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I’ve been on both sides of a lead pastor transition. Years before serving in the lead pastor role at our church, everyone on staff—including me—shared our individual scores from a leadership assessment we had each completed. It turned out that one of the labels for a specific style of leadership was termed “dominant.” This stereotypically tended to be the hard-charging, no-holds-barred, take-the-hill leaders. The primary leaders in our organization seemed to fit that mold. I

So here’s an idea as we move into the Thanksgiving holiday… Paul’s short letter to the Philippian church underscored his belief that developing a “servanthood attitude” was critical for personal fulfillment and joy. He writes: Your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. PHILIPPIANS 2:5-7 Did you catch tha

Of the four essential elements that every leader must exercise—Integrity, Passion, Servanthood, and Imagination—Servanthood seems like it would be the most intuitive and easiest for followers of Jesus. But let’s be honest: servanthood feels antithetical to leadership. So here’s another way to think about it…and it has to do with identity, both how it’s internally perceived and what the truth is. For instance, do you really know who you are? For those who have received the gif

In a previous post titled Helping People to Become Inviters, I talked about giving the people in our churches more resources for becoming better “bringers” of the transformative power of Jesus to others. While the word evangelism is not popular these days for all sorts of justifiable reasons, the idea of sharing the revolutionary good news of Jesus is unavoidable in the New Testament. And, of course, that’s in the context of the full message of the Kingdom, including the “now

How about a quick video to get you thinking today? First, let me set this up with a little background. When church leadership teams go through our Elemental Churches Inventory, they... engage individually with curriculum, interact in four self-facilitated group sessions along with videos, take several web-based assessments, and watch short thought-provoking online videos in their personal reflective times. It becomes a leadership development tool as they take on ownership and