Leadership has to be an expression of the Fruit of the Spirit, not a cover for egos, bullying and power.
Category: leadership
This is about a style of church leadership that is built on multiplying disciples and churches, from one-to-one coaching all the way up.
This wasn’t just being busy; this was a series of simultaneous responsibilities with a major price tag, and a lot of grieving people.
Are we willing to use people who are better than us? Because if not, we are doomed to be the best person in the room.
Each one had constructed a ring-fenced zone, where sin could roam free but still safely caged. Had none of them watched Jurassic Park?
If you think that saying ‘I don’t know’ means you’re a failure (because you’re paid to know, you ought to know) then you will never learn anything.
Seven lessons from a superb new biography of a remarkable man.
Even the best of us can get caught in a bitterness of spirit, whether to an individual, a group, a type or even a whole church.
With Steve Jobs you were only toast if you thought he was wrong but didn’t dare to say so. But I’ve seen pastors act as if disagreeing was an act of treachery.
Like you, your heroes are average at almost everything they do – you’ve just shone a light onto the brilliant bit.
If you want people to focus and contribute, you need to help them keep in the game. And that gets harder as the clock keeps moving.
Thermometers can tell you what’s happening, but they can’t change anything. Enter the thermostat.
You’re probably facing a series of leadership questions in your church, but it’s important to see that your role might not be the same in each circumstance.
‘Ghosts’ are the habits, practices, customs of the past that don’t have any present value, but the organisation (church, group, whatever) still carries on with them.
When you’re a leader, it’s all too easy to be the hero. You’re the one with the answers, the vision, the ideas. You’re the pack leader, the team captain, the one who’s first over the top. And you know as well as I do, all the things that are wrong with that ‘big hero’ style.
It’s not that this kind of leader want to be the only person in the room – Diotrephes needed that church he could control – but he needed to be the leader in the room. And he’d break fellowship with an apostle to win.
I’m sure I’m not the only pastor who dreads Annual Meetings. I’ve seen them hijacked by silly side issues, falling apart in blazing rows, or just quietly managing decline.
Each person in that nightmare was a Christian, serving and sacrificing. But somehow, that shared commitment did not become a shared commitment to each other.
Pastors can be so busy giving out, giving themselves away, that they don’t take the time to check what’s going on inside them, and ask, ‘What am I supposed to be doing here, and how do I keep on keeping going for the long haul?’
So I’ve written a new free give-away for subscribing to my email list. The Pastor’s Check-Up
LeaderBox is dedicated to getting you reading with focus, and then implementing what you learn. And there have been action points for me out of every book.