Tag Archives: leading

Are you responding too much?

06 Friday Jan 2017

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Yeah, that’s the question.  Are you responding too much?  It seems as though many people spend a good portion of their day responding to someone else – all day long.

If you have kids, you are always responding to them.

If you are pastor, you often spend days responding to situations and people in your care.

At work, we respond to our bosses, our coworkers, our clients and customers.

If you look on social media for about five seconds I’m sure you’ll find people responding to something the President or President-elect has said or tweeted.

There’s responses to other politicians too.

And to terror attacks and other acts of violence like shootings.

We respond to celebrities and their lives.

We respond to natural disasters.

We respond to e-mail, text, and messaging.  And God forbid you don’t immediately!

We respond to the guy or gal who cut us off in traffic.

We respond to some social media post on politics, or religion, or something else that we disagree with.

Tired yet?

Responding is not the same as leading.  Don’t get me wrong, there are times when it is appropriate to respond to things.  Like most things in life, this isn’t an all or nothing type of thing.

But, don’t you think we respond to too many things?  Why?  Is there an expectation that we should respond to every little thing?  Do we think that highly of ourselves that we think that anyone else cares what we think about a given situation or person?  Do we think we have to play the role of Savior and correct people?

I don’t have an answer.  I just know that most people waste their time responding.  I think we respond so much because responding is so much easier than leading.  It’s easier to offer criticism of an idea or person, than it is to take a chance in leading into the unknown.  Leading is a risk taking activity – and if you are doing it right, you’ll receive criticism.  That’s because you are upsetting the status quo.

If you are responding all the time, or even just a majority of the time, how are you supposed to have any time to do anything productive or anything that advances you towards the completion of your goals?

Churches spend a great deal of time responding.  And again, that’s not always a bad thing.  Often churches are the key players in a response to a situation.

Yet I wonder, are we, dear church, so busy responding that we aren’t taking risks any more?  Are churches leading?  I wonder if this is part of the reason for decline in church membership.  Responding can be tiring.  Leading gives life and direction.

We should respond when we are called to respond.  But let’s also take some steps forward.  It’s also a part of our calling too – an important part.  Jesus didn’t just respond to everything around him.  He lead.  We should too.

 

What your church measures matters

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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churchWhat does your church measure?  What are the metrics?  Attendance?  Giving?  What?

There are lots of things that a church can measure to know if it is on track.

This is not one of those typical articles that is an argument to say that churches should stop tracking all of this.  In fact, quite the opposite.

Tracking things is important.  When we track something, we are essentially saying that the thing we are tracking is important.

The deeper question is why?  Why is this thing we are tracking important?

For example, if a church tracks attendance, a great question to as is why?  What is important in knowing the attendance from week to week?  Is it tracked because….well…that’s what you are supposed to do because every other church you’ve been to does this?  Or is it tracked because it is important to know if attendance is rising?  Why is that important?

Being clear about these things is important.  And tracking typical organizational metrics can be just fine too.  There are some important organizational metrics – that’s not the issue.  Churches are really good at tracking many typical organizational metrics.

Churches are often pretty good at tracking some typical church metrics too – how many sick have been visited in the last month is a good example.  I’d say this is important too potentially.

The real issue comes down to this – what a church measures matters.  It signifies what the church values.  What a church measures tells me more about the culture and mission of the church than just about anything else.

A big challenge is trying to measure something that can’t be measured – the intangibles.  These are things like – measuring the relationships within a church community, or measuring how welcoming to visitors a church is.  The challenge here is to find something that can be measured that relates to the intangible.  A way to do this is to figure out what is really important in knowing this information.  Another question to answer is – how will we know when relationships within the church community improve?  What are the signs that signify that the church is more welcoming to visitors?  Once you nail these down, now you have something to measure and track.  Of course, these are all lagging indicators.

Even better is the leading indicators – those things that you want to measure which will tell you information about what is going to happen.  These can be tough to figure out, but not impossible.  If we stick with the sample goals, here are some questions you might want to ask to discern what the leading indicators could be – What are the things that we think will cause a strengthening of relationships in our church?  What are the things that we know that will make the church more welcoming?

Each church is going to have different answers to these questions because each church is made up of a unique set of people with unique values and a church with a unique mission.  The neat thing about this is that just going through this process has the potential to bring a church closer together.

Responding to People Leaving Church?

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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There seems to be a great deal of debate on the internet about how churches should respond to the decline of people leaving their pews.  There are articles, some of which I have posted on this blog, talking about the rise of the “nones,” people who are done with church for a variety of reasons.  There are lots of thoughts about how churches should respond to the exodus of people from church.  Carey Nieuwhof wrote an interesting article recently with seven ways to respond to the decline of the church.  I think he has some valid points.

While they are valid points, I would also say they aren’t right for every church.  Context is important.  What is the context of the church community?

Which leads to my point.  People have a lot of ideas on how to “right” the direction of the church so it stops losing members/gets people in the doors/gets back to its mission, etc.  I’ve written pieces on this as well.  The challenge is that there is not a single way to do this.  Nor should there be.

Here’s a little church history for you to help us with this idea.  So jump in the Tardis with me and let’s take a short trek back 20 centuries.  (trust me, I’ll keep it short)

There is this false notion that the early Christian church (1st-3rd centuries AD/CE) had a unified way in which they worshiped.  There is no evidence for this.  Not one shred of evidence for this.  If anything, the limited resources that scholars have found point to a different picture – each worshiping community did things a bit differently.  There were some overriding themes and practices – a gathering for Eucharist (there’s debate on what that meant), there were baptisms (again, debate on how that happened), and there was praying (again, more debate – I’m sure you are surprised by this. Not!).  This really shouldn’t be a novel idea – I bet your church doesn’t do the exact same things as other churches.

How the church worshiped in Rome was different from how they worshiped in Carthage and Syria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Egypt and elsewhere.  In fact all of these locations had their own versions of worship.  And that worked out pretty well mostly.  Yes, it was confusing sometimes.  Yes, there was debate on whose way was better.  But overall, everyone lived with the situation.  They adopted practices of other communities as they deemed them appropriate.

That changed with the advent of Constantine, the Roman Emperor.  He wanted unity in the church. He had an empire to control and run and the last thing you want when you are doing this is diversity – you don’t have as much control in diversity.

Ok, let’s jump back in the Tardis back to our modern times.  So how does the church respond to people walking out the door?

1. Accept that there is no nice simple universal answer to people leaving the church, except for broad brush statements like “Return your focus on Jesus.”  While true, it’s hardly an action plan with defined steps for a church to carry out.

2. Since there is no nice answers, we have to do some nitty-gritty work here and start with more questions.  Questions like “who are we as a church community?” “What is this church about?” “Why does this church exist at all?” “How is God calling us and in what ways?”  These are difficult questions that take time, self-examination, prayer, etc.  In some cases, there’s aren’t any apparent answers, just more questions.

3. We have to stop responding all the time.  Yes, you read that correctly – stop responding.  I read something a wise person wrote long ago – “you can’t lead if you are always responding.”  Responding feels good.  It shows that you care.  It shows that you value the person making the action.  It also means you never do anything to move things forward.  Yes, there are times when response is appropriate – I won’t deny that.  This isn’t an either/or thing.  And in our modern society, we’ve gotten really good at responding – think instant communication and the expectation of an instant response.  But if everyone is responding, then who is leading and what are they leading us to?

4.  What is the role of the church in your community?  It goes back to the context of the local church.  This isn’t easy work, but really anything  worth doing involves an investment of sweat, blood and tears, time, money, and life.

I believe the church has an important role in society.  I also believe that the church will look different going forward – I don’t know how, but I sense it will be different.  Everything changes over time, even the church.

Here’s what I know – when a church knows who it is, whose it is, and why – then I’m willing to bet there isn’t a focus on people leaving.  Why would you focus on that when you are being who are called to be?