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

Gang Life

Francis Chan, session speaker at the Orange Conference and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, told of a story about a gang member who attended his church once he was saved. After a period of time the gang member was starting to struggle. Francis had an opportunity to chat with him and found out he was wondering why church life was not as fulfilling as gang life. While in the gang, the young man always had people who were accepting of him, trusted him and had his back. His observation of church life was that people were unaccepting, did not trust him and did not have his back.
What a heart wrenching story. It was the last part that really grabbed a hold of me; having other's back. The phrase has been so important that it's been elevated to my prayer sheet.
I pose the question, do you have other's back? Immediately there's family, friends, co-workers. But what about there at your church? Do you have the lead pastor's back? The pastoral staff's backs? Elders' backs? And of course, the Children's Ministry back's?
Just something to think about.

Orange – Family Experience: The Non-weekly Option

“80% of kids raised in church will walk away from church by the time they get to college.”
Carey Nieuwhof is one of my favorite presenters and today he was on fire. Great presentation about the wisdom of using the family experience on a monthly basis. Good emphasis on strategy; so vital to hear.
Once again, awesome.

Church Staff 101
Wayne Geer

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

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

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

Getting Things Done (GTD)

”The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting with the first one.“ - Mark Twain

Mr.Twain was definitely before his time when it came to getting things done. I'm sure we've all been in the same place, overwhelmed with "stuff" and thinking that working harder, faster and longer was going to get more done. In my life, that style of productivity has only led to more stress. So, here at Church Staff 101, I'm going to walk through a breakthrough (for me at least) method of getting things done. I've borrowed some ideas from the book of the same name by Mr. David Allen along with a brilliant web article titled, Getting Things Done in 60 Seconds.

I came across the idea of GTD through the website, Lifehacker. I was intrigued and started doing some research along with purchasing the book. GTD was an interesting read. The overall concepts of the book were appealing to me, it was the methodology that slowed me done. It was then I found the website article. These two pieces enabled me to put into place my system of GTD; a system I've been using for almost eight months and has improved my productivity with lowering my stress load.



Yep, that's it. This pic is actually my desktop pic. I know, "Dork!" But it's a great reminder of what I need to do.

Stuff - is all the stuff I need to get done. Everything I can think of, lists I already have, new ideas, etc...
Inbox - I do use my Entourage (Mac version of Outlook) inbox as the central place for all to do items. Emails sent to me, emails I've sent to myself and Jotts all park themselves in my inbox. I do empty my inbox daily by sending all items into one of six folders; projects, someday, this month, this week, today, waiting on someone and trash.
Is it actionable - I ask this for every item every day and depending on the answer, I'm routed to the next step. I have found the "two minute rule" to be a lifesaver. I really had no idea how quickly I could work through stuff realizing if I could get it done in two minutes, then I needed to just do it.
Projects - I categorize to do items into subfolders here. For instance, a VBS item gets placed in a VBS folder here if it's not actionable right now.
Delegate it - I am blessed to have an awesome team around me. Casey and Brandon are easy to delegate to because I know they'll get it done.
Calendar - this is a future post, but Google Calendar is the BOMB!

And lastly, here's a six step plan to help you set up your own GTD.

6 Steps to GTD

• Read the book. You can purchase it right on this website. Read the parts that will apply to you.
• Online research. Google search "getting things done." Check out the article Getting Things Done in 60 Seconds.
• Implement your system.
• Stick to the rules. Determine to follow your rules.
• Don’t beat yourself up if you slip. We all slip up, no problem, just get back in the groove. Also, ask yourself why you slipped up. Maybe you need to tweak your system because it's not fitting you.
• Plan how you’re going to spend your extra time.

”Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.“ - Jean de la Bruysre

Wayne Geer

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

Country, Opera and Stories

Alright, here it goes. I'm going to let you in on a closely held secret about my life. This may radically change the way you think about me, but I'm willing to be transparent.
I like to listen to country music and opera.

Yep, you read that correctly. The music I hated as a young man, I love now. There is something about an opera piece or a great country song that just grabs me. In fact, this morning as I listened to one of those gripping country songs, I asked myself what made it so appealing to me? When it comes to country, I do like the twangy voices, the music, especially the steel guitar, and I like the story. Opera; the music, the female voices singing and again, the story. It's the narrative, the telling of some event in a compelling way that I love because honestly, it moves me.

So, what's so special about the story? As I listened this morning, even as I write now, it's the tale that made the impact. A good story can greatly affect. It can change our emotional state sometimes instantly. Many times I've come home from work in one mood and after hearing a great story from the day told by my wife or children, I'm completely transformed emotionally.

The story has the power to transform us partly because it helps us focus. You know it's true, when a story is being told that somehow piques our interest, we're glued. We hang on every word. We don't want to miss any details because we're wrapped up in the story. And the outcome is that oftentimes we're inspired by what we've heard.

Ok, Wayne, but what does this mean for me? When in ministry, it seems like most of the time it can be a rough uninspiring road We don't always see fruit in those we are pouring our lives into. And you know, sometimes people are just downright mean. But it's the compelling stories we hear that once again drive home the point that what we're doing is worthwhile, eternally worthwhile. It's when those we minister to come and tell us about how they are living out their walk with God that we are then re-energized. It's as if God the Father reaches down and pats us on the back, wow what a wonderful feeling!

And so I challenge you to look for and be encouraged by those stories. Go ahead and feel good about the ministry that's taking place through you. Thank God for Him showing you a glimpse of what He sees and knows. Take that story and let it inspire you until the next one. And lastly, pass those stories on to those around you. What a precious gift you hold, when you see a peer who is struggling and needs something to affect them, and then you tell them the story that's been your most recent pat on the back.

So what great ministry (NOT country or opera) stories have you heard lately?

Wayne