Tag Archive - team

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Why the Grass isn’t Greener at that other Church

Sunday, September 22, 2019

If you haven’t noticed, church staffing has become a competitive market in recent years. So much so that a quick Google search of “Church Staff Search Firms” will provide you with a list of companies whose entire purpose is to help staff local churches, and whom didn’t exist 20 years ago. By the way, some of these search firms are very good at their jobs.

It’s easier than ever for church staff members to change churches…and they are. Unfortunately, staff longevity is becoming a rare thing in churches. I frequently have conversations with churches that are looking to hire a new team member or a team member who is looking to make a move to a new church.

And while moving to a new church may be what God wants you to do, it’s important to remember that the grass isn’t always greener at that new church.

Your Expectations may not be Reasonable

Often times I hear sad stories from church staff members about how the church or their Pastor hasn’t met their expectations. Expectations that go unmet can create all kinds of hurt and disillusionment. However, your expectations may not be reasonable. It’s not your pastor’s job to disciple you, working at a church isn’t always rainbows and unicorns, and I know you got into ministry to be a part of life-change and people meeting Jesus but this is your job, you don’t get to get paid to do a hobby (and you shouldn’t get paid to have coffee with people all day long). So, temper your expectations (by the way, the secret to happiness in life is low expectations).

The Problem isn’t “out there”

Typically, when I hear church staff members talk about leaving their church the conversation focuses on a problem or series of problems at the church they’re currently serving in. The first bit of input I consistently find myself providing is this: “If God has given you the insight through His Spirt to see something in the church you serve at that needs to change, instead of criticizing it why don’t you try and help it be what you see God wants it to be?” Maybe the problem isn’t with the church, maybe the problem is you’re not being solution oriented and you’re focusing on what’s wrong instead of trying to help it get better.

Planting a New Church may not Fix it

When things get tough, many young leaders are opting to leave and plant a new church. And while I’m all for planting new churches to reach new people, too often these new churches are planted for all the wrong reasons by all the wrong people.

Sometimes you have to Create the kind of place you want to be

I firmly believe, that if at all possible (it isn’t always), the best option for you and the best option for your church is for you to stay and figure it out. You will grow through the process and the church will experience the benefit and fruit of you staying and figuring it out. Sometimes it’s worth staying and creating the kind of place you want to be.

Work at a church? Trying to figure out if it’s time for you to leave your church? Check out this post about “Why Church Staff Change Churches.”

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

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Leaders are the Culture

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Everywhere I turn it seems like people are talking about culture. Team culture, staff culture, and organizational culture. How to build a healthy culture and how to avoid a toxic one. But what about the culture at your church? How do you know what your church culture actually is and how can you change it if you don’t like it?

A church’s culture is determined by the defining set of values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the Sr. Leadership Team. This could be the Sr. Pastor, the Staff Team, a Board, Deacons or a group of Volunteer Leaders depending on the size and nature of the church. Another way to say it is, show me the top 3-5 decision makers or leaders in your church and I’ll show you who your church is going to be and the culture you’re going to have in a couple of years.

Culture is something that is usually unnoticed, unspoken, and unexamined in churches. As a result, few churches ever take steps towards intentionally defining and building a healthy culture; instead it usually happens by default.

It’s common to see churches fall into ruts and get stuck in the familiar traps of, “just preach the Word,” “just reach people,” or “just build disciples.” The problem is building a healthy culture in a church; particularly a healthy leadership culture is never “just that easy.”

While every church already has a culture, most of them “happen on accident.” As the leader you have to create the culture. And here’s a truth about culture you may have never thought about before…

Leaders are the culture

Their behaviors, their attitudes, what they allow, what they address, how they approach people, the decisions that they make, how they dress and carry themselves, how approachable they are, the list goes on and on. All of this tells people how to behave.

This is why I can play a name association game with you, and by saying Jeff Bezos you automatically think about Amazon. Or if I say Mark Zuckerberg you think Facebook. Or if I say Steve Jobs you think Apple.

This is because over time every organization takes on the personality of the leader. This is how the organization takes its cultural cues. Some leaders understand this and are wise and intentional about it while others lead without thought as to how their behavior is building or eroding culture.

Because leaders are the culture at your church, the easiest and fastest way to change the culture at your church is to change the leader at your church.

Change the leader, change the culture

Obviously, a new leader is a leadership change and will result in a change to the culture. But I’m more so referring to the leader themselves changing and growing. This is why everything gets better when the leader gets better.

If you’re the leader at your church and you want a better culture on your team and at your church, than change and be a better you. Pay close attention to the culture of your church because it is a mirror for you and your leadership, and after all you are the culture.

Posted in Leadership

3

How to Build a Problem-Solving Culture at your Church

Monday, May 27, 2019

The best ideas don’t always come from where you think they come from.

In the Church we tend to hire professional pastors who are supposed have all of the answers. After all pastors go to seminary to learn theology and all kinds of good stuff about the Bible and how to teach it. The very nature of the structure lends itself to people thinking pastors have the answers. But guess what? We don’t. We may have some of the answers and even a few good ideas from time to time, but we don’t have all of the answers and we certainly don’t have the best ideas in the room.

The best ideas typically come from people who are closest to the problem.

So, for all of you who want to lead in a big church here’s one of the unfortunate implications of that statement. The larger the church is that you serve at and the more removed you are from day to day interaction with volunteers and people who attend your church, the more likely it is you have no idea what the best ideas are, in fact you probably don’t even know what the biggest problems are.

But your culture needs to allow ideas to flow up, input to be given and problems to be solved. Many churches never come to close to identifying or solving their biggest problems because their culture won’t allow it.

Here’s a few ideas about how you can start changing that.

1. Ask Good Questions

Asking instead of telling can quickly shift the culture of a team. Telling people what to do actually keeps them from learning to problem solve and think for themselves. Even if you have a strong opinion and you think your idea is the right idea, exercise restraint and start asking questions like, “What do you think we should do?,” “What do you think is best for our church?,” and “Is what we’re doing actually working?”

2. Push Decisions Down

If low level decisions consistently get escalated to high levels, then you’ve got a culture that is preventing you from solving problems. People are afraid to do the wrong thing, so they are escalating everything for input. Start to refuse to make decisions on things that you know others should be deciding on (otherwise you’ll train everyone to come to you for every decision). Do you have to make this decision?

3. Do Something About It

If you ask for input and then don’t actually do anything about it, you are training people not to answer you. If all you ever do is listen to problems, identify problems or talk about problems, the biggest problem you may have is a lack of courage to act.

4. Allow People to Make Mistakes

Each of my four kids can walk. I know that may not impress many of you, but there was a time when they were younger they could only crawl. When they got old enough and strong enough they would pull themselves up using a piece of furniture and attempt to take a step or two. They always failed. Every single one of them failed. There were some bumps and bruises and painful crash landings. But they’d get back up and try again. My wife and I would sit a few feed away from them and literally cheer them on. We’d tell them how proud of them we were for taking one lousy little step. You get where this is going. If you want to build a problem-solving culture in your church, you’ve got to cheer on little steps, little failures, and all of the moments they get back up and try again. Demeaning them won’t help them walk.

Posted in Leadership

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2 Fatal Church Leadership Mistakes

Monday, January 21, 2019

When it comes to leading a church, there a lot of things that can go wrong that are outside of a pastor’s control. However, the other side of that coin is also true. There are a lot of wrong things that pastors do that are well within their control.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination. There are all kinds of things I’ve seen church leaders do to sabotage themselves. But the following two mistakes are so common and so easy to solve that I couldn’t help identifying them.

Choosing Availability over Competency

Churches are notorious for choosing the available person over taking the time to search for or develop a competent person. Just because someone shows up doesn’t mean they’ll show out. I’ve seen churches choose staff too many times based on convenience. They’ll elevate a volunteer to a staff role because they’re a faithful volunteer and great at doing ministry or delivering tasks on time. I hope you don’t mishear me, I am all for developing internal talent, in fact about 75% of the staff who work at Sun Valley (the church I have the privilege of serving at) have been developed and hired internally. Unfortunately, just because someone can deliver tasks on time doesn’t mean they can build a team and lead others to do the tasks of ministry. It’s one thing to lead by doing, it’s a completely other thing to be able to delegate tasks to others or empower them to make decisions. Churches are also guilty of over promoting young talent too quickly because they see “something special” in them instead of developing that young talent. Promoting and developing aren’t the same thing. While it’s certainly more convenient to choose someone who’s already around and available it doesn’t always prove to be the right move.

Being a Discourager instead of an Encourager

When a good team member does something wrong, nine times out of ten they already know it. Every once in a while, (that 1 time in 10) you may need to point it out. You may need to check in with them to make sure you’re both seeing the same thing the same way, but good team members don’t need over coaching. They don’t need someone to be harsh with them or pick and point out every little thing they did wrong. They need encouragement. They need someone to believe in them and help lift their attitude, because when you lift someone’s attitude you lift their performance. You can’t play a good game with a bad attitude. Here’s the thing, even a mediocre performing team member doesn’t get any better when you rub their nose in a mistake they made. Taking an over critical or harsh approach discourages people, lowers their performance, and it demotivates. Do that long enough and all you’ll have left on your team are low performers. As a leader your words carry incredible power and weight. Use them to build people up and move them in the right direction.

If you’re a church leader and you struggle with either of these two pitfalls the first step you need to take is be honest with yourself, then be honest with your team and apologize to them. Own it. Then change your approach. It’s within your power to change. You can do this!

Posted in Leadership

2

5 Keys to Growing your Church in 2019

Sunday, January 6, 2019

I’ve never met a church leader that didn’t want things at their church to to change for the better. They want more people to say yes to following Jesus, they want people to become better friends with God, and they want their churches to think more about people outside of the church than those already in it.

The trouble is while most church leaders want this year to be better than the last, they don’t want to do anything different.

I’ve said this many times before, people (including you…and me) always want to change their circumstances, but they never want to change their lives. But everything gets better when we get better. Families get better when fathers and mothers get better. Students get better when educators get better. Organizations get better when leaders get better. And churches get better when church leaders get better. But better doesn’t happen by trying harder, it happens by trying different. It happens through change…but change is painful. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. It’s always easier and more comfortable to stay where you are than to change and move forward. But if you want to grow at some point you’ve got to stop doing what’s easy and start doing what’s right.

So, to that end, here are a couple ideas that will help you create change this year at your church…and maybe even in you.

Create Accessibility

One of the greatest changes you can make in your church to get different results is to make Jesus and His teachings more accessible to people who don’t know Him. Another way to think about this is to ask yourself or your team, “How accessible is everything at your church to people who are unfamiliar with Jesus and the Church?” How accessible is your website, signage, language, parking lot, building, kids and student ministries, worship services, and teaching to people who are unfamiliar with Jesus and His Church? Most churches simply make it too hard for people to meet and follow Jesus. They don’t do it on purpose, they’ve just forgotten what it is like to be unfamiliar with Jesus. And guess what will happen when you create more accessibility to Jesus? More people will meet Jesus…and isn’t that kinda the point?

Lean into Constraints

You probably have a list of reasons (or excuses) why you can’t grow. Barriers to the future or anchors to the past that are keeping you from getting to the future. Make a list of your top 5 constraints and figure a way through them or around them. You constraints may even be the thing that help you innovate and come up with a solution you would have never otherwise come up with on your own. To that point, one of the top 3 reasons the church I serve at went multisite 6 years ago is because the original location was nearing a point where it would be fully maximized. Today we’re reaching more people for Jesus than ever because we had a facility constraint that forced us into a new solution (multisite) that is helping us reach new people for Jesus than we ever would have or could have at that one original location. Your biggest constraints may just turn out to be your best friend.

Allow Hope to Die

Stop hoping things are going to change at your church. Hope doesn’t change or produce new results at your church. Action does. Specifically, new action. Hope is not a strategy. Too many church boards and church leaders are sitting around praying and hoping that Jesus would do something new and powerful in their church this year when He already did something new and powerful 2,000 years ago on the cross. He’s simply waiting for those same church boards and church leaders to have the same kind of courage He did and lead things forward. 

Draft some new Players

If you want new results at your church, then it may be time to shake up the team a bit. New team members bring new experiences, expertise, ideas, and questions with them that aren’t currently on your team. You become who you hire and sometimes one or two new team members can help shift the entire locker room on a team.

Listen to Fresh Eyes

Sometimes you simply need fresh eyes, someone from the outside to help you see things differently. Sometimes you need an outside voice to say some things that you want to say but can’t. And sometimes you’re just stuck and need help. If that’s your church, then maybe the best step you can take to change things at your church is to engage the Unstuck Group. We help churches grow their impact through church consulting and coaching experiences designed to focus vision, strategy and action.

Taking new and different action will get you different results. And if you need a little help getting unstuck then connect with us at the Unstuck Group, we can help this next year be the best year of ministry you’ve ever experienced!

Posted in Leadership
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