Recently I was in a restaurant and listened to some bickering between waitresses. One of them has worked in the restaurant industry and this particular restaurant for many years. The other waitress is in the first year of her first job. The younger employee refused to take suggestions or advice from the older employee. Although they did not handle this situation correctly in front of customers, it did remind me of an important principle.
Summer is often a time for church leaders (unless you are youth leaders) to take vacations, chill out, and rest up. While I agree with that need, the fact is that fall gets here quickly and we need to be prepared for one of the best growth opportunities of the year.
This can be a controversial principle, because it appears at first glance that an organization is strategizing to leave a group of people out of the equation, but really this strategy helps the entire organization be more successful, eventually improving things for everyone involved in the organization, even those in the last 20%. This principle assumes that in any organization:
Yesterday I posted about the need for a church to plan for the future. You can read that post HERE. In that post I shared three questions our staff worked through at our last extended staff retreat at Grace Community Church. This post has results.
If we aren’t careful, church becomes a Sunday-to-Sunday routine process and we look up someday from the weekly grind and realize we never reached our potential. For most churches, when one Sunday is over they are planning for the next Sunday. The church addresses the ministry needs of the week, but little time is spent planning for the months and years to come for the church. The monotony of a repeating schedule can often replace long-term planning.
I like that kind of guy. We see it in our brave soldiers who fearlessly defend our nation. We see it in the dozens of hunters and fishermen in our church. We see it in the football and baseball players and coaches. We see it in the guy who works an office job fighting his way through the corporate world or the factory worker who sweats 8 hours a day to feed his family. One thing I am so thankful for at Grace Community Church is that we have attracted a lot of men’s men who are tough outside, but inside they have tender hearts for God and their families. I love when a man leads his family to church.
I am trying to decide what to blog about in the coming weeks. Any suggestions?
The following list may be an indicator of what people are interested in when they come to this blog. These are the top 10 posts so far in the month of June:
Here’s a random post that came to me this morning. I was thinking about some of the things that encourage me in life.
Strengths Finder 2.0 has proven already to be a great tool for my leadership. We are going to use this instrument with our staff in the coming months. I have been using Myers-Briggs Type Instrument for years and still plan to, but this is now another tool I plan to use to help build a healthy team.
I believe in being friends with the people with whom I work. I consider the people on our staff to be friends. I hope we never hire anyone I could not also claim as a friend. Part of building a healthy team environment is getting to know team members and building close relationships…friends. That is the disclaimer statement, because this post is not about working with friends. Actually this post is the opposite. This post is a warning against working with friends; especially close friends. Well maybe not a warning, but definitely a caution.
Just an average guy with a dream…
(Of course, he followed his dream and is no longer average.)
The shortest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 117. I have often wondered what was going through the Psalmist’s mind when he recorded his thoughts for this Psalm. Was he finished? Did he get interrupted? Was there something else he wanted to say? Was he satisfied with his work? (Obviously God was.) This shortest chapter has huge meaning. If we were to memorize just these two verses and implement them in our life, I think it may make a difference in our perspective on the world and the situations in which we find ourselves.
We are in the middle of a family series and I was talking yesterday about marriage and specifically the need to commit ourselves to making marriage work. My co-pastor Chad and his wife sang while Cheryl and I danced. It was a visual picture of the leadership of the church admitting that marriage is tough, but our commitment to make it work is what can make a marriage strong.
At that point, perhaps more than any other time, they realized with everything in them that This WAS Jesus. Did they understand Him completely? NO. Would they question Him again? YES. Would there be other storms? Of course!
For this one moment in time, however, nothing else in all the world mattered.
