I love mowing my yard. I love having a flush lawn with no weeds. I can have a nice house with a nice sized lot but I can’t just expect to have a nice yard because I have a nice house and a good sized lot.

I believe a lot of churches feel since they have a good location and a nice facility, they will grow and lives will change. I wish it were that easy.

Many people have quoted, myself included, Psalm 127:1

(1)Unless the Lord builds the house the builders labor in vain.

Only God can build His house but something jumped out at me when I read this scripture in context:

Psalm 126:5-6; 127:1
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. (6)Those who go out weeping carrying seed to sow will return with songs of joy, carrying their sheaves with them. (1)Unless the Lord builds the house the builders labor in vain.

If we are going to see Life Change we have to expect it by:

• Praying for it: “go out weeping.” This shows our weakness and dependence to God. We must humble ourselves before Him knowing we cannot do it on our own.
• Preparing for it: “carrying seed to sow.” You can’t reap a harvest without planting seed. We’re going to prepare for it by creating an environment where people can’t wait to invite someone to come and experience what God can do in their lives.
• Celebrating it: “Return with songs of Joy.” We’re going to celebrate with those whose lives are going to be changed and thank God with them for His love and forgiveness.

Which of these three are you not doing well?

• Are you passionately praying for God to bring you people?
• Are you working hard to prepare your worship services and messages to be excellent and not just “get by” for one more Sunday?
• Are you celebrating the life change in others that God is doing? You get what you reward.

It’s not about hitting a home run every weekend. We just want base hits. Players who swing for the fence every time, strike out a lot. In ministry, we don’t need home runs every week.  Don’t feel like every week you have to have the jaw dropping experience. Each week is about creating environments of excellence where we eliminate distractions that lead away from Life Change and allow Holy Spirit to work in lives.

To do this you have to clearly define what success looks like for your area of ministry and clearly communicate it to your team.

Our team goal is to: ______________________________________________________________________

1st Impressions: no one passes me without me saying “welcome to mychurchname.”
Kids: no parent or kid goes un-noticed.
Students: No loners this weekend.
Worship/Production Team: Have the songs memorized so we can lead people in worship without depending on the music.
Audio: Mics are on at the right time. 
Lights & Video: Create smooth transitions on time.

What areas do you need to be consistent in and have you communicated clearly what your expectations are?

People who have a life-changing experience with God will want others to find God in a life-changing way. When I eat at a great restaurant, you don’t have to beg me to talk about it, I share it with everyone.

The same effect happens when people begin to have Life Changing experiences at church. When people seeking life change begin to experience it you will guarantee they will share their experience with others.

So why aren’t people sharing with their family and friends about what God can do in their life? Because they have yet to experience it themselves or because they don’t trust the church to deliver on their expectation.

Bottom line is people aren’t ashamed of Christ, they are ashamed of church and therefore, reluctant to invite someone.

This will be the first of a series of posts on “Developing a Culture of Life Change” and I want to point out two elephants in the room:

If you are not praying for Life Change, it is not going to happen. K? You can have a polished approach with glitz and glamour but without prayer and the Holy Spirit’s leading, you will not develop a culture Life Change.

I am not an expert on this. I’m on this safari myself and haven’t arrived nor am I close. This is where we are directing our efforts as a campus to develop, with God’s help, a campus where people are experiencing Life Change and want to bring their friends/family to so they can experience it too.

Reputations on the line.

Every time we invite someone to church, we put our reputations on the line. We can rest assured that our people will not invite someone if they do not expect a positive outcome.

Our desire each week, to create an environment where our people can experience life change then confidently and passionately invite others to.

To do this we must first:

BUILD TRUST

We need to rebuild the trust of our people so they know they can invite their friends to our churches and not worry about placing their reputation on the line or be embarrassed.

We will build this trust by: creating a culture of excellence.
It’s not about getting by. It’s about getting better.
We’ll get better by:

• Give the extra 10%. What small things can we do that doesn’t take that much extra effort but produces a better outcome?
• Make small improvements each week. We have to grow into this. What small adjustments can we make this weekend to get better? Ask “If I were going to invite my boss/best friend/colleague/neighbor/family member, what would I do different?”
• Do your best and pray for God to do the rest. Do the best with what you have then pray that God works  from where your work stops.

How can you build the trust of your people so they are passionate about sharing Jesus and inviting people to your church?

Reasons for Missed Opportunities

In this post, Perry Noble points out 5 reasons we miss opportunities.

Want to Go Up the Ladder? Connect.

Tony Morgan quotes Harvard Professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, on how the best way to lead up  and out is by connecting. Read More.

5 Common Traits World-Changing Leaders Have in Common

Steve Jobs has recently been labeled the CEO of the Decade by Fortune Magazine. In this post, 5 common traits of World Changers are briefly described. Read More.

“When it comes to leading and organizations, change is inevitable. Great leaders though are always looking ahead and changing by design as they seek to make their lives and organizations more dynamic and effective in our current world. Leadership is such a fluid dynamic and when it comes to leading people you have got to understand that change will come.

Change is a choice. You can either initiate the change you want to be or you can allow circumstances to demand the change that needs to be made and accept the outcome that is thrown your way. Either way, change is the only path toward transformation as we travel on this journey.

That is why you need to be aware of the three types of change:

The first is change by crisis. As you begin to look at your organization or department are you going to have to change due to a crisis. Maybe it is one of your leaders or staff that come to you and say they can no longer help out. Maybe as a church you have realized that you attendance has been declining rapidly. Maybe in your life a health issue has no forced change upon you.Were you prepared or are you now having to change due to the crisis. The cost is usually high when it comes to this type of change.

The second type of change is by drift. Many churches get into this type of change. They are always looking around for the next best thing. They see a mega-church doing such and such program that has gotten them results so they drift towards that. Then they see another church doing something else and they drift towards that. Or they even go along with the latest church fads. Usually the problem with this type of change is that it does not happen fast enough. Usually when you have changed because of drift you have changed too late or it wasn’t the most ideal change for your organization or department.

The third type of change is by design. This is where being innovative leads you into the change you want. Successful leaders are looking ahead and, even though they might already be successful, see change as a chance to create new energy and momentum for growth. Changing by design is embracing change as a choice.

You can change by design and be the change you want by:

Charting your destination – Write out where it is you want to be in one, two or five years. Be specific.
Constructing a new course – Begin moving toward your new destination intentionally. Work your way backwards and set benchmarks to hit.
Creating the change – Begin making it happen. Be determined. Force the change.
Lance Armstrong said, “The easiest way to predict the future is to create it.“

What change do you see coming?”

A recent survey from Adecco Group North America highlights the increased dissatisfaction workers in America have with their employers. According to the survey:

• 54% of employees plan to look for a new job as soon as the economy turns around.
• Sentiment is even stronger among younger workers. Of those ages 18-29, 71% say they are likely to look for new jobs once the economy turns around.

These numbers should not be shocking, as most of us know at least one person who will be jumping ship as soon as they can. Employees appear to be getting angrier everyday and their employers keep throwing more wood into the fire. If you really want to heat things up, then be sure to do the following:

1. Daily reminders – Remind employees how lucky they are to have a job. Do this on a daily basis. Tell them how fortunate they are to be receiving a paycheck. Never mind their check is 10% less than what they originally signed up for. Remember to include this reminder at your weekly meetings, when you take them out to lunch to thank them for their efforts, and at this year’s office party.

2. Freeze raises and bonuses – Jump on the bandwagon. Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t you? Doesn’t matter if your profits are soaring or if your employees know you’ve had your best year ever. This is a great time to reign in costs, even if your costs are already in line.

3. Renege on your promises – You told people their reduction in pay would be temporary. However, you now view these changes as permanent. Of course you’ve decided not to tell anyone, until they ask.

4. Put a moratorium on promotions – Ask people to do the work of those who have been let go, and insist on holding back a title change and pay increase. Call this “self-development,” since you are giving people a wonderful opportunity to increase their skills. Something few employers seem to be doing.

5. Send out mixed messages – Tell your employees they are your most valuable asset. Then remind them that everyone is replaceable. Just to prove your point, be sure to replace a highly respected member of your team, with someone who is less experienced and less expensive.

It’s time to get back to basics. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Then you can begin the lengthy process of rebuilding trust in your organization. Or, you can continue as if business is as usual and watch your employees flee the minute the economy shows signs of recovery.

Roberta

Roberta Chinsky MatusonPresidentHuman Resource Solutions413-582-1840Roberta@yourhrexperts.comwww.yourhrexperts.com http://www.yourhrexperts.comVisit our newly updated web site http://www.yourhrexperts.com/generation/ to learn how your organization can leverage generational workforce challenges into opportunities. Subscribe to our free monthly electronic newsletter, jammed with resources, articles, and tips by clicking: http://www.yourhrexperts.com/hrjoin.cgiVisit Generation Integration blog: http://generationintegration.typepad.com/matuson/

One of the tensions I’ve been dealing with is the tension between “being thankful” and “being dissatisfied.” I am thankful for the opportunities that I have to minister. The position I have. The people I work with. The call that I’m able to fulfill.

But I see what the church could be as well. And that gap between what I see could be and where we are now causes dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction because it’s not happening now. Dissatisfaction because we aren’t there yet. Not ungrateful. Not satisfied.

I just read this before opened another browser to type about this and saw what Mark Batterson just posted on his blog:

“Healthy leaders have the right mixture of gratitude and dissatisfaction.”

Would it be right to say that being grateful puts you in the right position to be dissatisfied?

A Multi-site Road Trip

by Geoff Stuart, Greg Ligon, Warren Bird

Relationships are what hold churches together. (13)

Seacoast Church

IPOD
Initial – non-negotionable standards
Priority – standards to be implemented within the first year
Optional – ideas that might work across campusses but are not necessary
Discouraged – not allowed. (30-31)

Community Bible Church

Key Factors when Choosing a Location
1. Positive community image.
2. Location accessibility
3. Facility accessibility
4. Room for growth
5. Noise tolerance
6. Decent rent or purchase price
7. Room for storage.

What makes a great campus pastor:

1. Catalytic Leader: high energy, self starter, able to male new things happen
2. Multi-Tasker
3. People Magnet
4. Team Player/Builder
5. Communicator
6. DNA Carrier

Traits not conducive for a campus pastor:

1. Person who feels compelled to preach
2. Independent-spirited entrepenuer
3. Someone with an agenda other than reaching people

Risk involves Release (179)

The personnel and managerial challenge involves both paid staff and volunteers. If the church’s staff has a strong-performance track record and embraces a churchwode value of training others for ministry, it is usually able to handle the demands of rapid deployment of many volunteers. But if training leaders is not a core value of the church, be prepared! (183)

How can we identify, equip, and deploy leaders as rapidly as necessary to meet the demands associated with the huge opportunities that God is placing in our path? (190)

Always look for leaders. (190) Ephesians 4:12

Leadership Development

Discover > Connect > Train > Resource > Coach/Mentor > Celebrate

How to get Grandchildren (3rd generation churches)

1. Loosen your grip.
2. Build into your DNA.
3. Find a way to fund it.
4. Affirm what happens

What can kill a multi-site:

1. Poor choice of campus pastor
2. Not the senior Pastor’s vision
3. Not the board’s vision
4. Not enough preparation time
5. Worship that doesn’t matchthe target population
6. Bad attitudes within the congregation
7. Inadequate resources
8. Poor choice of location (231-232)

He starts the book off about a cute story of a monkey and a fish, hence the title. Here are some highlights from this read:

The Monkey and the Fish

by Dave Gibbons

A proper perspective is worth 50 IQ points (12)

Current One: Liquid

Third Culture: The mindset and will to live, learn, and serve in any culture, even in the midst of pain and discomfort. (38)

Current Two: Wardrobe

Don’t put on clothes that fit someone else. David didn’t wear Sauls armour, he fought in his own way and with his own weapons.

Questions should lead us. Not answers. (70)

Current Three: Neighbor

Jesus asks a man what is the greatest commandment and follows the question with the story of he good Samaratin. A story where the neighbor wasn’t a person like himself, but the neighbor was someone who was unloveable according to the culture.

Current Four: Liquid Bruce Lee

It’s critical for us to grasp the need for change and act on it. It isn’t just about whether we can maintain our numbers. It’s about maintaining our identity and our ability to influence the world in this new era.

You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes a teapot. The water can flow. The water can crash. Be water, my friend. – Bruce Lee

Our conflicks shouldn’t be about forms.

Shifts that mark Third-Culture Churches

1. From consumerism to cause-ism.
2. From Pastor/Teacher to Pastor/Social Entrepenuer
3. From Linear Pathway to Third Culture Rhythms

Current Five: Three Questions that Become the Answers

The answer finds residence in the question. Questions guide us to the answers of all kinds of situations. (113)

Questions to point you to make a difference:
1. Where is Nazareth? Who are the marginalized, weakest, and outsiders near you? 1 Cor 1:26-29 (116)
2. What is my pain? 1 Cor 1:19 (118)
3. What is in my hand? Exodus 4:1-5 (120)

Current Six: cWoWs- Everyone Plays

Artists are the prophets innovators, and conversationalists that are leading us. (141)

Businesspersons are the fuel for our movement. They often have the mix of creativity, sustainable management skills, and systems knowledge that keep any organization and mission. (142)

Community-Development Secialists are the machinery, the builders, implemented, and directors of the ideas and enterprises dreamed up by the artists and entrepenuers.

Current Seven: Ripples

If you look at history, it’s undeniable that diversity, especially cultural and ethnic diversity, is a huge asset when it comes to innovation, creatiity, and problem-solving. It brings forth fresh viewpoints, approaches, perspectives, learnings, ideas, insights, and sensibilities, and these in turn lead to breakthroughs, whether it’s an opportunity we’re trying to take advantage of or a proble. Or crisis we’re trying to address. (151)

The greatest single cause of Atheism in the world today are Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyles. – Brennan Manning (151)

Here are some highlights from the book:

:::: Stage One: Hubris Born of Success :::::

Hubris is the excessive price that brings down a hero, or alternatively, outrageous arrogance that that inflicts suffering upon the innocent.

Companies that change but without any consistent rationale will collapse just as sureley as those that change not at all. You have to comprehend the underlying “why” behind those practices, and thereby see when to keep them and when to change them. (38)

Be a student of your work relentlessy asking “why.” being a “knowing person” (“I already know everything about why this works, and let me tell you”) differs fundamentally from being a learning person. The “Knowing People” can set companies on the path to decline. (39)

Markers for Stage One:

:: Success Entitlement, Arrogance
:: Neglect of Primary Flywheel
:: “What” replaces “Why”
:: Decline in Learning Orientation
:: Discounting the Role of Luck (I would put in the role of Holy Spirit)

::::: Stage Two: Ubdisciplimed Pursuit of More :::::

Innovation can fuel growth, but frenectic innovation – growth that erodes consistent tactical excellence – can just as easily send a company cascading through stages of decline. (49)

What are the key seats in your organization? What percentage ofthose seats can youbsaybwith confidence are filled with the right people? What are your plans for increasing that percentage? What are your backup plans in the event that a right person leaves a key seat? (57)

The right people see themselves having a responsibility and not a job.

Leaders who fail the process of succession set their enterprises on a path to decline.(60)

While no leader can single-handedly build an enduring great company, the wrong leader vested with power can almost single-handedly bring a company down. (62)

Markers for Stage Two

:: Unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great
:: Undisciplined discontinuous leaps
:: Declining proportion of rightpeople in key seats
:: Easy cash erodes cost discipline
:: Bureaucracy subverts discipline
:: Problematic succession of power
:: Personal interests placed above organizational interests

::::: Stage Three: Denial and Risk of Peril :::::

When facing irreversible decisions that have significant, negative consequenses if they go awry, the case for launch should require a preponderance of empirical evidence that it’s safe to do so. (74)

Avoid taking big chances on ideas that could blow a hole below the “waterline” (below the waterline could sink the ship, above it can be patched)

A common behavior of late stage three is when those in power blame other people or external factors – or otherwise explain away the data – rather than confront the frightening reality that the enterprise may be in serious trouble. (78)

Reorganizations and restructurings can create a false sense that you are actually doing something productive. When you begin to respond to data and warning signs with reorganization as the primary strategy, you may well be in denial. (80)

Markers for Stage Three:

:: Amplify the positive, discount the negative
:: Big bets and bold goals without emperocal validation
:: Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
:: Erosion of healthy team dynamics
:: Externalizing blame
:: Obsessive reorganizations
:: Imperious detachment

::::: Stage Four: Grasping for Salvation :::::

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature to mediocrity is chronic inconsistency. (92)

Rebuilding greatness requires a series of intelligent, well-executed actions that add up one on top of another. Some decisions are bigger than others, but eventhe biggest decisions account for only a small fraction of the total outcome tha makes a great company. Most overnight successes are about twenty years in the making. (94)

Markers for Stage Four

:: A series of silver bullets
:: Grasping for a Leader-as-Savior
::Panic and haste
:: Radical change and “revolution” with fanfare
:: Hype precedes results
:: Initial upswing followed by dissapointments
:: Confusion and cynicism
:: Chronic restructuring and erosion of financial strength

::::: Stage Five: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death :::::

When you begin abandoning hope, you should begin preparing for the end. (107)

::::: Well Founded Hope :::::

The right leaders feel a sense of urgency in good times and bad, whether facing a threat or an opportunity. (117)

Winsylton Churchill: “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

What makes for the right people in the key seats?
1) The right people fit with the companies core values. (hire people who already have a predisposition to your core values, and hang on to them)
2) The right people don’t need to be tightly managed.
3) The right people understand that they do not have jobs; they have “Responsibilities.”
4) The right people fulfill their commitments.
5) The right people are passionate about the company and it’s work.
6) The right people display “Window and Mirror” Maturity. When things go well, they point out the window, giving credit to factors other than themselves. When things go awry, they do not blame circumstances or other people for setbacks and failures; they point to the mirror and say “I’m responsible.”