Tim Sanders served as Yahoo!’s leadership coach and Chief Solutions Officer during their golden years a decade ago. He shares his philosophies on creating great organizations in his book Love is the Killer App.

Tim Sander’s new book, Today We Are Rich, shares the importance of faith, confidence, attitude, and perspective in living a rich life even when times are incredibly difficult. At the heart of the book, are the following 7 principles he learned from his grandmother:

1. Feed your mind good stuff.
2. Move the conversation forward.
3. Exercise your gratitude muscle.
4. Give to be rich.
5. Prepare yourself.
6. Balance your confidence.
7. Promise made, promise kept.

Here is a sample of Tim Sander’s insights from the feed your mind good stuff section.

You should be as careful about what you put into your mind as about what you put into your mouth. Your mind is a machine. When you ingest a piece of information, your mind goes to work chewing on it, digesting it, and then converting it into a thought. When good stuff goes into your mind, good thoughts emerge. People who maintain purposeful mind diets of positive stimuli think healthy thoughts.

Avoid gossip the way you would the flu. It’s a socially acceptable form of pornography that is hurtful. Other people’s misfortunes should never be a source of entertainment.

I am not suggesting you stick your head in the sand, stop reading current-events coverage, and consume only inspirational or spiritual materials. The point of the good-stuff mind diet is to be highly selective about how you stay informed.

Apply this to your social life too. When you look for friends, evaluate their outlook, not just their proximity or relevance to your practical needs. When you find a conversation partner who lifts you up, commit to spending more time with him or her.

I find those are particularly wise words for church leaders to live by. You output what you input, whether it is great design, wise management systems, or negative attitudes. Focus on what is good and is pure, so that you can better fulfill your job in the global Church.

Special thanks to Tim Sanders for sending a complimentary copy of Today We Are Rich. This post also contains affiliate links to Amazon.

At Seeds Conference, Dino Rizzo of Healing Place Church (Baton Rouge, LA) discussed living a lifelong journey of serving.

I believe that there is nothing greater than embracing how God has called you to serve. There is no greater role, title, or position than  being a servant. There is nothing greater to achieve. The greatest husband is a servant. The greatest pastor is a servant.

The one thing that is common with all of us is what Jesus rewards us with. At the end of the day, we will all stand before Jesus as He says, “You have been a faithful servant.” And I believe that being a servant is something easy to drift away from.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
Hebrews 12:1-3

I love the idea of endurance. God, give us hearts that endure. Anyone who has followed Christ for more than a month or so or a year has found that much of what God wants is through a process. God will always use a process. He will always use endurance and perseverance to develop you.

It is the great incubator of the local church that helps build so much endurance. God uses the context of the local church. God uses the context of leadership. It is in the local church that I have learned the most about the race - about being a servant of the Most High.

Jesus was patient with His disciples in the process of developing them who they need to be. In Matthew 15, Jesus was surrounded by all sorts of people with all sorts of problems, and Jesus loved all of them. Jesus told His disciples that He had compassion on them. After three days of healing people, Jesus still had compassion and did not want them to go away hungry. It is almost like Jesus is saying to His disciples, “You think you are done, but you are not done yet.” That is the story of a servant.

Serving is a lifelong journey. I believe that there is a day when all kinds of people with all kinds of problems show up on your doorstep. And you need to serve them. If you are not willing to serve in secret, then you will never be ready to serve faithfully in public. If you don’t value the small things, then you will not be entrusted with big things.

Will you be found serving when the Lord comes to find you?

At Seeds Conference, Willie George of Church on the Move (Tulsa, OK) discussed the four absolutes of leadership.

There are certain things that are principled, and this is one of them.

You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.
2 Timothy 2:1-2 (NIV)

This is about building a team. This is about structure. It is only two verses, but they list five layers of leadership.

1. Jesus Christ
2. Apostle Paul (who was taught personally by Christ)
3. Timothy
4. the faithful men who served Timothy
5. the others taught by the faithful men

STEP #1 - Every leader has to be strong in grace.

Now grace means a lot of things The willing presentation of excellent ministry before and sometimes even without a reciprocal response from the people who are ministered to. Children’s ministers and missionaries understand this process very well.

You may not get a thank you from the people you minister to. But God has the most amazing ways of payback. You don’t always get payback the way you think you want it, but God’s payback is always better. You have to learn how to be strong in grace.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
Colossians 3:22 (NIV)

This means you need to be willing to do ministry with low pay if necessary. Ministry costs money. And the numbers only get bigger. The challenges only get greater. You need to get to the point where you do things because you love people and not because of the immediate reward.

STEP #2 - The leader must communicate vision.

Not everyone does this. The difference between success and failure is often subtleties.

The Kingdom of God is not motivated or energized by need. The Kingdom does not come by need but by faith. And faith comes by hearing the Word of God.

Need is not a great motivator, but vision is.  Think of vision as a blueprint. Blueprints don’t slow the work down. They speed it up.

Then the Lord replied: “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.
Habakkuk 2:2

The Bible is a big book of strategies, and those strategies are almost always inadequate. Grab a rock and a sling and face a giant? March around a wall seven times then shout? There is no vision without strategy.

STEP #3 - The leader must delegate to faithful men.

No matter how gifted a leader may be, he will never fulfill God’s will on his life without helpers.

When you release a faithful person to help you, there is always a reciprocating response. That faithful person releases you to do what you need to be doing. Don’t ask God where your helpers are.

Among the twelve apostles, there was not one single volunteer. Every one of the disciples were picked by Jesus while they were doing something else. That is what we have a responsibility of doing. Don’t wait for volunteers, you must draft people. But you must qualify the people you pick.

Test their faithfulness. The more successful your ministry is, the more careful you must be to qualify them. Success brings opportunists who are not faithful to the same thing that drives you. Test faithfulness in three areas.

1. They must be faithful in the little things.
2. They must be faithful with money. Do they tithe? Are they responsible with the church’s money?
3. They must be true to the original. You do not have the license to do your own thing in someone else’s ministry. Your responsibility in to honor the spirit, the ethics, and the habits of the leader.

Model it. Show people how you want it done.

STEP #4 - The leader must remove workers who are not able to continue.

Starting out, you may have to take any help that is willing. But as you grow, you need to raise the ability of your people. Part of having the ability to do something is the ability to recognize whether you can or cannot do it.

A worker who lacks ability to do his job, will hold everyone back. When you fail to release a worker because you are worried about how they will make it, you are robbing them because they have a place somewhere else in the body of Christ.

You have to learn to change some of your people. A good leader has to remove people who are faithful but not sufficiently able.

No matter how bad, how hard, you want to do something… the key to it is the people.

At Seeds Conference, Mark Rutland of Oral Roberts University (Tulsa, OK) discussed the language of God.

Communication is the right message to the right party in the right way at the right time. If you get any part of that wrong, and you get all of it wrong. Communication is a wonderland.

Did you know God has a communications problem? The problem is us.

There is nothing wrong with the transmitter just the receiver. We do not speak God’s native language. What is the native language of God? It is not Hebrew or Spanish or even tongues. God speaks God.

The communication problem of God is He is communicating His essential truth to a world of broken receivers.

What God sent into this world was His Word. His Word became flesh. The miracle was the incarnation. God in flesh. God with flesh. And the flesh was the problem because when God became a human, He looked human. In fact, the Bible says He was unattractive.

The divinity of Christ is very comforting to us, but the humanity of Christ sets us on edge. Unless Christ was a baby that cries and is human then how could He ever relate to mankind?

When Christ was born, He didn’t think cognitively as an infant. He did not think about being the preexisting coexistant second part of the trinity. Christ had to grow into that. The Bible says that Christ grew in favor with man and with God. And as Christ grew, He began to remember He is God. He began to think in the language of God.

When Christ uses human language to explain the complex concepts from the language of God, people have trouble understanding. “Let the dead bury the dead.”

What confuses people isn’t that Christ can do miracles but that He can sweat. Everybody knows that God can raise the dead, but can God sweat? That is what some struggle to believe.

After Jesus was resurrected, He frequently talked about the Kingdom (of God), but they thought He is talking about the Davidic kingdom. The communication problem was Christ was talking about Kingdom while they were thinking kingdom. Not kingdom but Kingdom. Human words are imperfect for communication ideas from the language of God.

We struggle for these words. We struggle to communicate.

Christ asked the disciples if they wanted power. They said, “Yes.” But Christ says, “No, you will not receive power. You will not receive power but power. You will receive power from the Holy Spirit.”

The church has struggled for 2,000 years to understand the difference between power and power. The church needs to operate in the right power. The church needs to understand the language of God.

Do not confuse your own ego with the mind of God.

God will give you power, but it will not be power to build your kingdom. God will give you power to yield, power to submit, and power to die to oneself.

At Seeds Conference, Gabe George of Church on the Move (Tulsa, OK) discussed 7 steps to great volunteers.

If you want to develop great volunteers, follow these steps.

1. What is your mission?
   For us, children’s ministry is about the kids. If any decision conflicts with that statement, the right answer is clear.
2. Get your systems in order.
   If you want people who are sharp and capable, you have to have your systems in order. If people come to serve and see gaping holes in how you do things, they may defect not because they don’t care but because it looks like you don’t. Volunteers like to know their place. Systems provide that. Church needs to be safe. Systems provide that. If you don’t have systems, you are asking for it.

Those are two things that I think must be done before you ever ask for volunteers. Here is what you do after you’ve got the basics covered.

1. Cast the vision.
   People don’t respond to needs. They respond to vision. Vision captures people. When you are dealing with volunteers, you must cast the vision often, often, often. A  lot of our vision is systems.
2. Have a code of ethics.
   A code of ethics is a list that covers anything that is a deal breaker about serving. And we have volunteers sign the code of ethics in front of a pastor. You determine what this is for you. Clear guidelines make it easy to enforce expectations.
3. Deal with problems.
   You can not be afraid to deal with problems. And problems come from people. It is difficult to look at someone and say, “I’m sorry. This isn’t working.” As Joyce Meyer says, “Do it afraid!” if necessary. You need to realize that you are part of something that is bigger than you. You have to be bold.
4. Put them in the right spot.
   Volunteers all have different kinds of gifts. You have the ones who want to stay behind the scenes and the ones who want the microphone. The funny thing is not all of the people who want the microphone should have the microphone. Our kids are not lab rats for you to develop yourself as a speaker.
5. Be followable.
   There is one thing I’ve seen a lot of in children’s ministry, and it is the guy in the room that others can’t relate to and say, “Well, he is the kids guy.” You don’t have to be corny. You can teach with authority. Just because you teach kids, doesn’t mean that you have to act like you are a child. There is a place for that, but more importantly, you need to be followable. Children’s ministry needs leaders. Children’s ministry needs men (and I think the women agree). And if you want men to volunteer, you need to act like a man. I’ve learned that you can reach kids better if you just act like a man. So ask if you are someone who can be followed. You can’t just be a friend.

That is how we do it at Church on the Move.

At Seeds Conference, Willie George of Church on the Move (Tulsa, OK) discussed turning obstacles into opportunity.

Every generation has to be reached on its own terms. We aren’t talking about compromising the major things. We are talking about small adjustments here and there.

The opportunities that God places before us often do not look like opportunities but rather obstacles.

See, I have set the land before you. Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their offspring after them.
Deuteronomy 1:8 (ESV)

Anything worth having comes with a struggle. The easy thing to do is to go to the place that no one wants to be - the wilderness. The easy thing is to retreat from the struggle.

When the Israelites were in the wilderness, they did not want the struggle of taking the land that God wanted for them. But in Numbers 13, there is symbolism in what the Israelite spies brought back from the land. They brought back grapes, pomegranates, and figs.

• Grapes symbolizes blood. This means there will be redemption here.
• Pomegranates symbolize worship. You will never have your full worship experience unless you take the land.
• Figs symbolize life. God symbolically showed them that this land is where He would feed them.

In Joshua 14:6-14, Caleb and Joshua were older than everyone else because they were the only ones in their generation willing to go take the land.

One of the greatest lessons you can learn in life is that you are not the first one to do what you are going to do. Do not become isolated and forget that others have gone through what you are going through. Do not forget that others have gone before you, and when you take steps of faith, the God that blessed them will bless you, too.

Every obstacle is an opportunity in disguise. When the Israelite spies came back from the land, they refused to see anything but the giants. When you run up against something that looks like an impossibility, your faith can turn it into something that is bigger than you have ever done.

In Numbers 13:26-31, the Israelites were afraid to attack the many people groups living in the land that God wanted for them, but Caleb knew they could do it. They did not have to attack them all at once. They can possess the land by conquering one group at a time.

You don’t have to do it all at once. God will very often only put one thing in front of you at a time.

Catastrophes are not obstacles but opportunities to reach your community.

We need to see the grapes, pomegranates, and figs in the situation.

At Seeds Conference, Ed Young Jr. of Fellowship Church (Grapevine, TX) discussed 11 statements for creative change.

Anytime there is change, there is creativity. Creativity and change are inseparably linked. When you change, often it is an innovation or something different.

I believe that God is cheering to us, “You’ve got it! Now use it!”

Some of us deny having the ability to be creative, but that is not true. God made us unique. And He wants us to be who He planned for us to be individually and collectively.

Here are some creative statements that God has brought forward in Ed Young Jr’s life and in the leadership culture at Fellowship Church.

#1 - You be you.

In every area, be yourself. Do not try to be like any other minister. Do not try to be like any other church.

#2 - Work for the weekend.

The weekend is the most important thing we do in the church. So goes the week, so goes the weekend. So goes the weekend, so goes the week. If you make the weekend the thing, most people show up on the weekend, and you can connect with them there. Creativity is stopping something and starting something else. Why should the church be boring? It shouldn’t. So the weekend is where you can be creative. So often the small tweaks will take you to the giant peaks.

#3 - Have a seat at the table.

At the head of the table is the pastor with the food. The first chair is for people who do not know Christ. If your church is doing what it is supposed to do, then 1/3 of the church should be lost. Chair 2 is baby Christians (another 1/3). The third chair should be mature followers of Christ who share and serve (the last 1/3).

#4 - Sign up for group therapy.

Creativity is best done in a group. Everyone is a creative genius, so in a group, there is no telling what creative thing will come up. Critique while you are planning. Critique while you create. Play idea ping pong. You will not believe the ideas that go back and forth.

#5 - Get your “ask” in gear.

Always seek knowledge. Some are afraid to ask questions because of insecurity. Don’t be afraid. When you talk, there is a rhythm. You need to talk then ask then listen. We ask two questions in our creative process: (1) What if? and (2) What is? Delegation without investigation is an abomination. What if? plans the thing. But What is? investigates the thing. Also ask, “Who am I reaching?”

#6 - Hire “yes” men and “yes” women.

“Y” stands for yielded to God. “E” stands for encouraging. “S” stands for strong. The with you’s help you. The for you’s cheer for you. And the use you’s make you think they are with you, but they really use you and abuse you. When you let God take care of haters, He will take you to a whole ‘nutha level.

#7 - Get on the stairmaster.

Everytime you ask the right people the right questions to get the right answers, you will ask a lot of the wrong people, too. So you are always climbing. You are always moving.

#8 - Become a creative criminal.

Steal ideas unashamedly. Rip them off. Of course, make them your own. God gave you eyes… plagiarize.

#9 - Surf the wave.

Fade awaves are the waves that hit the coastline of our conscious and then fade away. Try to harness your creative ideas. Build in rest periods during the day.

#10 - Go through labor and delivery.

You’ve got conception (getting the idea). You’ve got pregnancy (incubate the idea). You’ve got to give birth. The reason many churches die and lose their creativity is they forget about the lost person.

#11 - Join the comedy club.

The majority of our creative ideas come out of laughter. You have to build in blocks of time to laugh and create. And if laughter doesn’t work, argue! Debate it out if necessary.

You’ve got creativity. Now use it!

The people who make up your team are the most important part of your church after sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and obedience to God’s Word. Your leadership team molds the culture of your church and guides them for better or worse. And it is for this reason that you must create a great team before trying to create a great church.

Leaders of [organizations] that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline.
- Jim Collins

But we can’t look at filling church jobs with a strict corporate HR mindset. The right people for a church can often look quite different from the right people for a business.

Quality church leadership takes more than professional skills. According to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, a church elder should also be spiritually sound, a defender of the faith, wise, fair, reverent, well-thought-of, hospitable, accessible, gentle, not thin-skinned, not money-hungry, committed to his wife, a good father, and more. So staffing your church requires looking at the spiritual and personal conditions of a job candidate and not just the professional skill set.

And because heart attitude is far more important than brain power, sometimes God chooses unimpressive people to do great things. So we must be sensitive to the Holy Spirit in order to recognize the occasions when the right person may also be the unlikely one.

1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (MSG)
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.

It is better to be patient when hiring and get the right people than to quickly add manpower that leads your church in the wrong direction or slows it down as dead weight.

For extra help, there are church staffing organizations that can guide you through the process and scout out people who would be a good fit for your church’s job. Recently, Vanderbloemen Search Group (specializing in large church executive searches) partnered with Help Staff Me (specializing in mid-level staff) to combine resources and expand their networks of relationships. The partnership will likely boost the growing trend of more churches turning to staffing specialists to get the right people on the bus.

Of course, this only scratches the surface of how to fill church jobs with quality leadership. If you have some tips of your own, please share in the comments.

BONUS: Check out LifeChurch.tv’s rigorous interview process including testing, interview questions, and general philosophies from Craig Groechel and Jerry Hurley.