Archives For Leadership

7 Critical Areas for Church Security (free ebook)

Kent Shaffer —  May 22, 2013

We hear stories of shootings, child abusers, and natural disasters, but what should we do when they come to church? ACTIVE Faith has a free ebook exploring some practical steps.

We need to approach this with biblical wisdom. We cannot and should not ever underestimate the power of prayer. We must pray against opposition from both spiritual warfare and mankind’s sinfulness. I believe prayer thwarts harm more often than we realize.

We agree on prayer for safety, but what is our responsibility to prepare for safety?

The story of Nehemiah is one of prayer, pragmatism, and faith. In Nehemiah 4:7-20, foreign nations despised the Israelites and planned to harm them, but the Israelites sought God in prayer, posted guards, and rebuilt the city walls while trusting God to fight for them if trouble came.

Nehemiah 4:7-20
(8) And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. (9) And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.

(15) When our enemies heard that it was known to us and that God had frustrated their plan, we all returned to the wall, each to his work. 16 From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and coats of mail. And the leaders stood behind the whole house of Judah, (17) who were building on the wall. Those who carried burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other. (18) And each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built. The man who sounded the trumpet was beside me. (19) And I said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, “The work is great and widely spread, and we are separated on the wall, far from one another. (20) In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there. Our God will fight for us.”

I love that Nehemiah and the Israelites sandwiched their responsibility between prayer and faith. They asked God, did what they could, and trusted God to do they rest. They weren’t lazy. They didn’t invite trouble. And they certainly did not have a false sense of security. Instead, they realized that God was the key to safety.

Pastors need to spiritually and physically protect the congregation just like a shepherd protects his flock.

This doesn’t mean that we go to an extreme by shutting ourselves off from the world in order to be safer. We are called to be in the world but not of it, and that comes with risks and sometimes violent persecution. At that same time, we shouldn’t wrecklessly go out looking for trouble. We must be Spirit-led in our outreach and in protecting the flock.

7 Critical Areas for Church Security

ACTIVE Faith’s free ebook covers 7 critical areas for modern church security.

  • Background Checks
  • Check-in System
  • Disarming Friendliness
  • Emergency Action Plan
  • Triage Teams
  • Emergency Response Team Kits
  • Emergency Communications

The larger a church body becomes, the more important is to have systems in place to discourage wrong doing, prevent evil, and respond well to crisis. But in whatever you do, be sure you do it with much prayer and faith in God.

Download 7 Critical Areas for Church Security (PDF)

Special thanks to ACTIVE Faith for supporting Church Relevance by sponsoring this post.
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You don’t have to be awesome. God is awesome.

Kent Shaffer —  February 18, 2013

Some pockets of Christianity create a false theology of what a pastor should be by hijacking the biblical roles of a pastor with their own cultural ideals. It is not intentional. In fact, they often agree on the biblical definition of a pastor, but their actions and culture don’t show it. Their culture perpetuates an epitome of pastors that binds them psychologically and drives their behavior.

The Bible describes a pastor as a shepherd who feeds and protects the flock and ideally knows them by name. It is an authoritative intimacy with the congregation that feeds them spiritually with preaching, teaching, and relational discipleship while nurturing, protecting, and guiding their individual spiritual journeys.

In some pockets of Christianity, we’ve stopped empowering believers to use their spiritual gifts and created a culture where the pastor is expected to be the eloquent speaker (teaching gift), the counselor (shepherd gift), the CEO (administration gift), the visionary (leadership gift), the motivator (exhortation gift), the scholar (knowledge gift), the expert (wisdom gift), the soul-winner (evangelism gift), the buddy (hospitality gift), the prayer warrior (intercession gift), the spiritualist (discernment, miracles, & faith gifts) as well as a technologist, social media maven, marketer, sex expert, financial strategist, diplomat, comedian, blogger, vlogger, and more.

When you fail to emphasize the responsibility each church member has to own and live out their spiritual gift(s) daily, the pastor will inevitably feel the need to take the responsibility of all the gifts upon his shoulders. This is impossible and unhealthy. The eye can not be a spleen.

In Leadership, Theology
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How to Maximize Church Volunteers (free ebook)

Kent Shaffer —  January 30, 2013

As a community of believers grows, its needs new leaders raised up to handle the increased ministry needs. This is true for churches that handle growth by multiplying into new locations and for churches that keep their growth in one location.

It is the story of Acts 6:1-7. The early church was a time of growth where 5,000 men could find Christ from just one sermon (Acts 4:4). Yet we see in chapter 6, that the Greek-speaking Jewish widows became lost in the bustle of growth and were neglected. Seven men of good reputation and spiritual maturity were chosen to meet that need.

Unfortunately, raising up volunteers isn’t easy. It’s hard work. And to have Acts 6 quality volunteers takes a culture well-equipped at discipleship and cultivating spiritual maturity long before being appointed to serve.

ACTIVE Faith is offering a free ebook on “How to Maximize Church Volunteers”. It is a great primer introducing best practices of modern churches for appointing, training, and supporting church volunteers. The more you grow, the more you need structure.

Volunteer Challenges Based on Church Size

The benefit of house churches (<25 people ideally) is they have no need for volunteers to run major equipment, maintain facilities, or manage ministry operations. What volunteer needs do exist tend to happen naturally, such as greeting newcomers and watching kids.

But as a church grows, even a house church, the need for volunteers and structure increases as the ease of relationships decreases.

For example, it is said that the quality of community intimacy declines after a house church exceeds 25 people. At this size, it is less likely for everyone to take part and more difficult to know each other deeply. At around 100-230 people, we experience Dunbar’s number – our cognitive limit of being able to know who everyone is and how they relate to each other. This is a medium-sized church (51-300) that still has some relational agility but still needs structure to meet all ministry needs and appoint believers according to their gifts.

Large churches (301-1,999) often undergo intense growing pains as they learn they can no longer know everyone. It is at this size and above that we more commonly see volunteer mistakes, such as:

  • not communicating volunteer opportunities
  • lack of clear leadership
  • lack of leadership training
  • lack of accountability
  • lack of volunteer appreciation
  • haphazardly appointing volunteers (lack of necessary spiritual maturity, abilities, etc.)

By the time a church grows to be a megachurch (2,000-9,999) or gigachurch (10,000+), they’ve usually figured out structure and now must work even harder at relationships and love. If left to itself, structure and management become cold and sterile. You can’t systematize love and relationships; trying just seems artificial and disingenuous. It is a weird tension because you need structure, but true love is sloppy. This is non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter how structured and high performance you are, if you don’t have love, it is in vain (1 Corinthians 13).

So each stage comes with its own challenges. Regardless of what size you’re at, download ACTIVE Faith’s free ebook and think through if there is anything that your church needs to change.

Download: How to Maximize Church Volunteers (PDF)

Special thanks to ACTIVE Faith for supporting Church Relevance by sponsoring this post.

In Leadership, Resources
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How to Get Things Done

Kent Shaffer —  December 13, 2012

There are a lot of books, articles, and stage talks on how to get things done. In some ways, the topic has become so romanticized in Western culture that some love the pursuit of learning about it to the extent of not having time for real productivity.

There are a slew of tips and research worth paying attention to:

Start things (that’s the hardest part). Don’t multi-task. Pick one task and focus on it for a long, uninterrupted stretch of time. Be deliberate. Break large tasks into smaller steps. Eliminate distractions like social media. Schedule your day and tasks in the morning or the evening before. Write down your long-term goals and the milestones for achieving them. Checking email too often makes you stupid. Too much data can make you stupid.

2 Reminders for Productive Ministry

Yet in the midst of a sea of how-to advice, I think it is important remember a few key things about ministry:

#1 :: God’s plan doesn’t always seem productive (or at least efficient).

Joseph’s journey from slave to Egyptian ruler wasn’t efficient. Moses waited 80 years before leading the Israelites. From a Western perspective, these timeframes seem excruciating. From a Western perspective, a few months can seem too long. There are certainly situations that need to be sprinted through, but the race Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 9 and 2 Timothy 4 is a patient marathon.

There is a big difference between being lazy and patiently working hard. At the heart of the gospel and The Great Commission is a responsibility we have to selflessly love, serve, teach, and proclaim. And almost the only way to do this is through the patient nurturing of relationships. In ministry we must fight against the desire to replace relationships entirely with big events, programs, and systems that give the appearance of results. These things are great when built upon a culture that invests in relationships, but without that relational depth, they rarely disciple people as well as we think they do.

When making disciples, do you want quantity or quality? God looks at the heart, but pursuing quality is often full of messy ups and downs that feel unproductive.

# 2 :: Do what’s most important.

The busyness of ministry always has more important things to do than you have attention to give. Focus on what is most important and trust God to take care of the rest. Focus more on God’s voice through Scripture and the Holy Spirit and less on the opinions of your church’s biggest donor or the best-selling author celebrity pastor.

My 5 Favorite Productivity Tools

I’m far from a productivity guru. I have, however, experimented with an abundance of techniques and approaches to getting things done. My workflow rhythm changes every few months, so I try to custom tailor my task management to each specific season of life. These are my 5 favorite tools from recent years:
  1. NeuYear Wall Calendar
    It helps to visualize the year’s biggest responsibilities, events, and milestones charted in one place for quick reference. It gives a sense of urgency that helps goad productivity towards the next fast-approaching deadline. It reminds me of what I need to do today to accomplish what need to be done next month. Perhaps most importantly, it’s helped me see if I am leaving enough room in my schedule to spend time with my wife and kids. I recommend the Dry Erase version of the calendar.
  2. Google Calendar
    Google Calendar weaves every aspect of my life, my family, and my workspace into one master schedule on my phone and computer.
  3. Gmail App
    Rather than using an app for notes. I write notes as an email to myself when on the go.
  4. Paper Notepad
    For daily planning and task management for a day in the office, I’ve found jotting down a quick schedule and to-do list each morning on a notepad to be the most helpful. It helps me focus on the tasks at hand by removing the clutter of future obligations. And I love the feeling of accomplishment from physically scratching off a completed task.
  5. Asana
    For long term planning and team interactions, I use Asana. It is free, less time-intensive, and a more versatile solution than popular alternatives.

For Discussion:
What are your favorite tools, tips, and techniques for productivity?

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Measuring Ministry Effectiveness (free ebook)

Kent Shaffer —  November 29, 2012

Church leaders want to be good stewards of what is entrusted to them, but each generation has struggled to find an appropriate way to measure their effectiveness.

Businesses measure return on investment (ROI), but measuring return on ministry investment (ROM) is much trickier. Here’s a few reasons why:

  • The Inputs
    Healthy ministry takes more than money and heavily relies on a mix of time, money, talent, and obedience to the Holy Spirit and God’s Word. These inputs are a difficult mix to quantify.
  • The Results
    Even trickier is attempting to measure spiritual fruit – authentic conversions, maturing believers, discipleship, accountability, right heart attitudes, purity, and biblical obedience.
  • God’s Economy
    What is the most effective thing in ministry doesn’t always make rational sense. After all, God likes to use the foolish things of this world to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27). While it is good to be strategic and make wise choices in ministry, we must always be sensitive and obedient to leadings from the Holy Spirit. In other words, we must be willing to throw out our plans and programs and follow the Holy Spirit when He guides differently. Sometimes healthy and obedient ministry is reaching thousands of people, and sometimes it is spending 40 years to win one convert. What matters is obedience.

Reality is it’s impossible to measure ministry effectiveness with man-made metrics. There will always be some mystique to the way God works and what He truly defines as effective.

So how do churches measure their effectiveness?

While there will never be a perfect formula, churches have found supplemental metrics by counting attendance, finances, commitments to Christ, baptisms, small group participants, and volunteers. While not direct indicators, these metrics can be good hints as to a ministry’s health.

Some church leaders have borrowed tools from the business world, such as Harvard Business School’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) for performance management. Nonprofits and businesses have been using the Balanced Scorecard for two decades to:

  • Align efforts with the organization’s vision and strategy
  • Improve communication internally and externally
  • Help prioritize programs and projects
  • Evaluate performance against strategic goals

Free Ebook

Ministry consultant Eric Soon has tweaked the Balanced Scorecard to better fit churches’ needs, and ACTIVE Faith is offering a free whitepaper – “Excellence in Ministry: Balanced Scorecard” – as a great introduction to using the BSC in ministry.

If your ministry is healthy and built on a strong foundation of prayer and listening to the Holy Spirit, then tools like the Ministry Balanced Scorecard can be a wonderful complement to your ministry and produce greater stewardship as long as you use it within the framework of your unique calling.

Special thanks to ACTIVE Faith for supporting Church Relevance by sponsoring this post.
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Perspectives on Global Partnership

Kent Shaffer —  October 18, 2012

At the Global:Church Forum, a panel discussion shared the global partnership experiences of Ajith Fernando of Youth for Christ (Sri Lanka), Menchit Wong of Compassion International (Philippines), Oscar Murui of Nairobi Chapel (Kenya), Bishop Jospeh Garang Atem of The Episcopal Church of Sudan (South Sudan), and John Huffman of Christianity Today (USA).

What have you learned at the Global: Church Forum?

Huffman: Those of us who are givers need to be receivers and to listen for a season before talking. In fact, Westerners may be the receivers in the years ahead which will be tough.

Wong: We need to stop and reflect.

Muriu: There is a need for the Church to explore southern hemisphere to southern hemisphere partnerships.

How can leadership boards be better?

Murui: Bring the reformers in. Bring in fresh eyes that have no vested interest and can speak with honesty.

Huffman: You have to be willing to give up power in order to have global diversity. At board levels, this is a very delicate issue.

How do you maintain balance without creating power struggles?

Fernando: Come in with the perspective that God’s sovereignty is greater than us. Do not give up the idea that agreement is possible. Always punctuate meetings of conflict with prayer because it is difficult to be mean when influenced by prayer.

Atem: Give the Holy Spirit room to do His work.

Wong: Don’t call it a retreat when it is really a business meeting. We had to repent and humble ourselves before others and God. And as we set aside the business agenda and reflected spiritually, it was a time of great growth. When we pay attention to the Holy Spirit and less of ourselves, good things happen.

In some ministries there is an unspoken value of perpetuity equals success. But sometimes there are times that the work is done. How do you discern that? What are barriers to realizing it?

Huffman: If times change and a ministry model is no longer successful, you need to close it.

Fernando: What does our nation need? Is our group doing something that the nation needs? Sometimes you need to stop things. Other times you just need radical shifts.

Murui: Maybe we need to learn as Christians to work a timeline into the things we create. Without an end point, some ministries live on to drain Kingdom resources. If I was the Devil, I’d try to keep organizations alive.

Why are the majority of black Americans not investing in Africa as missionaries?

Murui: The black American Church has been asleep to missions because it is so caught up within its needs within the US culture – dysfunctional families, incarceration rates, etc. But we are beginning to see the black American Church wake up and start coming as missionaries. When we see a white come to Africa, there is some sense of suspension because of our history of colonialism. But when a black American visits, they have high credibility because Africa looks up to their music and sports athletes.

Will donors in the West start mandating organizations to start working together for strategic partnership? And should they?

Fernando: It is necessary for there to be chemistry, and you cannot mandate chemistry. I also think there is a move of the Spirit that will connect people together.

Huffman: Mainline denominations did use to mandate working together, but then they declined. What is happening now is a new paradigm of working together. The Holy Spirit is mandating us, but I don’t think it will be one-size-fits-all.

Wong: The work to be done is so big that we must have strategic partnerships, so we at least must be working towards them.

How do we help the Northern Church free itself from isolated independence and better engage in God’s mission?

Huffman: Friendship is the best way to engage and prevent isolation. These relationships are lasting. Partnership at its best comes from friendship. Not all partnerships have the luxury of 50 years of relationship first. Sometimes you have to move in fast, but always work for friendship.

Murui: There seems to be a romanticism for the West to go into extreme poverty and engage it while bypassing key churches around that poverty that would be a great help. Work with significant local organizations and treat them as equals. The Africa and India of today have changed from 50 years ago.

Wong: It is when God humbles us that we can truly experience great things. When an organization is proud of its vision, it is easy to miss the strengths of other groups. Invite other organizations into your gatherings so that you can appreciate their work. When you travel, remove your ideas and act as family. Mentioning your title can create barriers. Pray together.

Atem: Come and see, and you will know what to do.

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Andy Stanley on 3 Keys to Creating High Performance Teams

Kent Shaffer —  October 5, 2012

At Catalyst Conference 2012, Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church (Alpharetta, GA) discussed how to create high performance teams.

Teams are important because of synergy. Churches get people to give them money to create volunteer positions for them to fill.

If you don’t know why something is working when it is working, you won’t know how to fix it when it breaks.

But leaders are generally bad at evaluating things that work. Leaders tend to be good at evaluating problems. This is why church leaders tend to blame things that break on people rather than systems. You might not need a new youth pastor; you might need a new system.

When you see something working well, ask, “Why is this working so well?” The reason things work well at churches is because of high performance teams. Regardless of the size of your ministry, you want and need high performance teams.

You need action-oriented people who have extraordinary clarity around what are we doing, why are we doing it, and why are we doing it here?

Irreducible Minimums for High Performance Teams

#1 :: Select performance-oriented people and position them for maximum people.

Recruit doers and not thinkers.
If you have to choose between a doer and a thinker, choose a doer. It is much easier to educate a doer than it is to activate a thinker. Jim Collins says, “If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate people largely goes away.” Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Put people where they can create their greatest contribution.
Albert Einstein says, “Everyone is a genius, but But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” You’ve got to figure out a way within your organization to get the best people in the right roles. It usually takes bypassing the politics of who deserves the role by tenure.

Everyone on the team needs to feel the interdependency of the team.
Speak to your staff and volunteers so that they understand the interdependency. The senior pastor depends on the children’s ministry volunteers in order to do what he does. Every role is essential to the whole ministry. Interdependency won’t be felt unless key leaders makes people feel valued and that their roles are important.

#2 :: Clarify the what and why.

Performance oriented people like to win.
You must clarify the win for every staff and volunteer position. When you clarify the win, it becomes the magnetic north for the energy and get-it-done doers of the organization. When you don’t define the win, each individual will define it for themselves.

Teams dissolve when the problems are all solved.
Conversations about change don’t begin around conversations about the problems. Conversations about change begin around conversations about a common goal.

You have to organize to the what.
Once you clarify the win/what, you must create an organization where all of the resources are allocated to that win. Don’t force your staff and volunteers to have to work around what your organization was structured for. Nothing frustrates high energy people more than having to do work arounds. The lion’s share of your time and money must go to getting critical mass.

#3 :: Orchestrate and evaluate everything.

Orchestrate means this is how we don it here until further notified. Great teams never depend on individual thinking and creativity. Great teams know exactly what the play is when it is called. Linebackers don’t get creative except when in trouble. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion. High performance teams stick with the playbook.

Orchestration brings consistency and predictability to all of your processes. Orchestration will make your organization seem more personal.

Evaluate everything.
Create a feedback loop.

As a leader you must stay close to critical events, or you will default to numbers, which get exaggerated. Figure out how to get close to key events in your church. Has your organizational growth pushes you so far back that all you see is numbers? Numbers are never accurate. See it for yourself as often as possible, and create meetings in between to learn more than numbers.

What you are doing is so important.

Special thanks to Skylark Audio Video for covering my travel expenses so that I can live blog the conference for you.

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Matt Chandler on 4 Things We Inherit from God

Kent Shaffer —  October 5, 2012

At Catalyst Conference 2012, Matt Chandler of The Village Church (Flower Mound, TX) discussed the believers’ inheritance from God.

What the Holy Spirit does is illuminate, and we need to illuminate our hearts by being honest about where we actually are and ask the Holy Spirit to help us. Ask to be broken because we like ourselves a lot.

Galatians 4:21
21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. 23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. 24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia;[e] she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.

There are those that believe that their justification is by their obedience to rules. Paul doesn’t expect us to be out from under obedience to the law but out from under the weight of the law. Be obedient to what God wants you; don’t try to follow what God has for someone else.

Two children were born to Abraham. One was born of the flesh without God’s help. The other was a miraculous gift from God.

Justification is the crown jewel of our salvation, and that justification is by grace from a just judge. What justification leads to is our sonship – that we are sons and daughters of God.

Romans 8:14-17
14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons[a] of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Sonship is the vitality through which ministry flows. You are not a black sheep of the family but a co-heir of Christ.

4 Things We Inherit

  1. We get God Himself
    Psalm 4:7 says, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” Psalm 73:25-26 says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength[a] of my heart and my portion forever.” We get God in good times and in bad times. It doesn’t matter what we accomplish, all we have got is Him.
  2. One day we will get resurrected.
    Read 1 Corinthians 15. There will be a day when death no longer has a sting and there is no loss.
  3. We get the world.
    Psalm 2:8 says, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” Romans 4:13 says, “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” God does not need you to spread the gospel, but He is offering you a chance to play.
  4. Suffering and rejection.
    2 Timothy 3:12 says, “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” If you contextualize Jesus to the point that no one is offended, you are not preaching Jesus. John 16:33 says, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” It is not unloving of God to wound you now so that you might have everlasting joy in eternity. God is going to do surgery and then plant us where He needs us so that we can live as sons and daughters. Be faithful where you are.

Special thanks to Skylark Audio Video for covering my travel expenses so that I can live blog the conference for you.

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