. Oh by the way, every significant increase of 500 people creates an entirely new list of different challenges that must be addressed in all of these areas.

Sometimes the problem is that a church gets out of balance in any one of these areas to the detriment of all the others. The most obvious is over building your site and incurring too much debt that strangles everything else you are trying to accomplish.

The single most significant issue beyond the blessings of God is the constantly changing role of the pastor and the people. In most small churches the pastor does the ministry and the people run the church. For any church to reach its potential the pastor must do the leading and the people must be equipped to do the ministry.

In my experience far too many times when this ongoing transition breaks down the primary blame is placed on the people and their unwillingness to follow. The hard cold truth is the reason they are not following is there is not a leader in place that has the character and integrity to say clearly come follow me as I follow Christ.

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