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Help Your Preacher Preach Better

June 21, 2012 in Bible, church, leadership, missional, priorities, productivity, speaking, speech acts with 4 Comments

Your preacher might be better if they could focus on preaching. It had to be said! Truth is, many churches require so much of their pastor that they hardly have anytime to prepare to preach.

Preparing to preach isn’t always difficult, but it is time consuming.

There’s language study, historical/critical review, prayer, devotional time in the text, reading, reflecting, constructing, importing creative elements, story-building, writing and delivery. Preaching takes time, so does visitation, prayer for the sick, staff meetings and leading, building use and facility concerns, other teaching responsibilities during the week, and hosts of other activities. Some preachers have to handle all these activities themselves, so it’s no wonder some preachers serve up yesterday’s leftovers from the pulpit. It’s easy to flip open the latest book and harvest 3 points here and 5 suggestions there, call it a sermon and go home.

 

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Is There Such A Thing As An All Powerful Pastor?

March 8, 2012 in advocacy, church, leadership, life, preaching, priorities, productivity, ranting, spiritual formation with 4 Comments

I’m sick of it! Permit me to rant for a moment!

And if you’re a pastor/preacher/minister, you’re likely sick of it too. You’ve seen all the tweets and articles in magazines that act as if the pastor is a singular human in their organization, capable of creating and sustaining wonderful health and growth all by his or her own lonesome.

 

Here are some of the doozies I’ve heard lately:

  • As the pastor, you should be the happiest person in your church.
  • Pastor, what’s your staff culture? Remember, you set the culture for your staff.
  • If you don’t have 5 evangelistic relationships going on, how can you expect your congregants to have any?

On and on the lists go. It all adds up to this: As the leader of your organization you’re expected to have a great family, exercise daily, be studied in theology, history, culture, music, Bible and the local and national news. You’re also solely responsible for the culture and spiritual growth of your staff and congregation, as well as their intellectual and emotional health and growth. By the way, how up-to-speed are you on fund-raising and systems-thinking and strategy- implementation? What about addiction, co-dependency, visitation, guest-services, and community activities. Oh, before I forget, don’t you have a sermon to preach this weekend?

The problem with these little maxims is that they are partly true. As a pastor and leader, you do carry some level of responsibility for all these things. Yet there are so many things to be responsible for that no human can do them all well. I don’t mean to be snippy, just realistic. I pastor in the real world with real-world limitations. And many church leaders I know are stuck in systems that they are handling with as much hard work and determination they can muster. And still others, face challenges that they cannot overcome. There are simply more considerations than some evangelical leaders understand when passing down their leadership maxims. While these considerations run the risk of being labeled excuses, for many people it’s the water they swim in. In nearly 20 years of working near, around and in churches, I know these considerations to be depressingly true.

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4 Unexpected Leadership Lessons

February 28, 2012 in Bible, books, change, church, leadership, missional, Missional Church, productivity, reading with 0 Comments

This past Sunday was my last as the Senior Minister at Redwood Church. It was more than I could have hoped for. My family’s time in California, in the grand scheme, has been brief, yet extraordinarily fruitful. I can’t speak for the congregation, but Rochelle and I are different and better people. We’ve learned much about leadership and loving a church. Mostly, we’ve learned the hard way. And we are eternally grateful for a congregation that allowed us to test, experiment, fail and recover.

Here are a few of our unexpected lessons learned the hard way:

1. Conviction Is Key. In the life of a congregation there are thousands of decisions. In fact, there are thousands of different and difficult decisions to make everyday. This means that leaders need to lead by conviction; knowing what they believe and how to achieve. Andy Stanley says  in Visioneering: God’s Blueprint for Developing and Maintaining Vision that engineering a vision is both knowing what your vision is and having the conviction to bring it to fruition. Leaders who lack conviction will have their vision blown to and fro by the changing winds. In addition, without conviction, slights and criticisms weigh more than they ought. If you’re going to succeed or fail do so under the pressure of your own God-given vision.

2. There’s A Thin Line Between Love & Hate. That’s an overstatement…sort of. In her book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her leaving congregational ministry. As she exits the pastorate she is reminded of the words of one of her ministerial mentors. He said, “The people who hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you and the people who love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you.” It’s wise counsel. As a leader, you cannot avoid criticism. You will have both detractors and fans. Therefore, you can’t allow other’s opinions to shape your self-perception. And you certainly cannot allow other’s opinions to shape your activities. This is where Jesus’ ministry is key. In the course of a week, our Lord went from celebrated hero to Gethsemane. Crowds are fickle. Always have been.

3. Stay Ahead / Stay Fresh. For a leader to succeed s/he must be ahead of the organization. The leader is hardly ever the smartest person in a group, but they must be the one looking farther down the road. Church world is hectic. And when the leader has to teach and preach each week, looking forward can easily become the first thing to fall by the wayside. It can’t. A few times I struggled to get ahead, to know what was coming in 3, 6, or 9 months. When I stayed ahead, the entire organization functioned better, when I was scrambling we all suffered.

4. Love Before You Lead. I once heard Francis Chan say that he knew he could lead a church, he just didn’t know if he loved his church. That was powerful. And it changed my view of leadership. Recently a friend of mind stepped into a senior ministry position. He called to ask my thoughts. In response I told him that the first thing he should do is make sure that everyone in hos new church knew that he loved them. The apostle Paul was right, the greatest thing you can do as a leader is offer love. What’s more, if people’s hearts aren’t open to you, then you’re dead in the water.

What unexpected lessons have you learned about leadership and church life? What wasn’t covered in class that might help us all lead our churches to greater heights in the God’s kingdom?

Being Conventional (or why I can’t take Boise St football seriously)

February 27, 2012 in church, leadership, productivity with 3 Comments

Success is rooted in the conventional. There I said it! I know, I know – there’s a lot in this day and age about creativity and innovation and that’s all well and good. But if you’re not careful you can become so consumed with innovation that you forget about convention and the myriad ways it serves your organization. When you fail to be somewhat conventional, you’re compromising your success, and I’ll tell you why.

But first, a caveat: I LOVE innovation, creativity and moving organizations and churches forward in ways we hadn’t imagined before. In fact, the majority of the world’s accomplishments have been made through innovation and many of today’s more pressing societal concerns will be solved through creativity and innovation, but there is a place for convention.There is a wonderful place for innovation and I love it, but there’s a necessary place for convention as well. And it’s a necessary place for success — especially for leaders.

Why do I think this? Boise State football.

For years now, Boise St. has been ascending in the college football rankings, but still, many people like me can’t take them seriously. The reason? They dismiss convention by playing on a blue field. And when your organization completely dismisses convention you put your success at risk. Here’s why?

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What’s Your Hurricane? Find Your Purpose.

February 24, 2012 in leadership, life, ministry, missional, priorities, productivity with 1 Comment

Have you  noticed how the good folks over at The Weather Channel get far too excited about hurricanes! You’ve seen them. Jim Cantore, standing in boots, winds gusting while reeds sway in the background. Alexandra Steele covering the action with eyes glistening. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were giddy about some beach city on the verge of destruction.
Why are they so exhilarated?

They live for hurricanes!

This is what they got in the biz for; why they went to school. 85-degrees and partly cloudy doesn’t quicken the pulse quite like a Cat 5. So when there’s a tropical depression turned tropical storm turned hurricane, it’s no wonder that they go nut-burgers when the tempests begin to rage.

So what’s your hurricane? Do you have one?

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