Category: Leadership

We’ve been talking on Conversatio Morum about developing the ability to gauge how you’re doing, how your team is doing, and how effective you are at accomplishing your task. We’ve described this as a Check Yourself mentality. We’ve talked about several different ways to measure this, and why it’s important. You can see all the posts here. The final thing I want to discuss with this is the need to experiment. By this, I don’t mean, make uninformed decisions. What I mean is that there are always things to improve, things to tweak, better ways of doing things. Continue reading “Check Yourself – Part 5”

The last few weeks on Conversatio Morum we talked about having a check yourself mentality, what that means and why it’s important. You can read about that here, here, and here. Today I’d like to talk about another way to gauge this for your entire group. The Purpose driven movement has been well received in large, and at the same time has been given a lot of flack from certain parts of the church. With that being said, I do think that Rick Warren gives some great and practical thoughts on ministry. Specifically, when looking at the Purpose Driven Church the 5 purposes in purpose driven church are thermometer to help gauge how your church as a whole is doing.

If you’re unfamiliar with the 5 purposes listed by Warren and Saddleback, they are:

1. Fellowship
2. Discipleship
3. Worship
4. Ministry
5. Evangelism

You can pull these purposes out of Acts 2:42-47 so they are rooted in scripture. Now, the question is how you begin to utilize them as a measurement for health and effectiveness. When you begin to think of the 5 purposes as a thermometer they begin to make more sense in terms of a metric to show health. The best way to view this is that each thermometer should be at the same level as a good gauge of health. On the other side of this coin, if you have an imbalance, that’s a good indicator of lack of health. For example, if evangelism is at a 8 and everything else is at a 3, your situation is like growing a 3-year-old with steroids. Not the greatest picture of health.

So part of the goal is to have each of the thermometers be at the same level. The other part of the goal is to have them go higher. You don’t want each purpose to be at the same level and that level be 0. The goal is to continually be growing in each of these areas and, on a scale of 0-10, have them all be at a 10.

This is a common tool used by some of the most effective church’s in our nation. Does this seem like a helpful measurement tool for you? Can you see the advantage of utilizing this tool to determine the health and growth of your congregation?

The last few weeks we talked about having a check yourself mentality and the need to gauge your effectiveness, you can read about that here. We also talked about ways to gauge your effectiveness, you can read about that here. Today I’d like to talk about another way to gauge this. This is geared more towards leaders as opposed to the 1/3 rule that is geared towards entire groups. You need to gauge how your leaders are doing personally and in their task since they set the pace for everyone else. Continue reading “Check Yourself – Part 3”

Last time we talked about how in leadership having a “check yourself” mentality is necessary. You can read that here. I want to spend some time talking about the specifics of effectiveness when dealing with church for the next several weeks. One thing I want to clarify is that effectiveness does not mean bigger numbers and more people. If you relegate to numbers as a metric of success then you’ll end up with a big group and not much life change in that group. In the end that becomes a big social club. I will also say that my observation has been that what is needed to attain growth is counter intuitive in that the best way to do that is to not concentrate as hard on numerical growth. Continue reading “Check Yourself – Part 2”

When we talk about mission, specifically related to church, there seems to always be this running tension between offering grace and seeing effectiveness. Usually people don’t want to have those harder conversations regarding someone’s effectiveness at what they’re doing. Whether that thing be leading a small group, leading worship, inviting others to follow Jesus, or even pastoring a church. Part of the reason for this lack is that as leader’s we don’t have the “Check Yourself” mentality for our own lives, much less for the lives of those we lead. The average median church size in the US is roughly 75 people. 90% of all church’s in the US run 400 or less. Now 400 is a good size, but when you take population growth into account, what this really means is that we aren’t keeping up. Continue reading “Check Yourself – Part 1”

I’ve been thinking through organizational health lately. Patrick Lencioni has a book out entitled The Advantage that speaks to this specific area. It seems that organizational health is big. The big idea is that you need a healthy culture before you can have a growing thriving organization. All the other things, knowing your burn rate, staying fiscally solvent, balancing budget, systems, structures, are important. They’re important, in that they’re permission to play, permission to get in the game. They won’t keep you there though. Continue reading “Organizational Health Is Big”