Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Articles

Stop Getting Sidetracked by the Urgent

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focus

Take a look at the agenda and minutes of one of your recent leadership team meetings:

  • What percentage of the meeting incorporates administrative or operational functions and what percentage focuses on high-level strategic issues?
  • Which items will significantly help advance mission?
  • Is there a way to delegate some or all of these operational issues to another team? If so, how? [1]

These questions, as outlined in Shelley Trebesch’s Made To Flourish: Beyond Quick Fixes to a Thriving Organization, are intended to help you diagnose a common mistake that many organizations make: allowing the urgent to overtake the strategic. 

Oftentimes, in meetings, it’s easier to brainstorm ways to solve the immediate parking issues, rather than plot out the church’s long-term strategy for city impact. Or, it’s easier to talk about ways to increase generosity and funding to meet this month’s budget, rather than thinking about how to move your church towards self-sustainability once the external funding runs out. The fact is, unless you consciously take steps to do otherwise, the urgent will always trump the strategic in your meetings.

How did we get to this place? Why is this the case?

Well, here is what typically happens in a growing church or organization. Let’s take a new church as an example. You start with the leader. As the church grows and you develop leaders to head up the different ministry departments, you begin having meetings with them. This team essentially becomes your leadership team because they are the ones in charge of getting things done in those areas. So right away, your leadership team is representative. While you might try to talk strategy in your meetings, the fact is, they weren’t recruited into their positions because they were good at strategy—you recruited them because they were responsible and knew how to get things done. Or, even better, you recruited them because they were warm bodies and had a lot of free time…okay, also because they love Jesus. No wonder the topic of your meetings always returns to logistics and operational matters—this is why they joined the team in the first place!

So how can you change the course and stop getting sidetracked by the urgent, so that you can focus on strategic issues?

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David Isn’t a Role Model

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Not everyone in the Bible is a role model. For example, who looks at Goliath and says, “I sure want to be like him when I grow up!”

However, how many times do we look up to David and try to emulate our lives after his? After all, he was the King of Israel, the greatest poet of all time, and the author of the psalms–including the famous Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

Now there are many honorable things in David’s life that we can learn from, but unfortunately, he doesn’t teach us morality. He’s the one who committed adultery, killed a man to cover up his tracks, and lied to get his way.

The fact is, David doesn’t teach us morality, he teaches us how to be human.

He teaches us how to be real and he teaches us how to have a close, intimate, and living relationship with our Lord God.

Leadership Development According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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*My post here was originally published on July 12, 2016 in Christianity Today.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Does your church have an intentional development plan to disciple and deploy believers to live out the Great Commission? Are you providing strategic pathways and opportunities for your congregation to participate in church planting so that they can be a part of the Kingdom of God invading into every crevice of society both locally and globally? Or, does this happen haphazardly when someone approaches you and they say that they feel called to ministry?

Jesus said to His disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:37-38 HCSB)

All Are Called

When I look at those verses, I see them as a call to pray for more harvest workers. But as a pastor and as a church leader, I also see them as a call to disciple my congregation into being harvest workers for the harvest that exists around them both locally and globally.

As a result, while a once-a-year sermon that challenges your congregation to consider full-time ministry may be helpful, it can actually create more harm than good. This sort of sermon unintentionally creates a culture that says some are called and others are not. But the reality is that all believers have the same primary calling—to go and make disciples of all nations. What we do to earn money is a secondary issue, not a primary one!

Instead of merely hoping that your preaching will stir some to see their primary vocation and calling as being harvest workers, what if you actually created intentional environments and training opportunities to call people into this reality? What if everyone in your church saw their primary vocation as being a harvest worker, where some would get a paycheck from the church if their role was to be an equipper of others (Ephesians 4:11-13), and others would get their paycheck from an employer, while serving passionately on the worship team, children’s ministry, or leading a small group? Then we would definitely see more churches get planted.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In Eric Metaxas’ epic biography of the pastor, martyr, prophet, and spy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we read about the ways that Bonhoeffer trained people for the call of ministry. Although, as the first head of the seminary in the Confessing Church, he was focusing on training individuals for full-time pastorates, there is much that we can glean from his methods that relate to our discussion at hand—training all people to embrace their first and foremost vocation as a harvest worker.

Before we get to those points, here’s a bit of background to understand why Bonhoeffer was starting a new seminary. The main reason Bonhoeffer moved back to Berlin to run the Confessing Church seminary was due to the fact that German Church seminaries had gone apostate. The German Church was compromising on theology and allowing itself to be shaped and formed by Hitler’s anti-Semitism. This was also at a time in history when the savage bloodbath known as the Night of the Long Knives had just occurred. As a result, Hitler was quickly gaining power while the divide between the German Christian Church and the Confessing Church continued to rapidly widen.

When it comes to creating intentional environments and training opportunities to encourage people to embrace their first and foremost calling as harvest workers, here are three things that we can learn from the way that Bonhoeffer designed and ran this seminary.

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Pastor, What Makes Your City Unique?

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The type of leader who plants an urban church looks different than the one who plants a rural one.

This is a relatively unimpressive statement for obvious reasons. After all, those who would want to live on a 20 acre piece of land and raise chickens are typically not the same type of people who would want to live in an 800 square foot high rise and prune a banzai tree or a Chia pet. (Remember when that was a thing?)

This is kind of like someone who asks you if they can ask you a question, when by virtue of asking you that question, they’ve already asked you a question. Or, as the great philosopher and comedian Steve Martin said, “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”

What makes something obvious anyway? And who determines what constitutes as common knowledge?

Okay, before I cause you to have an existential breakdown, let me get to the point of this nonsense.

The Point

In the past few months, I’ve been traveling quite a bit talking about church planting, leadership, and discipleship. I’ve been sharing from my latest book that I co-authored with Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches, as well as from the latest research we conducted on church planting and multiplication. You can download that research for free here.

As a result, I’ve had the privilege and blessing to meet with church planters and pastors in major metropolitan cities like New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. And I’ve noticed something.

The type of leader who plants a church in New York is different than the type of leader who plants in Houston or Los Angeles.

It’s not that they necessarily look different, or require distinctive theological education, but there’s definitely a difference. It’s almost…intangible.

It’s kind of like when someone asks a happily married couple how to tell if someone is the one. The answer is often, “You just know when you know.”

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Leading Change in the Church

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Conal Gallagher
Conal Gallagher

One of my favorite things to do is to help churches create alignment and momentum within their staff and leadership to move their church towards multiplication. In order to do just that, change needs to happen. There’s no other way around it.

Unfortunately, most pastors and leaders struggle with change management. This is because many forget to think through who all and what all is going to be affected by this change. As a result, people are overlooked, feelings get hurt, and easy wins are lost. Inevitably this results in unnecessary conflict that could have and should have been avoided.

Your mighty plans for change are then lost in the mire of relational trouble and politics. Nothing changes. Your church stays on the same course. And the next time you try to change something, you experience even more opposition and skepticism than ever before.

If only there were an easy step-by-step process to guide people through leading and managing change in the church.

Leading Change

John Kotter’s 8-Step Process outlined in Leading Change has heavily influenced the way that I process, think through, and lead change. I’ve implemented his 8-steps through precarious times and important shifts in churches, like when I helped my previous church make the shift to becoming more missional.

Here are his 8-steps, as now updated in his recent book, Accelerate:

  • Step 1: Create a Sense of Urgency
  • Step 2: Build a Guiding Coalition
  • Step 3: Form a Strategic Vision and Initiatives
  • Step 4: Enlist a Volunteer Army
  • Step 5: Enable Action by Removing Barriers
  • Step 6: Generate Short-Term Wins
  • Step 7: Sustain Acceleration
  • Step 8: Institute Change

Leading Change in the Church

These 8-steps are a proven system for change management and they can certainly be contextualized for use in the church, which I’ve personally done, but it’s definitely not a perfect fit.

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Germs, UV Sanitizers, and Spirituality

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korea-sanitizer

When I used to live in Korea, my wife and I bought a UV sanitizer to sanitize the bottles and toys for our firstborn. Here’s a picture of the box.

It’s fascinating that this company has effectively advertised that germs are from the Devil. Interesting, isn’t it?

When’s the last time you’ve seen a product in North America advertised in a spiritual manner?

We’re talking about worldview here. When I lived in Korea, I noticed that spirituality was much more on the forefront of people’s minds, than it is here in North America.

Now what does a UV sanitizer–with a picture of the devil on it–have to do with church leadership?

The answer is…everything.

When’s the last time you’ve read Ephesians 6?

For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. (Ephesians 6:12 HCSB)

Ultimately, the biggest obstacle to living a vibrant life in Christ isn’t your overbooked schedule, stressful children, or finances…it’s Satan.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, he mentions that one of Satan’s strategies is to try to make it look like he actually doesn’t exist.

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I LOVE Learning

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learning books

There’s a funny commercial that I recently saw on Hulu. It was a video of Oprah essentially repeating the same thing over and over again. Here’s her script,

This is the joy for me. I LOVE bread. I LOVE bread. I now just manage it. So I don’t deny myself bread. I have bread everyday. I have bread everyday. That’s the genius of this program. I have lost 26 pounds and I have eaten bread every single day!

No, Oprah didn’t pay half a million dollars for these commercial spots just so that she could rant about her love for bread. This was a commercial for…you guessed it, Weight Watchers.

As cheesy as that commercial might be, I get it. When you love something, you just want to tell others about it. You want to proclaim it on the rooftops. And yes, while I do love bread, this post isn’t about ciabatta, focaccia, baguettes, or pretzel buns. This post is about learning.

I LOVE learning.

In the midst of loving and serving my wife and three children, a full-time job leading and running NewChurches.com, preaching at least twice a month at my church, hosting a twice-a-week podcast, writing my new book with B&H (No Silver Bullets), speaking about the book I just co-wrote with Ed Stetzer (Planting Missional Churches) and writing curriculum for Bible Studies for Life and The Gospel Project, I still carve time away to learn.

This is because I know that…

The moment you stop learning is the moment you’ll stop growing

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I love and hate this quote from Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton,

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

I hate that! I don’t want to be a beginner, I want to be an expert. But when I chew on the truth of those words, I realize the genius of it.

The moment we see ourselves as experts is the moment we allow pride to subtly seep into our lives.

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5 Steps to Being Missional

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Last post, I covered some important concepts on serving as a group, but today, I want to go a bit more in detail on being a group that extends and lives out the love of God–a group that is, as Jesus puts it–salt and light.

Evangelism is best done out of the context of a gospel community whose corporate life demonstrates the reality of the word that gave her life. – Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church

In this day and age, how do we tangibly tell others about the good news that has so shaped our lives? Out of love, we want to tell others about Jesus, but how do we do this in a way that doesn’t feel like we are shoving something down someone else’s throat? How do we appropriately engage others with the truth of the Gospel?

Here are five steps that will help us to better share about the wonderful hope that we have in Jesus Christ with our family, coworkers, neighbours, and friends.

1. Developing Trust

This is all about developing trusting relationships. After all, people don’t care what we have to say, unless they know that we care. This isn’t about trying to fake a trusting relationship, this is all about genuinely loving and caring for those around us so that trust is built up between us. This isn’t a bait and switch thing either, it’s simply about being a great friend. Doesn’t everyone need great friends whom they can trust and rely on? That’s what we need to do–be the best friend, coworker, neighbour, and family member that you can be. Why? Because that’s what Jesus would do, wouldn’t he?

2. Having Conversations and Living Life Together

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A New Paradigm on Serving

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Since we all understand “serving” differently, my goal in this article is to re-envision or redefine our understanding of serving. In a way, if our understanding of serving is a box, then instead of thinking outside of the box, I want to grab an eraser and give you a blank canvas.

So take a look at these two spectrums and self-analyze where you’re at personally and where your group is at in regards to serving:

The fact is, our lives are filled with opportunities to serve at every moment–and most of us are serving on a regular basis, without even knowing it.

  • i.e. When you choose to do those dishes, that’s an act of service.
  • i.e. When you choose to shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk as you do your own, that’s an act of service.
  • i.e. When you wave “thank you” while you are driving, rather than giving people another gesture, that’s an act of service.

However, especially in group life, serving has become a task, rather than a regular rhythm of our groups. Serving has become a task because we myopically view serving merely as a project that we do together, in a concerted effort, rather than something that we would do ourselves. It’s unnatural for us.

Now, I’m not saying, “Don’t get together to serve.”

What I am suggesting is that we admit that there are some inherent problems in service projects as we’ve come to know them.

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Living as a Missional Community

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One of the things that fascinates me about Jesus was that he was a masterful communicator. One of the ways that he loved to communicate was via word pictures.

Jesus loved to paint word pictures.

He did this because he knew that, through word pictures, we would be able to intrinsically understand and connect the truths that he was teaching us with our real lives today.

Two of the most powerful word pictures that he used to describe you and I were salt and light:

Matt 5:13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

Matt 5:14 “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

When we read these verses, we, in our western individualistic world views, think that he’s talking about you and I individually–that we are individually the salt of the earth and the light of the world. However, when you look at the original language, the word “you” is actually plural.

You (the community together) are the salt of the earth.

You (the community together) are the light of the world – a city on a hill.

You (the community together) are the body of Christ, and each of us is a part of it (1 Cor 12:27).

Jesus never intended any of us to journey through life alone. Faith is not a private thing, it’s a community thing. We each have our own relationship with God, but it is in the context of community that we live it out and grow.

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