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Managing Change...and Your Personal Vision To say the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives is the understatement of the year. Managing change—especially forced change—is more than a little challenging for any leader. But think about this: there is no growth without change…whether that’s physical, emotional or spiritual growth. Once upon a time you were a comfortable little fetus forming in your mother’s womb. And then after a few months, things began to get uncomfortably

And I Totally Get That It's Not an Easy Gig... Okay, first a disclaimer: Many of the churches we work with use a current worship style/approach. That is, they open (or close) the service with a 15-25 minute set of worship songs. Some longer, some shorter. Second disclaimer: Before being a senior pastor, I was a worship leader and prior to that a traveling professional musician. That doesn't make me an expert; it's just given me a lot of experiences on both sides of the wors

How Are You Exercising These in Your Church? In the book Elemental Leaders, we identify 4 critical elements every effective leader must exercise: Integrity, Passion, Servanthood, and Imagination. In our research, all four must be engaged in order to have a well-rounded, foundational approach to leading others. Integrity refers to the leader’s wholeness: are they integrated within themselves, self-aware, and vulnerable? Do they walk their talk? Passion is obvious. Every su

Learnings for Church Leaders from the Coronavirus Pandemic. The Covid-19 virus has turned the world upside down. With hour-by-hour changes, we’re quickly finding ourselves struggling with social-distancing, sequestering, financial fallout, overnight out-of-work parishioners, the fast-cascading hardships on the poor and marginalized, not to mention the global anxieties and uncertainties connected with the virus itself. It’s also forcing quick decision-making for church leaders

Over the years I’ve found myself ruminating on why pastors are often reluctant to engage with outside organizational assessors and coaches or even in-house team-based reviews and surveys. I think it’s the human condition that makes us reluctant to expose our weaknesses or fear of change in front of others. In dysfunctional settings where perhaps a board and senior pastor are at odds, or a “culture of honor” and trust have not been established with staff, it’s inevitable th

Thirty years ago, the church I was a part of began using video. A lot. Our numbers had exploded. We were in a former Baptist church building that seated 572; I remember because we had taken the pews out (it was cutting edge back then to not look like a church!) and replaced them with that number of comfy chairs. By the time we left that building, we were doing seven weekend services…plus a midweek. The reason we started using videos was because while churches were following