Thoughts on Data, Culture, and Organizational Development
Every week, I lead a small group of teenagers at a bible study. Every week I start with the same questions. Keep that in mind, we’ll come back.
I was a part of a small group of college students. From that small group, a church grew up. One of the first things we did was talk about what we wanted to see out of this group and then search through Continue reading “Values – In Church”
Andy Stanley has said “You’re going to cheat someone. The question is who?” In fact, he wrote a book on it. You may, or may not, have noticed that the blog has been dead for about a week. There’s a reason. Last week we had a difficult family situation and Continue reading “Who will you cheat?”
What are you doing at 10X? I’ll explain.
A long time ago, I liked knowing everything. I liked being the go to guy. I’d always try to learn as much as I could about anything, so that I could be the guy with all the answers. I still like learning, but for very different reasons now. Continue reading “10X”
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?