The Pain of Disunity
One of the greatest hindrances to a church making an impact on the community around her is a lack of unity—a lack of Christian love and passion focused together in the same direction. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). […]
Three Keys to Defining Your Ministry Process
Defining the process is formulating a strategy. It is agreeing to a blueprint. And this blueprint describes not only the kind of disciple that will be built but also how. Church leaders must define more than the purpose (the what); they must also define the process (the how). My coauthor of Simple Church, Thom Rainer, […]
Is a Pastor a Leader?
Sadly in many contexts, pastors either fail to exercise leadership or are stripped of their leadership. Those who fail to lead their congregations are often content to be chaplains who feverishly run from need to need without leading the flock in a particular direction. In other cases, a local church greatly hampers the leadership of […]
Not Smelling Our Own Stench
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells a fascinating story about the launch of Febreze. The researchers and product development team at Procter & Gamble really believed they had developed a product that consumers longed for—a product that would eliminate, not merely mask, bad smells. During the product development phase, people expressed a deep […]
Our Biggest Regrets
Tom Gilovich and Vicki Medvec, two Cornell social psychologists, have studied and researched how we deal with regret. They place regret into two broad categories: actions (things we wish we had not done or said) and inactions (things we wish we had done). In their research they discovered that in the short term, we tend […]
Four Leadership Lessons from Nehemiah (Part 2)
Yesterday I shared two leadership lessons from Nehemiah 13. The final chapter in the Book of Nehemiah gives us a picture of how a great leader responded when there was a major drift among the people he led. I will pick up where I left off yesterday… 3 – Confront problem people. Vision is translated […]
The danger of “hiring the best”
The longer I lead, the more I realize how essential the right leaders are to the success of a team, ministry, or organization. While the right leaders will overcome insufficient systems and processes, great processes and systems can never overcome ineffective leaders. The right leaders are not necessarily the “best” leaders. The “best” leaders when […]