elementals: quick reads to sharpen your leadership edge.

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Jun 24, 2019
2 min

Vibe. Yep, It's Vital.

How aware are you of your church’s vibe? In bringing people who are estranged from God back to Him, there are only two ways we approach that: we either attract them or we go find them. And if we do this in the context of a community of believers, we either create environments designed to attract people and/or we develop missional or incarnational communities embedded in the area that we want to reach. And frankly, both approaches are closely joined at the hip. Let’s think bot

Jun 17, 2019
2 min

3 Biggest Misses in Strategic Planning

So you've finally gone through the process of developing a 12-to-18 month strategic plan with your leadership team. But do you know what causes most plans to never get off the ground? Very few churches we’ve worked with had a good process for regularly scheduled strategic planning. But even the ones who did found the process had more than a few holes in it. In our work, we’ve identified the 3 Biggest Misses in Strategic Planning…let’s see how you fare against these: 1. Littl

Jun 15, 2019
2 min

Is Your Church A One-Generation Effort?

"The leader’s unique legacy is the creation of valued institutions that survive over time." The New Testament doesn’t say much about leadership succession. The apostle Paul describes the selection and appointment of pastors, but is curiously quiet about when pastors are succeeded. Leaders must spend time thinking about the future of their organizations. In one of my favorite leadership books, The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner write: “The domain of leaders is the fut

Jun 15, 2019
2 min

Are You "Creativity-Challenged"?

You Don't Have To Be An "Artist" To Be Imaginative I’m convinced that the power of imagination and creativity is too often overlooked in leadership circles. Many times we relegate imagination to the exclusive domain of artists and creatives, forgetting that we are made in the image of God…the epitome of creativity. We have the same spiritual DNA, regardless of how artistically-challenged we consider ourselves. Ed Catmull, the president of the creative powerhouse Pixar, began

Jun 15, 2019
4 min

4 Reasons Why Pastoring Is So Hard

Over half the pastors in the U.S. find the job overwhelming. Why? For years while I led a church, I’d meet other pastors who would talk about how hard it was to be a pastor. I remember thinking about jobs I had in the past that seemed far more difficult than what I was doing then. Prior to pastoring, I had a number of, uh, interesting careers. In one, I found myself digging a ditch as long as a football field during a 20-degree winter hard freeze in Cincinnati. It was so cold

Jun 14, 2019
3 min

Are You An Elemental Leader?

The 4 Fundamental Factors for Effective Leadership Over the decades, I’ve had some good bosses and some not-so-good bosses. And conversely, in my own leadership history, at times I was a good leader and other times a not-so-good leader. But after many years of observation, study, and reflection, it seemed to me there were four simple but elemental factors balanced in every great leader: integrity, passion, servanthood, and imagination. What’s more, these leaders ensured that

Jun 14, 2019
2 min

Eating Cheeseburgers With A Coat On

So Who Are We Serving? Some years back I walked into a fast-food restaurant that was freezing. People were eating with their coats on. I was waiting on my food and said to the woman at the cash register, “Hey, it’s pretty chilly in here.” She smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s how we like it back here. It gets warm in the kitchen.” I replied, “Yeah, but your customers sitting out here are eating with their coats on.” She looked around me at the dining area and then looked back at

Jun 14, 2019
2 min

4 Critical Questions Before Writing Your Sermon

Every Good Message Begins With Thinking About The Questions First Over the last thirty years, I’ve spoken in some capacity—whether teaching or worship leading—in well over four-thousand church services because of multiple services on the weekends. I’ve spent the bulk of my life trying to learn to communicate the good news of Jesus. And I still feel like a neophyte despite Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” theory of mastery. Before crafting a message, I’d ask myself 4 critical questio

Jun 14, 2019
2 min

4 Stages of Organizational Focus

A Different Organizational Focus Is Critical As Your Church Grows Many of the churches we work with struggle with systems. The leaders may be passionate about the mission, but how that work gets done may be sloppy or ineffective. If that’s the case, it eventually leads to staff/volunteer burnout. Therefore, thinking smartly about developing healthy systems is a critical component for the life of the organization. But with one caveat: if you’re in the front end of churchplanti

Jun 13, 2019
3 min

The Art & Science of Changing Service Times

Are Your Service Times Optimal to Reach New People? Recently in coaching a great church in the Columbus Ohio metro area—The Church Next Door—we suggested to senior pastor Doyle Jackson that they considering changing their service times. The Church Next Door accommodates about 900 people each weekend in four services: two on Saturday night (5:00 and 6:45pm) and two on Sunday morning (9 and 10:45am). The first one on Saturday night was okay, but the second one was super-sparce.

Jun 13, 2019
3 min

Do You Like What You're Doing Now?

...And Why Do You Do What You Do? After being in some outreach-oriented ministry from the time Jesus captured my heart way back in the seventies (the Mesozoic Era) and pastoring in an outward-focused church for nearly 30 years of that time, periodically I’ll run into folks who ask, “Do you like what you’re doing now?” When we launched the Elemental Churches Inventory to measuring church health and leadership development, there was really only one goal: to help as many churche

Jun 13, 2019
2 min

What Does Leadership Demand Emotionally?

Balancing Compartmentalization With Transparency If you’ve ever had a boss that you enjoyed working long, hard hours for, what made them worth working that hard for? After posting that question on Facebook, I got a barrage of comments. Generalized, they were: “They noticed me. My work, my contribution, my hours. There was genuine appreciation.” And it was stated over and over that they felt their boss was “in the trenches with me.” That means at an emotional level as well. H

Jun 13, 2019
3 min

The Success in Succession

Are You Future-Thinking? There’s been a lot written about senior pastors’ transition and succession, particularly as Boomers are in the throes of figuring out what’s next. I’ve been on both sides of successful transitions, following a catalytic lead pastor/churchplanter as well as turning over my senior pastor leadership to a next gen leader. The reality is: it’s rarely easy because all of us carbon-based bipeds are complicated and easily blur the lines between “what we do” a

Jun 12, 2019
2 min

How Love Creates an Outward Focus

Loved People Love Others I’ve noticed that Christians who have developed an outward-focused approach to life tend to deeply believe that they have a heavenly Father who liberally loves them. It is an act of faith. I’ve sat with believers who’ve told me “I just can’t believe that God really loves me.” There are times when I’ve said to them, “Wow, that’s too bad…because it’s not true. But if you want to believe a lie about God, that’s up to you.” This is simply about choosing t

Jun 12, 2019
2 min

The Power Paradox

Maybe it’s time we leaders reconsider how we think about power. In relationships. In politics. In culture. In organizations. About four-thousand years ago God spoke to Abraham and said, “Leave what’s familiar and I’ll make a nation out of you. And here’s the Big Deal, Abe: you’ll bless the entire world.” What does it mean to bless an entire planet? How would I do that? Would that mean I’d have the power to make people happy? To end all wars? To eliminate disease and pain? To

Jun 12, 2019
2 min

Why Plan a Year of Sermons?

Powerful Things Happen When "Mission" Meets "Messages" In An Intentional Way For pastors, I think it’s smart to have an overview of an entire year of speaking, particularly if the bulk of your messages are topical in nature. The way our leadership team would determine the teaching calendar was preceded by uncovering what we called our yearly strategic initiatives—what we would want our entire staff and key volunteer leaders to be focused on for the next year, typically three-

Jun 10, 2019
2 min

You’ve Probably Been Operating In Your Calling For Some Time

YOU MAY BE LEADING…AND DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT! Eons ago I played in a little vocal-driven acoustic group consisting of a steel-six-string guitar, a classical guitar, a violin and hand percussion. I had just become a Christian. I had been playing bar-band rock music for years before that, but as a drummer mostly. I picked up classical guitar and a little keyboards to be able to write. Following that I joined an amped-up Christian rock group, hit the road for years, starved a go