Thoughts on Data, Culture, and Organizational Development
I skipped church this past Sunday. As a staff member, this isn’t normal for me. I was giving my wife a weekend off and took my kids to their grandparents house. On Sunday morning, over breakfast, I had a conversation with my mom and dad about greeting on Sundays (They have been in ministry for over 30 years). Continue reading “How’s your first impression?”
Are you from an ask or a guess culture? You may be unfamiliar with these concepts. If you’re like me, you’re already putting the pieces together of what ask culture and guess culture are. I’ll give you a short explanation and for further clarity, you can read about these concepts at 99u, The Guardian, or the original concept at ask.metafilter.com. These articles came across my desk this week and I had a need to share them. For me, it explained some otherwise nuanced things in my relationships with others. I think it will also explain some relational pain points to you in regards to asking vs guessing cultures. Continue reading “Asking vs Guessing”
[quote]The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.[/quote]
I was talking to some friends last night about the idea that sometimes the best thing to do is to start. Is there a new venture you want to take on? A blog you want to write? A habit you want to develop? The best thing to do with that is to start. Continue reading “Start Makes a Difference”
In church planting, it seems, there are continuous talks around what qualities are needed for a church planter. It seems that, for a lot of groups, what these qualities come down to are the difference between extroversion and introversion. There are other qualities that are discussed such as spiritual life, personal\family health, etc. While those are always deemed most important in the qualities needed, they seem to go away quickly as if they are simply the barrier to entry in consideration. The thing that I’ve found takes up the majority of the conversation is Continue reading “Being Who You Are”
I’m interrupting my regularly scheduled posts to talk about an event that happened this weekend. Leadership Network hosted their second Hackathon in Austin, Texas. I was privileged to attend. It was an excellently planned event in which innovators, programmers, designers, ideators, and leaders of all kinds converged to write code that matters for the Kingdom. Continue reading “Code For The Kingdom Review”
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. [tweet that]
If you’re unfamiliar with the 5 purposes listed by Warren and Saddleback, they are:
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. [tweet that] 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. [tweet that] 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”