Coaching Churches

One of the hardest challenges for churches to grow beyond 500 is the necessary transition for staff team members from ministry to leadership. Most of them were hired for their relational skills and have no practical training on developing other leaders who actually do the ministry.

Most churches either simply hire more staff workers or stop growing and never really understand why. Hopefully, your current team can be developed into leaders of other leaders. If they cannot, they may need to transition to another smaller church that is a better fit for they’re gifting. This post by Dan Reiland will help clarity next steps:

“Developing leaders is an art. It’s a great responsibility and one of the most meaningful things you can do as a leader. Personally, I love it!

Developing leaders is life-changing, Kingdom advancing, and spiritual legacy in the making.

It’s nearly impossible to accomplish your God-given vision by yourself, therefore developing other leaders becomes essential.

It’s rare that anyone would disagree with that, and yet a surprising number of leaders acknowledge the lack of intentional development on their staff and among their volunteer leaders.”

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Great leaders have the ability to cast vision and inspire people to make changes to accomplish incredible things together. We however have to be careful that we do not use hype instead of reality. If everything requires too much “greatest ever” language, then when the time comes to make major change people will not hear you. This post by Scott Cochrane is excellent:

“As a leader you must certainly project optimism. But when you cross the line into hyperbole, your leadership is facing significant risks.

Recently, a leader in my orbit described a meeting as “Quite possibly our best meeting ever!” Right away, the thought flashed through my mind, “I need to keep watching my own communication for any signs of such exaggeration.” How many of these statements, or statements like them, have you used?”

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All great leadership principles come from scripture and many leaders draw too hard of a line between the secular and sacred. Integrity and productivity are equally as important in the church as they are in the corporate market. So lets not draw inappropriate hard lines between the two leadership worlds that have more in common that we think. This post by Thom Rainer is great:

“One of the most common responses we receive at ThomRainer.com is something like this statement: “You can’t run your church like a business.” I get it. Our goal is to glorify God. Our goal is to make disciples. Our goal is to be faithful to God’s Word.

Our goal is not to make profits. Our goal is not to adopt secular principles in place of biblical principles. So, when someone insists we not run the church like a business, I understand his or her heart and intent.

But there are indeed some business principles that correlate with church practices and biblical truth. To say we don’t run our church like a business carte blanche may be a signal that we are ignoring sound and, at least indirectly, biblical counsel. Here are five examples:”

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The reality of all leadership is that most of our major problems are caused by a small percentage of people. When you realize that, then you can develop the right perspective that puts these people in a different category. Then you still must develop the leadership skills to help them. This Dan Reiland post is very helpful:

“As a church leader, I’m confident you love and care about people, but If you have been leading for more than one week, you have encountered a difficult person or two.

Recently a wonderful volunteer on the hospitality team told me that someone just left because of the coffee. The unhappy attendee said, “This coffee tastes like dirt.” He said it was weak and insisted that we do something about it. It didn’t matter that it was free. (Free is not an excuse for lousy coffee, but thousands of people seem to like it.) The volunteer offered the Starbucks brand, but the attendee was upset that it wasn’t free.”

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