Orange Tour DFW - Session 3

Session 3 was with Carey Nieuwhof, a senior pastor from Canada. Great session with deep insight about the "c" word, change.

• Change is a constant
• Every change has a life cycle; an upswing and an eventual downswing
• Easy change takes place on the downturn, though this may not be the best time to change
• Well-led organizations change while on the upswing; this is the most difficult point of change, but potentially the most productive
• We may have to change stuff that was working in order to have greater impact
• We need to look at why we do what we do all the time

5 Steps to Implementing Change

1. Study the concepts
2. Get as many of your team on-board as possible – need leaders aligned
3. Define an action plan
4. Reorganize for change
5. Implement the change – soft launch, evaluate

A great session to wrap up an inspirational day. Tomorrow, Church Staff 101 continues the love!

Wayne

Orange Tour DFW - Session 2

Session two with Reggie. He talked about the phrases that need to come in-between the words from the two lists he talked about in session one.

So to get from list one to list two, we need to do the following:

• To get from focusing on Students to focusing on Leaders, we need to Integrate Strategy.
• To get from Content to Experience, we need to Refine Our Message
• To get from Production to Relationship, we need to Elevate Community
• To get from Age-focused to Family-focused, we need to Reactivate the Family
• And to get from Growth to Service, we need to Leverage Influence

Reggie passed out the “Calibrate” card. A "scorecard" to be used to see where our churches/ministries are at when it comes to getting us from the first list to the second list using the "in-between" phrases. Very good stuff. Even during our break, great discussions with our leadership that are here with us this weekend.

Check out Orange Tour to check out the conference and Church Staff 101 will continue the live blogs.
Wayne

Orange Tour DFW day 1

The giant ice storm was a dud, so right now, at this very moment I'm in the opening session at the Orange Tour DFW stop with the great Reggie Joiner. And as usual, incredibly "meaty" material from "the man."

Here's Reggie's list of things we probably think about every week:
Students
Content
Production
Age-focused ministry
Growth

And here's Reggie's list of things maybe we should be thinking about every week:
Leaders instead of students: most effective way of reaching the kids is us as pastors reaching the adult and teen volunteers who can multiply our influence.
Experience instead of content: There is a gap between what we’re teaching and what really happens out there, and it’s our job to close that gap.
Relationship instead of production: The world’s culture will always have better production, BUT what the world’s culture doesn’t have is the importance of relationship
Family-focused instead of age-focused: our 40 hours per year with the children we minister to has limited influence and impact. We need to leverage parents because of their 3000 hours of influence. We need to help make our parents experts at influencing their children. We need parents to fight for their relationship with their children, and we need kids to fight for their relationship with their parents
Service instead of numeric growth: serving must be a component of discipleship. We need people to volunteer for our ministries to help them grow spiritually, not for them to help us with our ministry

What would happen in our ministries if we moved from thinking so much about the first list and rather focussed more time on the second list?

Church Staff 101 will keep the updates coming.
Check out the Orange Tour website and sign up for the tour stop near you. It will be well worth your time, energy and money.
Wayne

Orange Tour Stop - Dallas

Tomorrow, hopefully we'll be able to attend the Orange Tour stop here in Dallas. I say hopefully because it's forecasted that we'll be receiving this year's ice storm tonight/tomorrow morning. We'll see...
Anyways, Church Staff 101 will post with the best from the tour stop, maybe I'll be able to blog live!

Wayne

Top 10 List for Most Ministries

As I was putting together the Top 10 List for Children's Ministry post at Children's Ministry 101, I realized the info would translate over to other ministries as well.

And so here's a top 10 list for most ministry programs and or departments. As always I hope it's a help to you and would love to read your comments.

Top 10 List for Most Ministries

1. Prayer. An essential, vital, can't make it without it, aspect of EVERY ministry. We can never pray enough, and we can never encourage our team's to pray too much.
2. Growth. Not numerical, but personal growth. We often say, "You can't give what you don't have." Spiritual growth is necessary as we pour spiritually into those around us.
3. Tell us stories. We love hearing stories of transformation taking place in people's lives, so we encourage our leaders to tell us and send us an email of stories they hear.
   
4. Be informative. All of our leadership are mouthpieces of our church. And so they are encouraged to be as informed as possible about their area of ministry and our church in general. Our job as staff pastors is to give them the info in easy to understand bits.
5. Continuing Ed. We highly encourage our leaders to further their knowledge about their area of ministry and spiritual matters. We provide a weekly email with ministry specific and church-wide info, provide relevant articles about their ministry role, encourage our leaders to attend local conferences (we try to cover some portion of the cost), provide two orientations a year and are always on the lookout for relevant books for them to read.
6. Be flexible. No, we don't offer Bible yoga classes, but we do want our leaders to be flexible about their serving role; always looking for areas of need and helping out in the moment, willing to change at the last minute if the time requires it.
   
7. Feedback. We do want to hear from our leaders. They are the "hands and feet" of our ministry, seeing things that we sometimes miss. We have an open door policy. Not every suggestion we're able to act on, but everything brought to our attention will be heard and thought through.
8. Free advertising. Our leaders know they are free advertising for the ministry so it's vital for them to be positive when talking about the it. Smile, tell good stories, have the "back" of the ministry.
   
9. Recruiters. Whatever word you use, recruiting, attracting, blah blah blah, our leaders, paid and volunteer, are the single greatest recruiting force we have at our hands. Planting the seed that they are needed to pray for more volunteers and talk to their sphere of influence about joining the team is a necessity. We tell our team to think in terms of replacing themselves this year with someone they've asked to join the team.
10. Membership. At our church, membership is mandatory if a person is leading other people. To us it shows that they are on board with the vision of the church

Again, let Church Staff 101 know what you think.

Wayne

Honor's Reward

Honor’s Reward
A few weeks ago, Pastor John Stickl let me borrow a cd set entitled, Honor’s Reward. It’s six cd’s of messages that John Bevere preached about the concept of honor. I’m only on cd 2, but getting smacked pretty hard in-between the eyes.

Growing up, the Korean half of the family was pretty forceful in molding me into what I thought was a honoring mindset. In fact, I prided myself on how respectful I was to those in authority in my life. Bevere’s messages have made me reexamine how I show honor to everyone.

I always think of honoring those in authority over me, but Bevere uses Scripture to show that I need to also honor those equal to me and those I’m in authority over. Very thought provoking stuff so far.

A couple of honor verses have grabbed a hold of me.

• Romans 12:10 “Honor one another above yourselves.” So I guess I need to respect, value and show as precious everyone, not only my authorities. Not that I’m a total jerk all the time, but I can’t be a jerk ever, to anyone.
• Psalm 15:4 “honor whoever fears the Lord.” No more making fun of the folks on the Christian tv channels. That’s truly the first thing I thought about when reading this verse. Certainly I need to be proactive in honoring those who fear God.
  

If only there was a honometer, so I could see how I was doing on this road of honoring...

If you’re interested, you can get the book here Though WARNING, I have not read the book, I’m just listening to the cd’s, but understand the book to be the written out version of the concepts in the cd’s. Let us know here at Church Staff 101 what you think about the cd set or the book.

Wayne

A Note to Pastors: Work Less

Scot Longyear has an eye opening post at the Worship.com blog containing some startling statistics about our profession, pastoring. He also includes a short list of practical to do's for a healthy leader.

Click to jump to the post, A Note to Pastors: Work Less.

It doesn't matter your ministry position, Church Staff 101 highly recommends reading Scot's post.

Also, take a moment and read my post, Taking a Break, about vacation, something Scot talks about in his post.


Wayne

Getting Started in Children's Ministry

Jason Rhode, children's pastor, co-founder of Children's Ministry University Online and adjunct faculty with Valley Forge Christian College, co-author's the blog, Children's Ministry Insights.

Church Staff 101 is always on the lookout for great insight from around the blogosphere and so check out his post, Getting Started in Children's Ministry. It's chock full of nuggets of truth everyone needs, no matter what area of ministry you oversee.

Check it out.

Wayne

"How" and Note Taking

"This is the ultimate guidebook for successful living. Its truths are simple but stunningly powerful." I'm hoping Marianne Williamson's quote is correct since I'm starting the book, "How" by Dov Seidman tonight.
A great friend and peer, John Stickl, recommended the book a couple of weeks ago, and I received it today from Amazon.
I'm also trying something new when it comes to note taking while reading. I always come across passages or information in a book that I know I'm going to want to find later, so I highlight or underline and maybe dog ear the page. But it takes me forever to find those nuggets later. Timothy Ferris wrote a blog post explaining his method of taking notes when reading a book. I'm going to take a modified approach and see how it fits for me.
As I come across something of interest, I'll underline like normal, but I'll also turn to the front blank page of the book and write down the page number and a short descriptive phrase about the passage.
Let's see if this works!

Wayne

How to Spoil Those You Lead

Jim Wideman, children's ministry professional and one of three authors of the blog, The Way We See It, writes:
"I love being spoiled. My wife has spoiled me for over 29 years. My daughters have spoiled their Dad all their life, my employees spoil me at the office on a regular basis. Because I like it so much I want to spoil others. A great goal for the New Year is to purpose in your heart to spoil your volunteers outside their classrooms as well as in. You’ve heard me say this before, you gain those you serve. It’s a spiritual law. Christ Jesus came to serve not to be served."

Read the rest of the blog article and Jim's Top 10 List for you to stand out in your church as a leader who serves their volunteers, How to Spoil Those You Lead.

Wayne

Taking a Break

Ah, it's great to take a break. Hopefully you've noticed, no new posts for a couple of weeks here at Church Staff 101. My family along with my wife's extended family had the opportunity to vacation in-between Christmas and New Year skiing in New Mexico. We all had a wonderful time. The vacation and the time of year made me think about how important it is to take time away from work and spend time with family.

"Yeah, but I just wasn't able to take all my vacation days." I used to believe I didn't need to take time away from ministry work. As I've gotten older, I've realized a few absolutes:

• The work will still be there when I get back. Uh, yeah, it doesn't ever end.
• I'm not that important. President Bush has taken more vacation time than most other presidents. He's in charge of the COUNTRY, I'm sure what we are in charge of is going to make it without us for a week or two.
• Must recharge "batteries." I cannot continuously give without recharging. Actually, I can (and have) but productivity goes down the tube after a long stretch of no vacation.

"We believe in family here at so and so church." I'm confident every senior pastor, executive pastor and board or elders would say they care about family and want their staff to make it a priority. Reality check here, just because they say it, doesn't mean they believe it or practice it. In fact, it's not up to them to make sure I'm prioritizing my family. It's my job to put my family first, period. And so more absolutes:

• Contrary to movie stars and televangelists, if you lose your family, you've lost it all. Aside from God, what's more important?
• Bragging about being a workaholic and saying family is a priority are not compatible.
• It's totally up to me. I have to make it a priority and stick to my decisions. It's necessary to say "no" sometimes.
• Reminiscing about events and situations taking place with those closest to me are the best memories.

Take the time off, I really truly hope and believe you won't regret it.

Wayne