Bringing your Blind Spots into Focus

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Bringing your Blind Spots into Focus

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Have you ever experienced someone talking on speakerphone or face-timing in public? This has happened to me twice lately. In both cases not only was it distracting and rude to everyone around these people but they were totally unaware of how obnoxious their behavior was and how others perceived them in the moment.

That’s usually how blind spots work. They show up at work, at home, in our casual friendships, and in our most meaningful relationships. Everyone sees them but us. That’s why they’re called blind spots. But just because you have them, doesn’t mean you can’t bring those blind spots into focus. Here’s a couple tips to try out this week.

Get Outside Help

If you really want to begin to bring your blind spots into focus you’re going to need help. You can’t do this alone, because you don’t live on the other side of you. You know your thoughts, intentions, and motivations. You know what you mean when you do what you do. Others just experience what you do. Ask other people that you trust and who know you and aren’t afraid to tell you the truth what your blind spots are…and then don’t fight back…just listen.

Humility

Discovering your blind spots requires humility. It means listening more than talking. It means looking introspectively at you instead of at others. It means working on you instead of a project or your team. And it inherently means you’re going to have to come face to face with some things about yourself that aren’t going to be pleasant or easy to face down.

Pay Attention to Pain

Pain is an incredible gift from God. It tells us that something is wrong and needs to change. When you experience pain in a relationship or at work one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, “What did I do to contribute to this problem?”

“Rule of 3’s”

If someone tells you something once, it’s easy to brush it off as his or her isolated opinion of one unique interaction with you. If a theme gets developed and it comes up more than once, say three times, then pay attention to it. Maybe it’s not everybody else maybe it’s you.

Courage

Once you’ve been made aware of a blind spot you have a choice, and the choice hinges on courage. You can choose to ignore it or you can choose to do something about it. But be warned, if it’s really a blind spot it’s going to be really tough to work on, because it’s not going to come natural. That’s why it’s a blind spot. But without courage you don’t simply choose to be blind you choose to stay blind.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation, Staffing

A Church’s Health Cannot Be Determined By Its Size

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

It is easy to become obsessed with church growth. Attendance is a number we can quickly see, measure, and compare. But we should never mistake attendance for more than what it is: a measure of the number of people attending, not the overall health of the church.

A church’s health cannot be determined by its size alone.

The health of your church should be more fully understood through things like:

The level of participation in biblical community
The degree to which people are using their gifts to serve
The generosity of your congregation
Whether or not you are reaching unchurched people
How well you’re connecting with young families in your community

And those are things you can actually track. I think we get hung up on attendance because we all want to be about leading more people to Jesus. But determining how to measure spiritual next steps and real life-change is a deeper conversation.

On Wednesday, November 2, Tony Morgan and The Unstuck Group will share a better way to measure church health in the free webinar, Vital Signs: How Healthy Churches Think Beyond Attendance Alone.

The team will share The Unstuck Group’s most recent research on church health built around 14 metrics that together give a fuller picture than attendance alone. And, they’ll talk about how to use these metrics make better decisions.

Click Here to Register for the Vital Signs Webinar

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

Should your Church Spend more Energy Reaching or Keeping People?

Sunday, October 23, 2016

It’s commonly said that you can tell if a church is insider-focused or outsider-focused by how they make decisions. Do they make decisions based on whom they’re trying to keep or whom they’re trying to reach? Oh, if it were only that simple.

Churches that Reach

Jesus started this movement called the Church with one simple mission, to reach outsiders.
Some churches become so focused on this mission that they’ll do anything short of sin to reach outsiders. Unfortunately this often involves ignoring insiders (people who have already said yes to Jesus)…which might be sin.
The challenge most outsider-focused churches have is helping people who say yes to following Jesus take their next steps with Him (discipleship).

Churches that Keep

It’s also clear through the teachings of Jesus that knowing and following God is relational by it’s very nature and can not be done well alone. This is why He said that His followers would be known by the quality of their relationships (love).
Some churches become so focused on the “one another’s” of Scripture that they don’t make room for outsiders. They frequently become so comfortable that they’re unwilling to change to reach people. That’s the exact opposite of the definition of maturity that so many insider-focused churches cling to.
The challenge most insider-focused churches have is helping people actually say yes to Jesus (evangelism).

I recently heard Dr. Kara Powell who serves as the Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute say, “Balance is something we swing through on the way to the other extreme.”

Great church leaders don’t try to balance reaching people and keeping people. They’re willing to live in the tension that the call of the Church is to reach outsiders and impact insiders. They don’t see these as two opposing forces rather complimentary ideas that fuel the movement of the church. It’s not one or the other…it’s both and.

Posted in Spiritual Formation

Why Big Weekend Worship Services are not the Goal of the Church

Sunday, October 16, 2016

I’ve personally been following Jesus for more than 30 years and in full-time ministry now for more than 20 years and there are still times that I get frustrated and wish the Bible gave us more answers than it really does. The New Testament is notorious for being way more descriptive than prescriptive in its approach. It describes much of what happened during the early stages of this new movement called the Church getting off the ground but it shares very little about how we should be doing Church today.

For instance, even the idea of having deacons was a pragmatic response that the Apostles had in Acts chapter 6 to meet the need of running a feeding program so they could focus on what they were supposed to focus on. And churches have been mimicking this practice ever since.

That being said, it’s really interesting to me that the modern church has fallen in love with a practice that the New Testament doesn’t actually prescribe anywhere, weekend worship services.

Now don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m a big proponent of churches providing meaningful, engaging and relevant weekend worship services. Not because that’s the mission of the church, but because it’s the most effective strategy in North America to expose people to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In other words large weekend worship gatherings are a strategy, not the mission.

The Mission is the Goal not the Strategy

When you love a strategy more then you love the mission you’ve got the right recipe for a declining church. When the strategy stops working it’s not time to give up on the mission, it’s time to employ a new strategy. The mission of the church is not to get a bunch of people in a big room at one time for a great show, the mission of the church is to help people meet Jesus. Don’t get those two things confused.

Strategies are Designed to Serve the Mission not the other way around

Strategies are fine as long as they are effective in moving you towards the mission Jesus has already defined for His Church. The moment a strategy becomes a lid or a hindrance to accomplishing the mission it’s time for it to go. If your weekend worship service is no longer effective it’s time for it to change. And the easiest way to measure the effectiveness of the weekend worship service at your church is by measuring life-change. Are people meeting Jesus and are their lives changing as they get to know Him and follow Him?

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

10 Articles that will Help Your Church Make Vision Real

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Thank you for making September another great month here at Helping Churches Make Vision Real! It’s fun to stay connected with you through social media and hearing that these articles have been helpful. So, thank you for connecting with me through the content on this blog! You made these the top posts from this last month. If you missed out on any of them, here they are all in one place for your convenience!

10 Insider Focused Ministry Names

The language we choose to use is important because it both reflects and builds culture at the same time. And one of the most obvious ways to tell if a church is insider focused or outsider focused is the language that they choose to use. It either says that the church is “inclusive” or “exclusive.”

What Growing Churches do Differently

It’s not faith, it’s not luck, and it’s not some leadership secret. Growing churches are actually doing something differently than the other 80% of churches in America that are stuck or declining. At the Unstuck Group we work with 100’s of churches every year and we’ve discovered that growing churches are actually doing some very tangible things differently than other churches. Below are just a few of them.

How Many People Should your Church have on Staff?

Before you buy into the idea that you need another staff person at your church, think again. That just may be the worst decision you make at your church this year.

8 Reasons Why People Don’t Volunteer at your Church

I’ve never worked with a church that has said they don’t need more volunteers. But I’ve worked with a bunch of churches that have trouble getting people to volunteer and stay engaged volunteering.

Stop Blaming your Team for Underperforming

If you’ve ever managed a team you know how easy it is to grow frustrated when individuals on the team don’t perform well and the team doesn’t get the results you’re looking for. Unfortunately when things go wrong, the first place most leaders and managers look to place blame is on the team. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. Sometimes someone on the team doesn’t do their job and things fail. But the team should be the last place you look to place blame. The first place you should look to place blame is on yourself. When things go wrong on your team, keep the following principles in mind:

Hope is Not a Strategy

Hoping things will get better at your church won’t help things actually get better at your church. In fact the opposite may actually be true.

Church Leadership and the Illusion of Control

Church leaders are supposed to be the best kind of leaders, right? Caring, humble, courageous, strong, and selfless. The term controlling probably wouldn’t make a top-10-list of attributes to describe the ideal church leader. Now I know you’re not a control freak, I mean you’re way to godly for that. But if you’re on a church staff I’m sure you’ve served with a control freak at some point. And control freaks are dangerous, especially in the church.

Why More People Don’t Meet Jesus at your Church

One of the things we’ve learned through our experience and research at theUnstuck Group is that churches in America are only baptizing around 5% of their weekend attendance on average annually. In other words a church of 500 is seeing an average of 25 people take the step to be publicly baptized on an annual basis. We can do better than that. We must do better than that. But it is going to take facing down these big 5 issues that prevent more people from meeting Jesus at your church.

Tearing Down Leadership Idols in the Church

A quick Google search on “Church Leadership” will turn up literally over 170 million links. That’s a lot of content to dig into on church leadership. For all of the talk about church leadership out there today it sure seems that the church is pretty leadership poor. I know some folks down in Texas that would say that churches have a bad case of “big hat, no cattle.” Another way to say it would be that churches are all talk and no action when it comes to leadership.

How your Church can Produce More Leaders

Leadership scarcity is one of the most significant lids that prevent growth in churches today. While many churches are providing great leadership content and training in the form of conferences, classes, or coaching groups few are actually producing more leaders. There is more to developing leaders than providing good leadership content. It doesn’t happen without these 5 key underpinnings.

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