Category: Church Leadership

  • How Not to Be a Jerk

    jerk-city

    I’ve noticed a crazy pattern. Help me understand it.

    Cause: A Christian leader will say or blog or tweet or Facebook something over-the-top. Hey, it happens. The way things are these days, an unfiltered moment can easily get recorded.

    Effect: Someone calls them on it. Maybe it’s a blog post or maybe it’s just a comment that says something like, “Um, that’s whack!”

    Cause: That blog post, comment, or tweet draws even more attention to the original outlandish thing.

    Effect: The once tiny statement, in context or out of context, starts getting mentioned to that leaders often enough where they think they have to respond. Maybe his co-workers mention it to him or maybe he’s gotten some emails or phone calls about it or maybe his statement ends up on a big name blog with a headline, “Christian leader thinks ______.”

    [Pause] This is where a critical choice is made. The leader, who now feels exposed, has to chose what to do next. The smartest thing to do is to either apologize for the stupid statement or at a minimum just move on. About 90% of people do this. But lately a new option has taken on popularity. The original offender goes on the offensive against the person who has called them out. It’s like a train wreck from here on out! [unpause]

    Cause: The Christian leader rallies his troops (friends, fans, staff) to defend him. It sounds noble, but it’s really throwing gasoline onto a smoldering fire. By taking a victims position these troops are poised to stand up and cry foul. Here comes the Christianese.

    Effect: The person who originally mentioned the statement is blind-sided by tons of comments and emails demanding that he stop attacking this leader. Typically, without a leg to stand on, these troops will go the politically correct angle and say, “Who are you to call this persons integrity into question” or “do you think this is glorifying to God to defame ____?” In effect, two wrongs don’t make a right. The person who called out the leader is now put on the defensive simply for bringing up that the leader said something outlandish.

    Cause: The Christian leader uses his platform (blog, Facebook, Twitter account, or even pulpit) to joke about how he has haters. Maybe he even makes fun of the person who brought it up in the first place? His aim in doing this is deflect the impact of his original offensive remark by pointing out how the person who called him out is a worse sinner than he is.

    Effect: The community of people who have observed this entire exchange are left with less respect for Christian leaders.

    My point? If you say something stupid, just acknowledge it, apologize for it, and move on. Taking it this far is buying a ticket for Jerk City. I really think that leaders who pursue the steps after the [pause] are just insecure in their position. In other words, you don’t see people who have been in visible positions for a long time getting tangled up in this sort of thing. They’ve learned that the best response is just to recognize their mistake and apologize as soon as possible.

    For the record, I’ve been on every side of this story! I just hope I’m growing up enough to buy a lot fewer tickets to Jerk City.

  • One-Two Punch of Leaders

    leadership-trump-rogers

    I’ve been thinking about leadership a lot lately as I reflect on the type of leader that I tend to follow. More to the point, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the type of leader I aspire to be.

    Let’s start with what I hate.

    I hate the Donald Trump-type of leader.The ego driven type A-aholics that thrive on their own power. As Trump himself has proven time and again, it is a losing style of leadership. Trump’s leadership style is bankrupt across many layers.

    I hate the Mr. Rogers-type of leader. These leaders are so afraid of expressing their will on an organization that their team feels unlead. These leaders make you feel good but often lead failing organizations. This leadership style makes you feel good but fails to produce results.

    Rather than go any further into this metaphor, I’ll get to the point. The type of leader I love and aspire to be is actually a combination of both. When I look at the landscape of “what’s wrong with leadership” I often see one type of leader or the other leading an organization. But I think it’d be more healthy if organizations intentionally had a little of both. You need a strong leader to get things done and cast vision. But you also need people who are insanely compassionate. And since it is nearly impossible to be both Donald Trump and Mr. Rogers… I think the best style of leadership is to have both.

    It’s way better to have the tension of plural leadership than it is to fail.

    Observation #1: Women seem to be better at this than men. I’m not one of those Christian men who buys into the lie that men are better leaders than women. I’ve got too much experience with excellent female leaders to believe that for a second. I’m astonished that churches openly discriminate against women who are strong leaders… but that’s another post for another day. I am not saying that men can’t do this, I’m just observing that when it comes to sharing leadership for the strength of the team… my experience has shown me that women do it easier than men.

    Observation #2: The best leaders have an equal and opposite sidekick. I jokingly refer to this as “Good cop, bad cop.” I’ve played both roles in leadership… but it’s way more fun to be good cop. When this works well it gets an insane amount of stuff done. It’s an efficiency machine!

    Observation #3: Everyone is happier with a one-two punch of leaders. Ultimately, there is the boss. But having a one-two punch of leaders allows people of various personality types to have someone to gel with.

    Application: I’m still working through this. Let me know your thoughts.

  • Two Kinds of Medium Sized Church People

    Here are some more thoughts on the medium-sized church crisis. My post the other day attracted a fair amount of comments and attention… and I was pretty frustrated that people jump to the issue of money.

    I only think that the money problems of current are bringing the Medium-sized church crisis to the forefront. At the end of the day I’m meeting two types of churchoers. Once you cut past the nice fluff they say about their churches and preacher they are really either small church people or megachurch people.

    What does this mean for medium-sized church? My experience in medium-sized churches is that there is a tension between these two types of people. One is resistant of anything “small church” so stuff that is appealing to the small church is annoying to them and visa versa. Eventually, misguided and unaccepted tension results in hurt feelings, bitterness, disappointment, and a range of other typical medium-church angst.

    And that angst is why I’m saying the medium church is in crisis… Eventually, church leaders must chose to lead their church one direction or the other: Lead towards smaller environments or toward becoming a megachurch. The cultural division is causing this squeeze. The financial crisis merely accelerates the trend.

    A Personal Example

    In Romeo, we mislabeled these cultural issues as a “personal preference issue” instead of a cultural issue. Big mistake! Our small church folks didn’t mind if the worship team wasn’t professional sounding or if the church basement was a bit too homey for potlucks. Small church people find those things endearing… maybe even spiritual.

    Meanwhile, the megachurch people wanted everything to be like the megachurch they used to go to and they wanted the church to become. Everything was compared to the megachurch down the road or the stuff they saw on TV or enjoyed at a conference or read about online. To the megachurch people, the failure of the small church people to realize all that Romeo could become was an abomination… a spiritual failure at worse and a lack of vision at best.

    See… this isn’t about money at all. Maybe I’ll be called a heretic for this? But, I will tell you what 10 years of church ministry has taught me about giving. Giving has 0% to do with what people are taught from the Bible and 100% to do with whether or not they feel that their money will further a cause they believe in. People are just sophisticated like that. They see right through the pleas for cash to your motivation. When motivations converge they give. When they disagree they give somewhere else. Christians are extremely generous… but they won’t give to a church simply because they go there.

    Next, let’s talk about money. I’ve only hinted at it, lets hit it straight away next time.

    Then, I want to talk about the superiority of small church and megachurch missions in our culture. This is the core reason for the crisis.

  • Check out the Youth Hacks podcast

    A couple weeks ago I shared a great hour of fun with Josh Cook and friends on the Youth Hacks podcast.

    You can listen online here.

    This was a lot of fun for me. We talked a little about life, a little about my transition to YS, and shared some fun tech stuff for youth ministry.

  • Medium-sized church crisis


    I guess this diagram is rather self-explanatory, eh? Over the last 4-5 months I’ve had several conversations in which the discussion centered on this diagram. So I submit it to you to chew on.

    Thoughts?

    If you are seeing the same thing, what are the plusses and minuses of this trend?

    If you think I’m nuts, let me know!

  • Slow Exhale

    Yesterday, Youth Specialties let go of about 40% of its workforce. It was a day that suckety, sucked, sucked. And than I thought about it and it sucked some more.

    Since YS is a small close-knit company I know every single person who was let go. You read about a company cutting jobs and it never seems personal… just a ticker on the bottom of the screen on MSNBC as I drink my morning coffee. This was very personal and too close to home.

    Today begins the slow exhale. In a couple of hours I begin to deal with the realities of “now what?” Yesterday is in the past and there is a lot to do in the hours, days, and weeks to come.

    Today I take a deep breath to breathe the new air of today. There is no other choice. The task at hand is to equip and encourage youth workers.

    Literally, this morning I will reshoot the podcast that was to go live yesterday and we will get right back to work. I will look into the camera and remind everyone… “What you do matters.” It does. It matters a lot.

    Marko posted this on his blog today… it captures what I feel about today.

  • The Power of Fear

    Up until fourth grade I lived in the city of South Bend on one of those quintessential small town streets where everyone knew everyone, kids played outside until the street lights came on, we all played at one anothers house, and we were all one happy family. Summer was all about riding bikes, fireworks, BBQs, swimming in Doug’s pool, endless games of football, and weekends at the lake. Winter was endless fort building and snow ball fights while avoiding shoveling the walk. At least, that’s how I remember it. I loved my street growing up. It was a safe place to play with friends.

    Until the summer between my 1st and 2nd grade year.

    One day I was riding my bike with a friend when we spotted something no kid could resist… wet concrete. The city had paved our street and replaced the concrete that went around a sewer grate right in the middle of my street, just a few doors from my house. The traffic cones were like syrens calling a weary sailor. We left our bikes in the grass, grabbed some sticks, and dashed for the land of the forbidden.

    The first thing we did was write our names. Then, my friend started furiously writing cuss words. He was number four in an Irish-Catholic family of seven. With two older brothers and a fire chief father he magically knew millions of cuss words and how to spell them. Not to be left out I spelled out the only cuss word I was confident I could spell: Dam.

    Proud of our vandalism we grabbed our bikes and took off to the park. Within minutes we had completely forgotten about our misdemeanor and moved on to other dubious acts like racing empty beer bottles down the slides and ghost riding our bikes down the hill of death.

    The next day, on my way over to the same friends house, I circled my bike around that sewer drain to see how things turned out. I was fixated on my name. “Adam.” How cool was that? Forever in the lore of Tonti Street everyone would know that I had placed my name on that sewer. One day, archeologists would dig up our block and they’d know that Adam lived there. I was an instant legend.

    Ecstatic, I jumped back on my bike. As I got a few pedals away, with my pride cutting through the summer air like a bottle rocket, I heard my name called out. I turned around to see one of the old geezers coming off his covered porch and waving me to come over to him. Our block was a mix of old timers and young families who had bought homes from estates of their former neighbors. I wheeled my bike around to gain momentum and sailed up his driveway to his front steps. Surely, he had seen my street art and wanted to congratulate the artist.

    I was dead wrong. While I had seen him mow his lawn and trim his bushes I had never talked to this man before. His size and demeanor were intimidating. He came down his steps with a limp and put his giant hand on my 7 year old shoulder. I remember looking up at him but not seeing much further than the anchor tattoo of the Navy on his forearm. Every sensor in my brain was telling me to run. I was convinced that he was going to grab me and pull me into his garage where he’d chop me up with his hedge clippers.

    “Son, I see you and your friend wrote in that concrete yesterday. You know you wrote some bad things and you’re going to have to clean that up somehow.” 25 years later and I still have no idea how he expected me to erase words from hard concrete. A jackhammer was simply not in the arsenal of a 7 year old. “If you don’t take care of that I’m going to tell your mom.” If his firm grip on my shoulder hadn’t scared me, the threat of telling my mom that I wrote “dam” in concrete on our street sent my flight instinct over the top. I wiggled my way free, jumped on my bike, and got out of there.

    The Power of Fear

    Those 15 seconds put more fear into me than I had never experienced. Worse yet, I was now deathly afraid to go anywhere near that man’s house… and he lived 4 doors down and across the street! The sanctuary of my block came tumbling down. I had constant nightmares starring that man. He was my Frankenstein. I still remember a recurring dream where I woke up hearing his voice on my front porch talking to my mom. In the dream I ran downstairs with a John Rambo-styled machine gun and peppered him with bullets until he completely disappeared. As a young child living halfway between reality and fantasy, all of my fantasies had me as a superhero and him as the villain.

    It’s amazing how 15 seconds of fear can terrorize you for years.

    The effect of this fear was actualized in my behavior. From that day forward I never went down that side of the street unless I was convinced he was gone. If I didn’t see his car drive away I was certain he sat on his porch staring at me, waiting for his moment to get me once and for all.

    I began riding my bike down the alley so as to avoid his glare. When school began, I didn’t go out the front door anymore, instead I climbed over the back fence and cut through neighbors yards to meet up with classmates for the walk to school. Halloween? Forget about it. I went to friends houses. On and on it went for more than two years. Those 15 seconds of terror changed how I felt about where I lived.

    A couple of years later my mom told us we were moving from the city to the suburbs. While my brother was upset that he’d lose all of his friends I was happy to start over and get away from the scary old neighbor. Little did I know that the dark streets of suburbia had their own things to be afraid of… but that’s another story for another time.

    My point here is that fear, no matter how irrational at times, often leads us to action. Sometimes that action is good, it protects us, while other times it leads us to do weird things like climbing fences to avoid the glare of an old man. Sometimes they are based in something imagined. While other times fears are based on something very real.

    Fear is one of the root motivators of all of our actions. If you serve in ministry… getting to the bottom of what you are afraid of helps you a lot. More importantly, building trust with people so that they will share their fears will help you discover how to best serve them.

  • Why do we cut heroes from the budget?

    In light of budget cuts all over, I’ve been thinking about those most effected.

    In my world, youth ministry and childrens ministry seem to be the first things cut at a church. If not first, than high on the list.

    Maybe in your world, it’s teacher’s.

    Or firemen/EMT’s.

    Or frontline customer service people.

    This isn’t the first recession of my working life. So I’ve seen the ebbs and flows of how it seems to work. In low-times those running things cut symbolically from their own perks and then hammer the little guy with layoffs. Even worse, sometimes they keep the little guy but make their work life horrible buy cutting the funding they need to be effective.

    So, now we see youth workers and teachers taking double paycuts. They won’t get a raise this year… didn’t get one last year… even worse, they didn’t get a raise last year and will take a paycut this year. On top of that they will start paying for a lot of ministry stuff out of their pockets. (Hence the double paycut) The same is true of teachers and many other frontline heroes.

    So, my question is simple. Why do heroes get paycuts while the big bosses don’t?

    Why are teachers seen as replaceable but administrators not? Why are kid’s ministry workers seen as less important than preaching to adults? How come no board says to their senior pastor, “We don’t really need a sermon every week. How about once a month and we’ll just get DVD’s for the other 3 Sunday’s?”

    Why are firefighters worried about getting laid off? Are we supposed to believe that city administrators will now answer 911 calls and rush into burning buildings?

    I think not. I think our culture grossly undervalues everyday heroes. I hope to one day live in a world where the heroes of society are richly rewarded.

  • How come?

    I was reading a couple ministry blogs this morning who were talking about worship services they either produce or visited. I don’t need to link to them as they are easy enough to find.

    Now that we go to a church with zero theatrics… and new people still come, and people still worship, and people still experience faith for the first time, and people still get connected, and people still give, and people are ever happy with our service!

    It made me wonder… how come people always want to do more with their worship services and not less?

    Why don’t bloggers brag about using one less camera man? One less drummer? One less actor? One less video screen? One less smoke machine? One less lighting board?

    Why is more noteworthy and less not?

    Why does over-the-top = excellence in worship?

    I have my theories as to why this happens in America, England, and Australia but few other places in the world. But I’ll just ask my friends… why is this so? Am I the only one who is annoyed by the logic that more = blessing, less = curse in the church? Am I the only one that finds massive theatrical production odd for “church?” Am I the only one who wonders how odd it must be for visitors to walk into a theater fit for a broadway production of Rent?

  • 3 Things I Don’t Want to Hear From a Pastor…. EVER!

    Now that I’m a regular Joe sitting in the pew on Sunday morning, I’ve gotten a chance to discover some things that are awkward for the audience to hear. In short, I don’t think pastors should say these things… EVER!

    1. Talk about your sex life. How gross is it to hear any 40 something year old man talk about sex with his spouse? It’s especially gross for a pastor to talk about having sex with his wife while she sits and blushes in the audience. And Ed Young, yeah… we know sex is beautiful… but no one wants to know how many times you had sex in a week. I think I just puked in my bulletin.
    2. Talk about your past careers. I know working at a church can pretty redundant and boring. And sometimes you feel like your role is insignificant next to the corporate types who write the big checks. Get over it, you aren’t a _____ anymore. You’re a pastor, your congregation loves you, and we know you could make more money elsewhere. Please don’t remind us of that every week, we don’t care.
    3. Using your kids sin as an illustration. Holy smokes this has got to damage kids self-image. Can you imagine the horror of not only being busted doing something bad but then having your mom or dad tell hundreds… or even thousands of people about it? No wonder so many pastor kids grow up hating Jesus. Cough. ***golden rule*** Cough. Cough.

    Thankfully, Stephen rarely does any of these.

    So what do I suggest? I know that these 3 things tend to come up because you need a good illustration. And typically, when I’ve let these types of things sneak in it is because I don’t have time to really research a great illustration. But you know they are “winners” and will go over with the core audience well because it’s personal and the people love you. But, be honest, these three things tend to come out most often when you have little time to prepare.