Leading Ideas – Lewis Center for Church Leadership – Wednesday, 8
January 2014
Quotable Leadership:
I think Martin Luther King’s greatest contribution was to hold
up a vision of what the nation could be. (Gardner Taylor)
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Starting the Year Poised for Growth by Wade Griffith
Christmas and New Year’s are just behind us and Lent is on its
way! Consequently, there is plenty to
do. But thanks to the generosity of a lot of great mentors, here are some
things I’ve found helpful to do in the first quarter that reap dividends
throughout the year.
Goal Setting with Staff and Leaders
Focus is essential to fruitfulness. Discrete and measurable
goals help facilitate such focus. Ask staff and key church leaders to develop
five goals for the new year. Each goal should explicitly connect to your
mission statement. Each goal should also have some quantitative measure of success.
Then, for each goal, ask each leader to break down the goal into five to ten
critical tasks. Each task should have a completion date. This will help them
and you monitor progress. Finally, sit down with them to finalize the goals and
plans.
You may be wondering why this would be done early in the year.
Isn’t that too late? My experience is that many of us are just too busy in the
fall with budgets, lay leadership recruitment, fall program wrap-up, and
Christmas to give goal setting meaningful thought. I recommend doing it early
in the year, after the budget is finalized, but the main thing is that you do
it sometime each year.
Lay Leadership Success
Great leaders are not identified, vetted, tested and trained
overnight. The first quarter is a time to provide training to new leaders while
also developing future leaders. For example, work with each group to select a
vice chair to also receive training. This is your opportunity to get them in
the loop and to evaluate them for future leadership potential. Do they come to
meetings? Do they engage and initiate action? Do they volunteer for tasks? Do
they follow through? These are all great clues to identify someone God may be
raising up for leadership.
Stewardship Planning
I’ve learned not to wait until the fall to do stewardship
planning. It is better to begin planning in the spring even if the stewardship
campaign is in the fall. Recruit a team leader. Choose an approach. Ask your
team leader to recruit a team from a list of people with a demonstrated commitment
to giving. Recruit a guest speaker if needed. Make a timeline. Having all of
this finished before summer will make the fall program season so much easier.
It will also allow you and others to get creative about how you might use
multimedia, social media, interviews, etc., to enrich the campaign. If you wait
until the last minute, invariably you will do a rerun of last year’s effort. It
takes time to pray it through carefully while also looking for creative ways to
enhance this critical spiritual experience.
Sermon Planning
We strategically plan sermon series campaigns to coincide with
times of the year when people are most likely to visit a church. When school
begins again in August and January are two great examples of times when you
should consider doing what Adam Hamilton calls a “fishing expedition” type
sermon series. It is designed to attract non-religious or nominally religious
people to church by addressing a universal concern or issue that all people
face. These types of series attract visitors because they are perceived as
highly relevant and “non-churchy.” Your task is to use these opportunities to
address the topic in a helpful manner while also sharing the gospel and how the
gospel provides answers to the issue at hand. Examples might include a marriage
series, finances, parenting or tough questions.
But sermon planning early in the year is not for the upcoming
year. It is for the following year! Why plan them now for 2015? To advertise
these series effectively while limiting costs takes time. Having time to plan
effective use of advertising on Facebook or Twitter also takes time. When you
plan in advance, you have time to create organic buzz, use social media
platforms, access conventional advertising outlets while also giving musicians
and other worship leaders time to plan skits, props, special music, and videos.
More time usually translates into a better worship experience.
I am convinced that these “behind-the-scenes” tasks are critical
for an effective year in ministry. Get a start now on these key catalysts so
that you will end the year amazed at how Christ is using your church to reach
new people. In my experience, lack of fruitfulness is not so much a reflection
on the Spirit as it is on how wisely we invest our time and effort as leaders
of the church.
Wade Griffith is pastor of Liberty Crossings United Methodist
Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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What Church Leaders Can Learn from Other Enterprises by C.
Anthony Hunt
I believe church leaders have much to learn from prayerful and
careful consideration of a broad range of management and organizational
practices. And based on my experience over the past several years in leading
several churches and non-profit organizations through transition and
turnaround, I believe some key concepts from the realm of business development
can apply to church leaders involved in starting new ministries or turning
around congregations in transition or decline. These concepts are branding,
market niche, and product excellence.
Brand and Niche
According to most management literature, successful enterprises
today ask “What's our brand?” and “What's our niche?” before addressing the
standard 4-P’s of marketing — product, price, place and promotion. There's only
one Starbucks, one Apple, and one McDonald’s. These and other successful
ventures clearly addressed the questions of brand and niche early in their
development.
Clearly identifying a ministry’s brand and niche clarifies
perceptions about the ministry and helps the ministry shape its mission,
vision, and purpose. Properly addressing the questions of niche and brand can
be critical to sustainability and growth. For example, St. John United
Methodist Church, a turnaround church I’ve worked with in Baltimore,
understands its brand to be “The Experience” and its niche to be reaching young
adults for Christ. This has led to significant growth among young adults in the
church over the past several years. In its promotional material, including its
website and social networking presence, the church presents itself as “The
Experience” where people experience God and the church in new and exciting
ways.
Should leaders and startup/turnaround teams work first on the
niche or the brand? I have found that the brand-niche question is a chicken-egg
one. They go hand-in-hand; you can't have one without the other. So I have
found that it helps to work on the two simultaneously.
Excellence
Also, successful start-ups and turnarounds invariably focus on
delivering an excellent product. I have recently seen restaurant start-ups with
beautiful space and ambiance (and sometimes even nice branding and niche) fail
and close within a few months because their product — the food — wasn't good.
In competitive markets, people make choices that are primarily based on the
quality of the product (Starbucks, Apple, Outback, etc.).
For a church that wants to thrive today — especially start-ups
and turnarounds — anything less than excellence risks failure. In my
experience, excellence in terms of product delivery for the church must begin
with worship. Worship has to be extraordinary, or people will find a church
where it is. Everything else that the church does will follow the way it
worships.
There is a plethora of things to which leadership of new or
turnaround ministries need to give attention, but I have found that these three
— branding, niche, and product excellence — serve as tipping points that are
critical to long-term vitality and growth.
Dr. C. Anthony Hunt is pastor of Epworth United Methodist Chapel
in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Enhanced Version of Keeping Our Sacred Trust Now Available
The Lewis Center offers a new resource to educate clergy leaders
on preventing sexual misconduct. Keeping Our Sacred Trust, an online course
that has been used by over 1,200 clergy across multiple denominations, is now
available in an enhanced version. The course addresses the dynamics,
motivations, and vulnerabilities that can lead to misconduct and the positive
steps that can help prevent misconduct or the appearance of misconduct. Keeping
Our Sacred Trust is meant to supplement in-person training, peer support,
counseling, mentoring, and supervision. Within this array of prevention
strategies, it can promote a baseline understanding of the issues and
expectations related to misconduct. The cost for each participant is only $49
and includes .5 CEU. Individuals can enroll online, or judicatories can set up
group enrollment with group billing, including discounts for groups of 250 or
more. To learn more, go to www.keepingoursacredtrust.org or contact Joe Arnold
at 202-885-8560 or jearnold@wesleyseminary.edu.
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The Right Question
Leaders do not need answers. Leaders must have the right
questions.
Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach, encourages leaders to
seek feedback on their performance regularly from a range of people. He
suggests that in soliciting personal feedback, the “only question that works”
is:
How can I do better?
Want more Right Questions? Check out “Right Questions for Church
Leaders: 2013 and 2012 Collections.”
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Lewis Center for Church Leadership
Wesley Theological Seminary
4500 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20016 United States
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