Change is Hard (for some)

The sad truth is you must know who your blockers and whiners are.  And you have to find a way to change them, placate them, or ignore them.

When you're trying to do something different, you will always get pushback.  Change is very difficult for some people.

When you're about to change something, think of the stakeholders.  Put them into three columns:

1. Those who will block change
2. Those who will allow change
3. Those who will create change

Your job as a change manager is to move people one column.  
Turn blockers into allowers.
And if you still have any life left in you, turn allowers into creators.

You will always have blockers who will never be moved.  If the change is mission-critical, you must be willing to ignore them.  Even if it means alienating them or losing them.

An Open Letter (that gave me a good chuckle)

Dear Disgruntled Church Member;

You are an important part of the Body of Christ.  You are a part of the Royal Priesthood.  But you have not been chosen to be the pastor of this congregation.

I know you have been trained by our denomination to think that your input is as valuable as anyone else's.  But it's not true.

Next time God gives you a call to the pastorate, please take it.

Sincerely,

A Pastor

The Law of the Snake Pit

From One Size Doesn't Fit All by Gary L. McIntosh, p.102:

"I've heard two viewpoints.  One says not to change anything during the first year.  The other says to change as much as you can in the first year.  Which is correct?"

"I suggest that in the early years of ministry in a new church you follow the Law of the Snake Pit: Keep moving, but don't make any sudden jerks."

Five Guiding Principles of Effective Ministry

From One Size Doesn't Fit All by Gary L. McIntosh, p. 80:

McIntosh says you should run every decision that you make as a pastor and as a church through this grid to make sure you are focusing on the right things:

1. The Principle of Visionary Leadership
   A church grows when decisions are made based on the intention of bringing new people into the church.
2. The Principle of Human Resource Utilization
   A church grows when decisions provide the staff, leadership, and resources needed to focus on outreach.
3. The Principle of "Open Doors"
   A church grows when decisions create opportunities for new people to enter into the life of the congregation.
4. The Principle of Incorporation
   A church grows when decisions spawn ways to incorporate new people into the social circles of the membership.
5. The Principle of Finance
   A church grows when decisions adequately finance local outreach activities.

What to Do First?

I've been on the ground in my new church district for almost three weeks now.

I've been doing a lot of unpacking and moving things around and trying to get settled into our new house.  Kendra has started her new job teaching a couple of classes.  Nathaniel has started second grade at a new school and gymnastics at a new gym.

I've preached a sermon in each church and I've attended an elders meeting.

How do you get up to speed in a new church district?

Here's what I've done:

• Started weekly meetings with the associate pastor
• learning about who he is and what exactly he does
• learning about who the (elected and de facto) leaders are
• learning about the current ministry structure
• learning about pitfalls and areas of opportunity
• learning about recent church history and why things are the way they are
• learning about what's on the calendar
• chosen a book to read through and discuss together
• Started working on some upcoming sermon series
• Heaven in My Heart
• Children's Bible Heroes
• Advent
• Started meeting with elders and church leaders individually
• getting to know them
• trying to figure out the big picture
• Ordered the NCD survey
• Started exercising more regularly

Here's what I think need to do next:

•  Administer the NCD survey
• assess the church's health in 8 quality areas
• evaluate a starting point
• start work on two "minimum factors"
• Continue meeting with elders and leaders individually
• Move into the church office
• Establish my regular office hours and work routine
• Try not to change the whole world all at once

Any advice?

You cannot lead if...

Over on Ja Cook's Don't Survive, Thrive! he has a great post about what disqualifies someone from being a leader. Not sexual blunders or embezzling (although, I'm sure those are also disqualifiers).

Ja's list hits close to home with things like...

• You cannot lead if you cannot love those you lead

and

• You cannot lead if you cannot lift others up to be better than you

and

• You cannot lead if you cannot last through trials and hurdles

Be sure to check out the rest.

How to Start New Ministries

We all want church members to find their spiritual gifts, their passions, and their place in building God's kingdom and reaching the community. Or do we?

If we really want these things to happen, we need a process (or processes) for making them happen. If the members have the "what" and "why," we should readily give them the "how."

Let's say a church member comes up to you and tells you God has given them a "burden" for a new ministry for the youth of the community. And the more you listen, the more you think this ministry would actually be valuable to the community. And then you start thinking that it could mesh very well with your church vision.

Do you have a process to empower this person? Do all the members know (or have access to) that process? They should.

Here's just a sample process for how to start new ministries:

How to Start New Ministries

Because the church is the Body of Christ, each member is interdependent. No one should try to start a church-based ministry without (or in spite of) church support.

At each step of the way, you'll need to find support and buy-in:

1. be clear on the community need and your spiritual gifts
2. talk to your pastor about your ministry vision
3. ask your pastor if it fits the vision of the church
4. find at least one potential ministry partner
5. write out a proposal, including...
• ministry need and vision
• who would do what (spiritual gifts, roles)
• who would this ministry report to?
• resources (time and money) required
• how/when could it become self-sustaining?
• start-up timeline
6. show your plan to your pastor
7. ask for your plan to go to the church board
8. church board would give final approval (or disapproval)
9. be willing to try hard and fail a lot

My advice is to print this up on a brightly-colored piece of paper and put it on bulletin boards, in the literature racks, and in every ministry process playbook (you use playbooks, right?).

Once people know they're allowed to start new ministries, they might actually try. And someone might be successful. You may have the birth of a new leader. And the world might be changed for Christ.

Efficiency v. Effectiveness - CAGEMATCH!

You may have noticed in my little blurb about me that "I'm on a journey toward becoming a more effective and efficient pastor."

Stephen R. Covey says:

"While you can think in terms of efficiency in dealing with time, a principle-centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness in dealing with people.”

I've too often made the mistake of trying to be efficient with people... putting the end results first or trying to make facetime as brief (i.e. efficient) as possible. Someone walks up to my desk to talk (about something actually important) and I've thought that I can "listen," check my e-mail, file papers, give "obvious" (duh!) answers, and still be effective. Um... no. Notsomuch.

Being efficient with people is not effective.

The goal here is to be efficient with time so you can take the time (however long it takes) to be effective with people.

This is something I've heard before (note 1, 2 previous entries on being fully present). But I find, as a naturally task-oriented person, that my default position is to ignore the relationship in the midst of getting things done.

Evaluation

Evaluation is at the very foundation of effectiveness. You don't really know which direction to lead your church (and by extension, what to do today) unless you have taken some time to evaluate the situation. If you aren't evaluating, how do you know what to prioritize?

Here is presented a cyclical model for planning (in any field at any time, micro or macro):

1. Evaluate the current situation and needs
2. Plan how to address the situation and needs
3. Implement plan
4. Evaluate effectiveness of implemented plan
5. Repeat

As you can see, evaluation is key to two of the steps. You must evaluate the overall situation and figure out how to meet it. And then you must evaluate how effectively your implemented plans met the situation (you might call this an effectiveness review).

One of the best tools I have ever found for ongoing church evaluation (and thus, strategic planning) is the Natural Church Development (NCD) survey.

This survey is completed by 30 church members and analyzes the local church in 8 key areas:

1. Empowering Leadership
2. Inspiring Worship
3. Functional Structures
4. Holistic Small Groups
5. Gift-oriented Ministry
6. Need-oriented Evangelism
7. Passionate Spirituality
8. Loving Relationships

Our church is on its third NCD survey cycle over the last 5 years. The first time we did the survey, we found that our minimum factor (our biggest need area) was Holistic Small Groups. So we addressed that by starting a small groups ministry in our church. The next time we took the survey, all of our scores had gone up, because our new small groups ministry had positively impacted every aspect of the church.

We were so excited by our positive results (every factor over 60!) that we didn't address the new minimum factor (Loving Relationships). And on our third survey, we found that Loving Relationships have deteriorated even further. So that's the area that our church really needs to work on now to become healthy and growing again.

I'm really proud of my board. They are doing a great job of strategic planning and really working in a prayerful way to address this minimum factor.

If you don't use some kind of formal evaluation tool, you really should start. Make it a tool that you can use over and over again so you can track your progress and see how effective your implementation was...

Not Enough Time to Read?

As "idea professionals," pastors can never read enough. You have to keep up on church growth literature, business/management/leadership practices, and theological and cultural trends. And you have to make time to feed your own soul.

Here are a few great resources:

ChristianBookSummaries.com - FREE. This site has a large library of summarized Christian books. Most are contemporary. Some are classics. You can sign up to get an email each time they upload a new summary. The books are well-summarized (about 8 pages each) and easy to move through quickly. You might find the quick summary read-through is enough (it took 200 pages to say that???). Or you might find that you want to buy the whole book. Either way, you've saved quite a bit of time and kept up on some recent Christian thought.

Tarrant Baptist Association - FREE. Also has a bunch of great Christian (and some business) book summaries. They seem to be less professional and all html-based, but I've gotten a lot of interesting reading out of them. They also seem to have some more up-to-the-minute titles.

PastorResources.com - FREE. If you go to the "bookshelf" section, you can see summaries (and/or excerpts) of very recently published books. I've actually found several very interesting books from here that I have put on my amazon.com wish list. You can also sign up for a weekly email that includes 4-5 book summaries each week.

Executive Book Summaries - NOT FREE. The site that started it all. Get all of the best and most recent books on management, leadership, sales, marketing, cultural trends, etc. This is a subscription service. It's a little pricey, but not nearly as much as you'd pay for the books (and time to read them, to boot). Download some free samples, while you're there.

Prepared for Preaching

Did you hear the one about the pastor who accidentally mentioned that he did all of his sermon preparation on the walk between the parsonage and the church? On the agenda for the next board meeting was a proposal to sell that parsonage and buy a new one 20 miles away.

A couple weeks ago in The Amazing Expanding Project, I wrote about short-scheduling your projects as a great way to manage time and beat procrastination. Unfortunately, the example I used was preaching. And upon further reflection, I have decided that I didn't really need to encourage pastors to spend less time on their sermons (in general).

In Thom Rainer's book Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, he points out that the first major reason for the unchurched to return or retreat is the impression they get of the pastor. And most of that impression comes during the sermon time.

The whole rest of your ministry can suck - you can quit visiting, quit evangelising, quit running effective meetings, quit planning, quit liking people - and people will still think you're a good pastor if you hit it out of the ballpark every weekend from the pulpit. (Wait, I know that pastor)

Conversely, the whole rest of your ministry can be great. But if you're not preaching well, people will think you're an idiot. (I know that pastor, too)

Obviously, you don't want either extreme. You want to be a great preacher and a faithful pastor.

But you can't be a great preacher if you don't spend enough time on it. You can't just think something up on the way to church and wing it every week.

Preaching is a sacred responsibility. It's not something that we should ever take lightly. It should weigh heavily on us. We are handling God's Word. Are we handling it faithfully? Or are we twisting it to fit our ideas and agendas? We are leading God's people. Are we leading them into His truth and will? Or are we just saying stuff that will sound impressive or not offend the saints?

Spend enough time really preparing to preach. Plan your preaching. Pray over your preaching. Read about preaching. Practice. Review your sermons. Analyze audio and video tapes. Evaluate your effectiveness. Improve. (It's a stewardship issue)

Prayerfully plan your sermonic year. (My Process)
Create compelling topical series. (Sermon Series Planning Worksheet)
Make each week's sermon Biblical, Interesting, Relevant, Balanced, and Christ-centered.
Take enough time each week to:
- Study your pericope and outline major themes and principles (early in the week)
- Find modern, relevant illustrations (early in the week)
- Decide what actions your listeners should take
- Find Jesus in the topic/text/theme
- Pray, pray, pray

Why I Blog Meme

Beth (over at My Simpler Life) just tagged me in the "why I blog" meme.

There are several reasons why I blog:

• It keeps me accountable to GTD and best practices.
  
• Pastors desperately NEED time management and personal productivity.
• I thrive on developing others.
• I learn best by teaching.
• It's storage for my best thoughts, ideas, links, processes, and documents.
• The community sharpens me.
• It could enhance my career.
• It might make enough money to pay for itself.
• My wife encouraged me to do it.
• It keeps me moving forward.
  

Pastoral Longevity

Okay. So this blog is about time management and personal productivity for pastors.

Today's time management tip is really a part of my big soap box rant about pastors staying long enough to make a difference in a local congregation.

The average tenure (meaning "ten years") of a pastor in North America (across all denominations) is less than five years.

Back in 1954, a pastor could walk into a new pastorate and have all of the respect and "positional authority" to make a difference. Pastors were authority figures, often with much more education than anyone else in the congregation. They were recognized leaders in a trusted profession. They could make a difference in just a few short years.

That was then. Times have changed. Pastors no longer walk onto the job with positional authority. Pastors must earn that authority. Pastoral ministry is no longer a trusted profession. Because of this, it now takes much longer to become a productive pastor than it used to.

On average, it takes about 4 years until you get that kind of trust and authority in a local congregation. At year 4, leaders in the church will start testing your boundaries, seeing if they can really trust you, seeing if you'll buckle (just like two-year-olds do with their parents). They don't even know they're doing it. But they're trying to figure out whether they can trust you to become the real leader of the church.

Unfortunately, most pastors sense this pushback as an attack. So they start looking for other jobs. And they take the first one that looks half-decent (emphasis on half).

If you'll just stay put for a year, you'll get through the testing point. And you'll finally have all the authority you need to start being productive.

Here's a quote from the George Barna Group:

"Our work has found that the typical pastor has his or her greatest ministry impact at a church in years five through fourteen of their pastorate. Unfortunately, we also know that the average pastor lasts only five years at a church - forfeiting the fruit of their investment in the church they've pastored."

So, if you want to be a truly effective pastor, you must stay put long enough to earn enough authority to actually become effective.

Not only that, just think of how much time you waste preparing your house for sale and finding a new house to buy in a new community. Think of the time you waste having to just get up to speed in a new congregation or new community.

That said, after seven years at Cornerstone, I will be leaving in June.

From Doer to Designer

I think one of the best ways to increase personal productivity as a pastor is to intentionally move from the role of doer to the role of designer. Moving from doer to designer is all about leveraging your time and energy.

Pastors complain all the time about the church expecting them to do all of the ministry. And pastors know that their real job is to empower others to do ministry. But the pastor isn't really doing anything about it. Even when the pastor thinks he is empowering others, often he's really just willy-nilly dumping responsibility on someone else.

So the pastor has to become a designer. I'm talking about the pastor becoming process-oriented, designing workflows, and establishing best practices. This means writing down every important detail of every regular church process and publishing it.

Note of Caution: I'm not talking about the pastor becoming the only designer in the church. The pastor doesn't have to write down all the processes by himself. But the entire church needs to become a place where well-designed processes and well-documented workflows are the norm.

Once the processes are designed and documented, they become great tools for training (empowering) people to do ministry. That way, people don't have to reinvent the wheel each time they do something, or scramble each time a ministry volunteer moves away. With a well-designed and documented process, you have an established standard for accountability. If the process isn't working, your document can be a great diagnostic tool to see where it's breaking down.

I really believe people want to be involved in ministry. And I believe they want to be successful. But too many times, they don't know what the job entails. They don't have clear outcomes and processes to look at. So they don't know what to do. And they don't do it. And they feel like they're failing at serving the Lord. And you wonder why people just aren't volunteering anymore.

The doer/designer problem is a major reason small companies fail to become large - the entrepreneur who started the business has all of the standards and processes. But they're trapped in the entrepreneur's brain. And when it's time for the business to grow, the small business owner is overwhelmed with so much to do and doesn't know the next step. The next step: go from doer to designer. Design and document all of your processes.

This will take extra time up front, but it will save you lots of time, energy, volunteers, relationships, and sanity in the long run. And who knows, it may just be what you need to move your church to the next level.

P.S. I really suggest going through the Ministry Advantage Pastor's Coaching System to help you make the transition from doer to designer.

Always Take Someone With You

Don't do anything alone as a pastor that you could be doing with someone else.

Do you need to make a hospital visit? Take someone.
Are you going to a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce? Invite someone.
Are you teaching a baptismal class? Bring an elder along.
Are you going to a conference? Take someone.
Are you planning an upcoming sermon series? Include someone in the process.
Are you going out to lunch this afternoon? Take someone with you.

Jesus sent His disciples out two-by-two in Luke 10 to go and preach and teach, cast out demons, and heal the sick. When they come back in verses 17 and 18, Jesus says "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."

There is something powerful about doing ministry as a team (two or more people together). Here are some major benefits that no pastor can afford to ignore:

• Spiritual Power - Biblically, there seems to be something very spiritually important about working in teams. Adam had Eve as a helpmate; Moses needed Aaron; Elijah had Elisha; Barnabas mentored Paul; Paul worked with Silas; Paul trained Timothy; etc. I think it's significant that Jesus made a behind-the-scenes spiritual comment about Satan falling like lightning when the disciples went out two-by-two into ministry.
  
• Accountability - A team member can keep us accountable in several ways. They can help us make sure we are being honest and transparent. They can keep us accountable to right thinking and a right relationship with God. They can keep us accountable to our stated vision and goals.
  
• Training for Ministry - If you don't spend time with people, you can't train up the next generation of gospel workers. You'll be able to delegate a lot easier if you have already brought someone to a level of familiarity with the task. Maybe the person has skills or interests that can be used to grow God's kingdom. You won't know if you aren't spending time with them.
  
• Transfer of Vision - Vision is caught, not taught. You can't transfer the vision that God has put on your heart by teaching a class or having people fill in the blanks. My senior pastor used to drive me around town, pointing out land that would make a great site for a new church. He would drive me through parts of town where we had no church members. We would pray together. We would brainstorm. He was transferring vision.
  
• Relationship - Pastoring (especially in a small church) is all about relationships. Are you building relationships for God's Kingdom? Are you deepening relationships within the body of believers? Relationships take time.

Bottom line: Don't do it alone. You weren't meant to. Pastors already feel isolated. There's no need to compound that by neglect.

Megachurch Pastor Craig Groeschel on Time Management

Over at the Lifechurch.tv Swerve Blog, Pastor Craig Groeschel is doing a 5-part series on Time Management.

Craig is an amazing communicator and the founding Pastor of a very innovative multi-campus megachurch in Edmond, OK.

His Time Management Blog Series is called Don't Do It All. He really focuses on delegation as a necessary part of leadership and time management. He also talks about churches trying to do too much in areas that don't matter for the Kingdom.

One of the things that really spoke to me was his assertion that people don't delegate for one of two reasons:

1. Poor Leadership Skills
2. Pride

Ouch.

A [deceptively] Simple Buy-in Process

I wrote a previous post on getting buy-in from the board. But not all of your biggest influencers are on the board. How did that happen?

You need the support of your biggest influencers to make a success of any major initiative - changing a church name, buying/selling property, changing church organizational structure, raising money to hire a Bible worker, creating a new outreach focus, starting a second worship service, etc.

Obviously, the more people you put into this process, the better. Small churches operate like a large (dysfunctional) family. So everyone has to be considered an influencer. In medium and large churches, make sure you get buy-in from ministry leaders, committee members, and major donors. In very large and mega churches, you only need buy-in from the planning team and staff (that's a very simplistic way of looking at it).

Make a 3 column document:

Those who will make it happen
Those who will let it happen
Those who will keep it from happening

Write down as many people as possible into this document. Then focus all of your energy into getting influencers to move left just one column. You want the "keepers" to become "letters." And you want the "letters" to become "makers."

According to Gary McIntosh in One Size Doesn't Fit All, the influence process needs to be bottom-up through key families in a small church, middle-out through committees and ministry teams in medium-sized churches, and top-down from the staff in very large churches.

Present a Rough-[almost final]-Draft

Because churches are volunteer organizations, and because they are run by committee, and because the church will be there long after you leave - you NEED buy-in. In fact, buy-in may be one of the most important commodities in a congregation. If there's no buy-in, you're just spinning your tires.

As a young pastor, I wanted to look professional in front of my board. I wanted them to believe me and trust me. I wanted them to like my proposals and vote them unanimously!

And it worked. They trusted me. They believed I had thought through all the issues in advance. They liked my proposals. And they voted them through unanimously!

But there was a problem. No buy-in. My early proposals were so slick, so convincing that they actually prevented me from getting buy-in. They liked the idea; they voted it through. But nobody else had wrestled with it. Nobody had made it their own. Nobody else was willing to go out on a limb to actually make it happen.

So here's my little lifehack for getting buy-in in meetings. It's not an efficient way of ramming through your agenda, but it is an effective way of getting collaboration and buy-in. It doesn't look terribly professional, but it works.

When you're about to make a proposal, create a document that is your best work. Then mark it up, cross something out, and make notes on the sides. Copy that and hand it out. People will see it as a work in progress - a rough draft. They'll read what you've crossed out. They'll automatically start brainstorming with you toward a better idea. They'll automatically assume ownership.

Poof! It becomes theirs. It becomes collaborative. Buy-in has been achieved.