Two Nuggets

I love sitting with someone smarter than me and getting wisdom and knowledge from them. I got that opportunity today.
I met with the owner of a church management software company, one of the biggest in the U.S., for a couple of hours this morning and came away with some great nuggets.

Nugget #1: Be a constant learner - an oldie but continues to be a goodie
You know, if everyone who's brainy keeps saying it, it's probably something I need to be doing. I know often times I feel like I need to be constantly learning about what's important to my performance on the job. But, duh, I need to be a constant learner about a lot of things; God's ways, husband, parent, finances, home improvements, etc... (I'm kidding about home improvement).

Nugget #2: Avoid "tribal knowledge"
Ooh, I like this one. Tribal knowledge is something learned that doesn't get passed on to others. It's like department A figuring out something that departments B and C could benefit by knowing, but department A doesn't pass the info on. When people on the team don't get this info, they may end up re-inventing the wheel or making mistakes that could have been easily remedied. Instead of keeping the knowledge in the "tribe", I need to pass it on to other's who could and probably would benefit. Whether it's "re-inventing the wheel", making mistakes or a long learning curve for the "new guy", all these time wasting activities could be avoided by not keeping knowledge and wisdom just within the tribe.

So there you go, I glimpse into what goes into Wayne's brain.

Happy New Year!

Transparency and the Draining Effect

Basically John said he was totally drained today.
I was in the same place yesterday, in fact I know most if not all of our Management Team felt the same way.

June 11 will be a day remembered for a long time amongst us staff folks at our church.

8:30 am: Lead Pastor, Executive, Worship, Nursery/preschool, Student, Small Group and me Children's pastor (Management Team) all together, one room, to work through the first layer of the pyramid from the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, by Patrick Lencioni.
We all knew we were "dysfunctional" we just didn't know our dysfunction was as deep, wide and murky.
We focused for most of the day, and yes, it was a full day - til almost 4 pm, talking about trust.
Don't get me wrong, we needed to definitely clear the air. The last few weeks have pretty much brought a whole load of dookie to the table that was once covered and put away.
It was just, wow, totally emotionally draining.
Pretty much in my experience I've never, ever, EVER been in a meeting where this much transparency and honesty has taken place. It was good, it just hurt.
My hope is we, gulp, continue this process; it would be a colossal shame to open this box to only have it quietly forgotten.
If you think about it, pray for us.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Orange - Francis Chan

Pastor Chan is one of my favorite speakers. Truly, every time I listen to him I’m challenged and today was no different.
Three questions to add to my growing prayer list:
Is the Holy Spirit truly in me?
Do I have other’s backs?
What does God want me to do that I’ve not been doing?

This guy is powerful.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Orange Conference Day 1 Preconference

We’re here! Flew in last night, picked up a very cool minivan; I know, I’m old. Drove out to the conference center and painlessly registered. What a relief. Beautiful hotel and now, Monday morning I’m in my first preconference session, Design on a Dime with Jeffrey Reed.
I sat in on a session with Jeffrey at Camp Kidjam and so I’m looking forward to his wisdom.
Update to follow…

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

Updated: Mrs. EVAN'S Famous Saying

"When someone tells you who they are the first time believe it!"
Ah, the famous saying from John Stickl's mom-in-law. It was about a year ago that I first heard it and from that very first moment, I knew this woman had great wisdom.
John is our Adult Ministries Pastor and oversees small groups; this guy is good. He and I talk a lot because I can always pick up some nugget from him. His MIL's saying has been one that has resonated with me. I wish I had known it sixteen years ago when I first started in ministry.
As I've looked back at first impressions of my different ministry opportunities, I've peeled away the "happy happy joy joy" parts of the visits. I've seen an interesting correlation between the first impressions and how the future at each particular position has developed.
People who have "told me who they are the first time" by going out of their way to be friendly, show trust, be respectful have been the one's who've proved themselves to be that way. Churches that showed characteristics of generosity from the first visit were that way in real life. The unfavorable impressions have also played themselves out. Very interesting.
So I'm adding the saying to my bag of wisdom in hopes of it being one more gauge to use.
Thanks Mrs. Evans.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

Retooling

Retool - reorganize, revise, modify
I know businesses do it, restaurants, even Starbucks kind of did it last night by closing all their stores for a few hours so all their employees could be trained at one time.

Have you heard of a church retooling?

This has been a topic in our staff meetings and lunch discussions for a few weeks now. We realize we have some systemic problems, inefficient processes and a loaded schedule that's not allowing us as a team to devote long blocks of time to work things out. Thus the thought of a retooling.

Well, after a long and thoughtful staff meeting yesterday, no massive retooling is scheduled for anytime soon. Sad.

Our processing as a team has been helpful, though. So here's a list of things to think about if you're dreaming about retooling.

Retooling List:

• Pray - always a given.
• Timing - when is the best time to pause as many activities as possible to get some margin in your schedules to reorganize.
• Focus - really, truly what needs to pause and make sure you pause it.
• Focus part 2 - if you pause activities for a time period, tell everyone why you're retooling, then you and your team had better work VERY hard at retooling. Our thought was if we retooled in the summer, it may have been one of our busiest summers, but we would set ourselves up correctly for the short and long term future.
• Focus part 3 - everyone needs to either be on board (executive staff, associate staff, elders, deacons, key laity) or know the why for revising (volunteer leaders, those affected by paused programming, congregation).
• Schedule - set in stone the dates and times your team will meet and don't deviate.
• Be Strategic - Know what systems, processes, inefficiencies need to change, make a list and one by one come to a conclusion for each item.
• You may feel a pinch - this will probably hurt. You will have some hurt feelings, anger and you'll probably lose some folks. Is it still worth it?
  
• The Captain - ultimately it's the senior pastor who has to truly embrace the retooling. If he's not on board, the ship isn't changing direction

Pastor Bob Kapp, a great friend and mentor was realistic when he told me retooling sounds good but is probably easier said than done, he was right.

What about you, any thoughts of retooling? Have you? And if so, what lessons did you learn.
Let us know.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

A BIG All Staff Meeting

Every month, our church has an all staff meeting where everyone who's employed meets for about an hour as one big group. It's always fun and encouraging. Early this week, we had an extended all staff meeting where we met offsite for most of the day and it was wonderful. As a giant team, we had fun together, worshipped and prayed together, learned together and of course ate together.
Our jr. high student pastor, Josh Wintermute, summed it up perfectly, "It was truly a life giving event."
What about your team? Do you get a chance to pull everyone together a few times a year to encourage, fellowship, laugh and pray?
If your team is struggling with feelings that their environment is not life giving, take a chance and put this type of event on your calendar. Go ahead and get the process started of producing a life giving environment.

Wayne Geer
Church Staff 101

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

"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

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

Are You Connected?

"Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."
Jane Howard hits the nail on the head concerning networking. Are you connected? No, I'm not talking about being connected to the internet or to "Americas best network" cell phone plan, I'm talking about a ministry network.

For probably the last eight or nine years, no matter where I've lived, I've been a part of a network meeting in that location. And in every situation, it's been time well spent that has been life giving and encouraging. Just yesterday I attended a local children's ministry network meeting, and I came away from it with great stuff to pray and think through.

I feel strongly about this one aspect of my own spiritual and vocational growth. In fact, I wish that in the first six years of ministry someone had pushed me to join a group. I can't even imagine the mistakes I would not have made had I been around peers who had already been through what I was experiencing. Below is a list of Network To Do's for you, so don't waste another minute, get hooked up, plugged in, and encouraged.

Eight Ministry Networking To Do's
1. You need to look for a group! I went out of my way to find and join these peers, they probably aren't going to come looking for you. Use the internet, call local churches, denominational district offices and local schools of ministry, someone is going to have some insight to help you connect to a group.
2. Put it on your calendar, make it an appointment. If you don't, something else will come up or you'll forget.
3. Force yourself to attend. Again, make it important. Think about it as another way to continue to be a learner.
4. Go with the attitude you're going to take at least one great nugget back with you. Focus on learning at least one thing that will help. Someone is bound to say something that can affect you, just be willing and attentive to receive.
5. Exchange contact info. This is one of those reasons we have about a million business cards. Make a connection with someone.
6. Ask questions. Speak up. Don't just sit there, ask away, that's why you're there anyways. If you're intimidated to ask in the large group setting (Chicken!), then wait until the end of the meeting time and pull someone aside.
7. Answer questions! Again, don't just sit there. No matter where you're at in your ministry journey, you have experiences, knowledge and wisdom that will help someone else, so give it away.
8. Start a group yourself. Put those leadership gifts you've been given to good use and start your own network meetings if there's not one taking place near you. Use technology to help, like email, im chat, even online conferencing.

I would love to hear from you! Comment about your networking experiences. Also, add this blog to your favorites or RSS reader to keep up to date on posts.

Wayne