Category: Leadership (page 8 of 8)

The Three Leaders Every Team Needs

June 23, 2010 / / 2 Comments /

Every great team has three types of leaders. This is true for churches or companies of any size. If any of the three types are missing, there will be stagnation, chaos and ultimately, failure. If a team has the right balance of the three, there will be growth and productivity.

Visionaries are people who see the future and dream about all the possibilities.

Strategists are people with the ability to take a dream and create a clear, tactical plan that can be followed by others.

Administrators are people who can manage all the details of the plan and provide accurate data to the team.

All three types of people are leaders for sure and all three groups need to be on your team.  If you are missing visionaries, you become stagnant and lose your innovative edge. If you are missing strategists, nothing is ever planned well and often there is poor execution of the big ideas that are discussed in your meetings. If administrators are missing, there is never any accurate data to determine if you are indeed hitting the mark.

What is your team missing? What type of leader needs to be added to your team so you can hit the mark and move forward?

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Where’s the Preacher?

June 14, 2010 / / 6 Comments /

I just took three Sundays in a row off from the pulpit at New Life Church and it may have saved my life. That may be a bit dramatic, but let me explain why I am not the speaker at New Life every Sunday.

Sermons on the weekends are not just 30-minute talks. A 30-minute message drains as much emotional energy as the average 8-hour workday. If a pastor has to speak more than once each weekend, the emotional drain is multiplied and if there is not a break from speaking, significant emotional and physical health is often compromised.

The elders at New Life are a group of guys who not only oversee the spiritual health of our fellowship, but also help me maintain a healthy balance between ministry to the local church and personal health. We have agreed that I should speak at New Life at least 36 weekends each calendar year. That’s an average of 3 out 4 weekends each month. The remaining weekends, I have staff, some members of the fellowship and some pastors from other churches teach.

I am not whining about my job, but I am being candid. Pastors who speak more than 40 weekends a year, with multiple weekend services are headed for burnout. There may be a handful of Superman pastors who can do this long-term, but there is a long list of those who have tried and have ended up losing their families, their health, or worse, their own spiritual vitality. I do not want to be on that list.

I miss New Life when I am gone, but I have to trust that I am not the only person who can teach Scripture.  I believe in the power of team and I believe the church is strongest when a multitude of voices are heard on Sundays.

I will be back at New Life this Sunday and I am fired up to talk about Ephesians for the next several weeks, but I will miss some Sundays and I do not apologize for my absence. I am running a marathon and want to be an old pastor who finishes the race well rather than a young foolish one who is convinced his preaching is all that a church needs.

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Are We Distracted?

June 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments /

“Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.” Proverbs 4:25 NIV

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV

Have you noticed how easy it is for our kids to get distracted? At my house, television, video games and even the computer easily distract my two kids. Pam and I seem to be always repeating ourselves and getting them re-focused on the chore at hand, like getting ready for school, brushing their teeth or eating dinner at the table.

Sadly, adults are not much better at staying focused. We seem to always be drifting away from our primary mission and God has to snap his fingers and regain our attention. We seem to get caught up in the temporal and forget the eternal.  We forget our primary assignments in order to chase after things that once caught, dissolve like sand in our hands.

For me to stay focused and not get distracted, I try to remember my primary assignment which is to love God, love Pam, be a dad to Abram and Callie and lead New Life.  There’s not much time or bandwidth left for anything else. The moment I try to add something to this list, one of the primary assignments has to take a secondary role and that is never good long-term.

Next, I try to anticipate distractions because they are as certain as death and taxes. I know something is a distraction because it deflects my attention away from my primary assignments.  Once I realize that an event or situation is consuming my time and energies, I have to determine if it is a distraction or an emergency.

Emergencies are different than distractions. Emergencies are something that can be solved with the right amount of attention and care. Distractions are like mirages. The closer you get to it, the further it moves away.  Distractions are something that cannot be solved by any amount of attention or care.  Distractions are perpetual time wasters and drains on your emotional batteries.

My charge to you today is to make a list of your primary assignments. Next, make a list of things that are distracting you from these assignments.  Are they emergencies that can be solved or distractions that will only drain your batteries? Let’s fix our eyes straight ahead, refuse to be distracted and remember that eternity is something that deserves our primary focus and energy.

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Equipping vs. Event Planning

May 20, 2010 / / 1 Comment /

How much of your team’s time is spent organizing and administrating events? How much time does your team spend equipping leaders and empowering people to do ministry? If we really evaluated these two questions, the results would be shocking and would go a long way explaining why so many attend our events but so few are actually engaged in the mission of making disciples.

I am not saying that events are evil or that organizing an event is a waste of our time. Some of the most epic moments I have had with God have been at events that someone took the time to organize.  What I am saying is that we must balance our time so that we are actually empowering people to be Christ followers who are making disciples and not enabling people to look at big events as the sum total of the Gospel experience.

A friend told me today that a man in our church is sitting on the sidelines and is waiting for a chance to do some ministry.  I told my friend to tell this man to open up the newspaper everyday and look for an area in our city that needs serving and get busy serving. If this man is waiting around for me to plan and organize an event tailored to his passions, he could be in for a long wait. Chances are, we might schedule something that fires him up, but then again, he may pass on several outreach events because they do not fit his schedule or align with his passions.

The bottom line is the pastors and leaders of local fellowships should spend the majority of their time equipping, training, leading, praying and releasing people to serve. We can schedule a few events that are necessary to rally the entire family around a big need in our city, but the primary responsibility to get involved falls on the individual, not on the church leaders.

What do you expect from the leaders of your church? Can you support your expectations with the expectations placed on them by Scripture? The life of God is released in a church and a city when leaders are equipping the people for the work of ministry and events only exist to strengthen the mission of the fellowship.

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Giving and the Local Church

May 17, 2010 / / 2 Comments /

The local church should be the most well funded group in our culture, but it’s not, and there are plenty of good reasons. Most local fellowships, including New Life, need to make some fundamental changes in the way they function in order for people to trust them with their finances. Here are a few thoughts to discuss and consider.

1. The church must be a storehouse and not a stockpile

In the Old Testament, there were regional storehouses, where people would literally bring their tithe of livestock, grains and produce. These storehouses had two primary functions – to take care of the needs of the priests and to distribute resources to the widows and poor. The New Covenant established by Christ did away with the Temple sacrifices, but the function of the local church was to be much the same. The elders should have the support necessary to pray and lead the church, and the local fellowship should be the distribution point for the widows and poor.  The church was never meant to be a stockpile of resources that were consumed primarily by its members.

2. The church must be missional not empirical

The days of empirical church are coming to an end and the age of mission is returning. People are no longer motivated to build more buildings just for the sake of new buildings. There has to be a legitimate Kingdom mission attached to each project that can be clearly communicated. If there is even a hint that something is being done to promote a person’s ego or ambition, wary churchgoers will withhold their resources. However, if the real needs of humanity are being met with the project, you can expect extreme generosity, even in a down economy.

3. The decisions must be made by a team, not a person

The local church is designed to be led by a team of people with various strengths and differing functions. That’s why it’s called a body. One dominant person with a charismatic personality may get the crowd charged with excitement, but over the long haul, it will require a team of men and women, young and old to accomplish the audacious dreams that God gives us.

I do believe the local church is returning to its original design and just in time. Our culture is tired of the flash and hype and is longing for humility and authenticity in a local church. May we respond to the needs of our world and reflect the love of Christ to our city, using words only when necessary. When we do, we will never lack the resources required for His mission.

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Leading from a Distance

May 3, 2010 / / 3 Comments /

Can you leave your church for the weekend and not fret? Can you not show up one Sunday and the worship services continue? Are most Sundays built around your charisma, your strengths and your talents or can someone different than you lead a weekend service? Do you have to be at every public gathering so people will feel the meeting is important?

I believe the real test of a leader is not so much when they are up front but when they are away and someone on the team is leading. Too many churches are built around one set of spiritual gifts and around one personality. The healthiest churches I know have empowered a diverse group of people to lead so that many spiritual gifts and many perspectives can be on display to the congregation.

This is one reason I have not embraced the video campus model and instead I am experimenting with another pastor leading a Sunday night campus who preaches my message live instead of asking people to watch me on a screen. There is nothing wrong with the aforementioned model so I am not challenging the leadership of many of my friends who do this at multiple campuses. What I am saying is there is another option that may work just as well.

My model is messier, requires a lot of relational equity with the campus pastor and demands loyalty and trust from one another. But in the end, it allows me to mentor young communicators and helps build our fellowship around a multitude of gifts and personalities and not just one. I am still the primary leader and I have final say on the sermon topics. We preach the same main points and use the same Scriptures, but a team is formed and many players get in the game.

This is just one way I am purposely leading New Life while purposely staying away from many of the gatherings. I want to lead, at times, from a distance.

Have you empowered people around you to lead or does everyone look to you to oversee every gathering? Are you preaching in your own pulpit more than 48 times a year?  If so, can I suggest you immediately begin mentoring your replacement, because unless you are spiritual Superman, you are headed for burnout.

Step away and lead from a distance. You will find rest for your soul, and the church will get to feed from a buffet of teachers and not from just one menu item. Your team will rise to the challenge and your church will become healthier than ever. Try it for a year and let me know if I am right or wrong.

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Raising the Bar

April 16, 2010 / / 4 Comments /

Recently, New Life Church was accepted as a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. I know that sounds as exciting as a root canal, but it is a big deal to me. ECFA sets very high standards for membership and only a handful of churches even bother trying to meet the requirements.

When I came to New Life in 2007, we did not have the internal structures or policies to be a member, but we were determined to make the changes necessary to hit the mark. The first thing we did was change the way decisions were made about spending money. We had always done a yearly audit, but we then added a purchase order system, a more detailed budget and we changed our elder structure. Under the old system, the Senior Pastor had a lot of autonomous, independent spending authority, but under our new system, spending decisions are made as a team with a lot more accountability from elders who are not a part of the staff.

Why did I make all these changes? The old system was not corrupt or necessarily broken. I could have continued with the status quo and no one would have been alarmed or concerned. The reason is simple. I want to be able to stand in front of our fellowship and challenge everyone to give and for them to know that we are operating with complete integrity and maintaining the highest standards available.

This removes all suspicion and brings everything into the light for all to see. Our finances are posted at www.ecfa.org and will be updated regularly. I want people to know we are committed to being good stewards, living below our means and giving generously at every opportunity. These are the principles we live by in the Boyd house and I want the same principles to apply at the church I lead.

Check out the website and give me your opinion. Is this important to you as a New Lifer? Does this help clear up any confusion or is it no big deal?

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What makes a good meeting?

April 3, 2010 / / 4 Comments /

A good meeting sounds like an oxymoron.  Meetings are normally not the highlight of the day at the office or at the church. People dread them like a root canal and for good reason. Usually, a lot is said, nothing is decided and very little is done after the meeting is over.  Either the meetings need to be cancelled or we need to change the way we do meetings. Let me make four suggestions.

1.    Don’t put anything on the agenda that cannot be debated

Patrick Lencioni wrote a classic book on this idea called, “Death by Meeting.” It should be required reading for anyone who leads. Lencioni compares a great meeting to a great movie – both need tension to be awesome. There are lots of rules that need to be made clear before you launch into a meeting filled with debate. First, all debate must be respectful and never become personal. Throw the grenade in the middle of the table, not at one another. Second, no one can be punished for asking the tough questions. Third, the leader of the meeting must encourage input from everyone in the room, not just the three or four strong personalities who love debate. Often the best ideas come from the people in the meeting who actually think before they speak.

2.    Start on time and be on time

My time is valuable and so is yours. If there is a meeting at 2pm, the proper time to arrive is 1:55pm. I am not a military dictator, but I do think it is rude to arrive late. It is also bad manners to start a meeting late and to go longer than announced. Start on time, be on time and finish on time.

3.    Hold each other accountable for what was decided

Lencioni has another classic book called “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” He believes most teams have little or no accountability and I agree. Meetings should produce action steps or resolves. Someone in the meeting must take ownership of each decision and be expected to report on the progress after a reasonable time.

4.    Debate in private, support in public

If the team makes a decision that you do not agree with, the time to bring up your concerns is in the meeting and not later while in the break room.  To be clear, the leader of the meeting needs to make sure everyone is heard and all the debate has happened before a decision is made. But once that happens, it is required that everyone own the decision and be willing to defend it publicly.

I must confess I have led a lot of sloppy meetings and I’ve attended many that were a complete waste of sunlight. For those on the team at New Life, I ask them to hold me accountable to practice what I blog. I know I will die someday. I just don’t want to die while sitting in a pointless meeting.

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The future of the local church

December 28, 2009 / / 8 Comments /

In the past ten years, I have witnessed remarkable changes in the local church and the coming decade will usher in even more transformations. While the ancient Sacraments will remain, everything else is up for debate. How we worship, when we gather, what is said, who is leading and where the gatherings happen will all undergo scrutiny and debate.

I have four predictions for the next decade of local church.

1. The places where we gather will become smaller

Every social and cultural trend is leaning toward the smaller, more intimate gatherings and away from the stadium worship experience. Mega churches that purposely create numerous worship settings that promote intimacy and community will see the most significant growth. There will always be a group of church people who will come to the big building, but if we want to see significant growth among skeptics and seekers, we must create less threatening venues for them to explore the issues of faith.

2. The church will be launched into real mission.

The local church is hungry to embrace the mission of the New Testament and this will only increase in the next decade. This next generation is tired of the hype of events and is eager to give their lives to something that requires sacrifice and results in biblical justice. They want to get their hands in the dirt of humanity and see real change in the communities where they live. They will come to the church building for some of the attractional events, but will get disillusioned quickly if these events do not result in real opportunities to serve their world.

3. The church will return to its ancient roots

If it’s new, it’s probably not truth. If its truth, it’s probably not new. I believe the ancient, yet simple recipe of local church will return. We will gather often, read the Scriptures, worship intently, pray fervently, be led by servants, live authentically, and honor the Sacraments. For sure, we will continue to be creative and inventive, but not at the expense of the ancient structure which has transcended all generations for over 2000 years.

4. The church will return to wonder and awe

The churches that embrace the supernatural nature of God will see the most growth and have the most influence in the coming decade. Good preaching, trendy stage sets, and clever videos will not be enough in the next ten years because people want to see God intervene more and more in the affairs of the earth with miracles and healings. Sound theology must prevail and we must not return to our sloppy Charismatic tendencies, but we must also embrace the mysterious and risky nature of God and not be afraid of wonder and awe. While the Holy Spirit may be unpredictable, the results are always predictable – people will find God, people will be healed and people will discover real freedom.


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