Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Articles

4 Ways God Shapes Us For Mission

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clay shaping

“Dead orthodoxy cannot fuel a movement. We need a living theology.”

What powerful words on the opening pages of Chapter 5 – Missional Theology in JR Woodward and Dan White Jr.’s latest book, The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities. I was privileged to speak into the development of this book at a few different levels, first as an anonymous reader, and second over my kitchen table with JR. Here’s both a summary and my wholehearted endorsement as quoted from the first pages of this book:

Practitioner led, biblically based, and theologically sound. In this book, JR and Dan have been able to navigate the line between missiology and strategy by presenting a team guide for discipleship and church planting. So buy this book, gather your friends together, and learn how to start a movement that will change your city!

This article is Part 5 of a Blog Tour for this book. You can look up #churchasmovement for links to the other articles, as well as go to their website for additional resources and downloadables.

There are four ways that God shapes us for His mission.

That pronoun, His, is key because the mission that we are on is ultimately not ours or about us. Mission is not what we can do, it’s what God is doing in this world and how we can join Him! The South African Missiologist, David Bosch, in his epic primer on all things missional, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, says this about the mission of God, or missio Dei, as he refers to it.

Missio Dei has helped to articulate the conviction that neither the church nor any other human agent can ever be considered the author or bearer of mission. Mission is, primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate. Mission has its origin in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love. This is the deepest source of mission.

So if this is ultimately God’s mission and not ours, how can we participate in it? How does God get us ready for it? And how does this concept shape the way we need to approach ministry and mission? Here are four ways that God shapes us for mission, as outlined in Chapter 5 of The Church as Movement. I’ve built upon their ideas here.

1. He Initiates

Instead of strategizing on how your church can make the biggest missional bang in your city, the better way to join God in His mission is to first grow in your listening and noticing skills.

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Campus Pastor Skill #3: How to Lead Down

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leading down

Leadership is often seen as leading those you have responsibility over—leading down. As we saw in Campus Pastor Skill #2, and as we’ll see in Campus Pastor Skill #4, leadership is more than just leading downwards.

But for the campus pastor, leading your leaders, staff, and your campus are the three broad areas that you need to pay attention to.

Let’s take a look at each of these areas:

1. Lead your leaders

In the NewChurches.com Q&A Podcast that I host with Ed Stetzer and Todd Adkins, we often tell pastors that there are two groups of people they always need to prioritize and spend the majority of their time with: leaders and the lost.

If you don’t take control of your schedule, and prioritize spending time with leaders and the lost, then others will grab hold of it and do it for you. There’s always more to do than we have time for. There’s always a crisis going on, someone getting married, another funeral to lead, and more opportunities to play golf than we have time for, so take control of your schedule and prioritize leaders and the lost.

If you don’t take control of your schedule, others will do it for you.

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No, I’m not talking about neglecting your congregation or forsaking your pastoral responsibilities to shepherd your congregation. In fact, it’s a healthy thing to occasionally do visitations with shut-ins, hospital visits, weddings, and funerals, but do not make this your priority!

You are called to be an EQUIPPER of those who will do the work of ministry, rather than the DOER of the ministry that impresses those who are watching.

The problem with this is that it feels good to DO ministry, doesn’t it? It feels good to disciple, to pray for others, to be wanted, needed, and respected, but don’t give into this!

Your real DOING is actually the task of EQUIPPING others who will DO the work of ministry.

When you do this, you will see the promises in Ephesians 4:11-16 come alive! Unity in your church. Maturity in Christ. Discernment. Love. Truth.

So let’s heed the advice that Jethro gave Moses in Exodus 18 and start with the fact that “You can’t do it alone.” Instead, you need to raise up leaders and teams who will do the majority of the pastoral care. You need to do the same with your children’s ministry, students, community groups, and guest services. Fortunately, being a campus pastor, you don’t need to worry as much about finances, operations, marketing, and HR since those typically fall under central services. You do need to know how to work with them though! See the previous article for tips on how to do that.

Leadership. You can’t do it alone.

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So take a piece of paper out and list out everything that you DO. In fact, list out all the hats that you’re wearing, and commit this next year to pray for, develop, train, and equip faithful volunteers who will take those hats from you and lead those areas. You are not shirking your responsibility, you are actually fulfilling it when you do this.

Now when you give one of your roles or responsibilities to someone else, don’t dump it on them! Instead, equip them using the gradual release of responsibility of model. Here’s my version of it tweaked for pastoral ministry.

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Campus Pastor Skill #2: How to Lead Across

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lateral bridge

Campus pastors are leaders.

First and foremost, campus pastors need to start by leading themselves well so that they do not disqualify themselves for ministry. Putting yourself up against 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 on a regular basis is a healthy exercise. Reading books like Paul David Tripp’s Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry, John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry, and Ruth Haley Barton’s Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry are necessary to keep our hearts pure, our motives clean, and our skills sharp.

Campus pastors also need to learn how to lead across—the topic of today’s article—as well as down and up, which are the topics of future articles in the coming weeks. If you missed it, take a moment to read the first article in this mini-series on Campus Pastor Skills, “How to Close a Service.”

So like I said earlier, campus pastors are leaders. They are leaders because they need to learn how to lead laterally. They need to learn how to lead those they don’t have any formal authority over. They need to learn the basic skills of influence. Well, actually, let me correct myself and be crystal clear. Campus pastors don’t need to learn how to lead laterally, but the best ones know how to. So if you want to excel at this role that God has called you into, take a look at the following three environments and relationships that you can do this in.

Campus pastors don’t need to learn how to lead laterally, but the best ones know how to.

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1. Lead fellow campus pastors

Before you take out your job description, read through it, and tell me that this is not your responsibility, stick with me for a bit. Place yourself in one of your other campus pastor’s shoes. If you were struggling with meeting a few metrics, like baptisms, offering, and newcomer assimilation, wouldn’t you rather get some on-the-go coaching from one of your peers, rather than from your supervisor?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying to be dishonest with your supervisor. In fact, you might have an excellent relationship with him or her. But, before these issues ever become an official issue, the best leaders are constantly tweaking and problem solving, which would include getting on-the-go coaching from others. Click here to read an article that I wrote on Two Ear Active Listening.

Here’s another example. Let’s say a fellow campus pastor isn’t closing their service as they ought to. What do you think would be a better scenario for them? The two of you sharing best practices on how to close services over a coffee, where you could peer coach each other? Or, church members complaining, and better yet, leaving their campus for another, and then this eventually being escalated to the campus pastor’s supervisor after it’s too late?

In this case, I believe it’s the role of the other campus pastors to coach, guide, and teach that campus pastor the more effective way before it’s too late. No, this is not an intervention, and for gods sake, don’t gang up on the poor soul. Instead, share best practices and peer coach one another.

The BEST campus pastors will notice and lead across, rather than turning a blind eye.

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In addition, let’s say a fellow campus pastor is spending the majority of their week—every week—addressing pastoral care issues, rather than with leaders and the lost. Before this becomes an issue of “performance” and not meeting whatever metrics your church has determined for their campuses, I believe it’s the responsibility of other campus pastors to speak up and help. Once again, share best practices for time management with one another, or go to a conference together. You could even try a learning exercise like shadowing one another to see what you can learn from one another.

While these two issues might formally be the responsibility of the campus pastor’s supervisor, the BEST campus pastors will notice and lead across, rather than turning a blind eye and saying, “It’s not my responsibility!” When the best campus pastors see something, they do something—especially when it comes to their peers.

2. Lead peers at central services

One of the benefits of a multisite or multi-congregational model is central services, or shared services, as some like to call it. Typically, finance, operations, HR, communications, and marketing are core. If your multisite church is a bit larger, then you might also have full-time “global” staff that lead evangelism, discipleship, and ministry programming for all campuses. If your church has fewer campuses, then you might have a few individuals who are wearing dual hats where a portion of their job is dedicated to a campus, and the other portion is dedicated to all campuses, or central services.

When it comes to leading peers at central services, I like to divide them into two camps: administrative and ministry staff. This is because the way that you lead both are nuanced differently.

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Campus Pastor Skill #1: How to Close a Service

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Campus pastors are not highly paid emcees or volunteer coordinators as I outlined in this previous article.

Campus pastors play a critical role in the life of a multisite church. They are the vision carriers for their campus, the equipper of the equippers, the pastor of that community, and the unifying ligament to the other campuses and the broader church.

Typically, campus pastors don’t preach, unless they are also a part of the teaching team. As a result, the preaching either comes via video from the main campus, or the teaching team will prepare the sermon together and each preach it live at their respective campuses.

I’ve been a teaching pastor in both models, and they each have their respective positives and negatives. In any case, in both models, someone needs to close out the service. And my conviction is that it needs to be the campus pastor. This is one of the primary public ways that the campus pastor can shepherd their campus. Yes, obviously this will happen through leadership development environments, coffee, and ministry done together, but as a regular and ongoing rhythm, the campus pastor needs to close out the service.

As a regular and ongoing rhythm, the campus pastor needs to close out the service

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I’ve seen campus pastors do this well and I’ve also seen them do it poorly. Check out this chart I developed.

Closing out a service chart - danielim.com

This may seem pretty straightforward, but you’d be surprised at how difficult it is to stick to the positive ways to close out a service.

I know this because I’ve often done the latter when serving as a campus pastor—especially when I forgot to share an announcement earlier in the service, or needed to reemphasize a programming issue.

As a campus pastor, if you have closed out the service well by contextualizing the message to your campus, then leave any last announcement to the very end of the service, after your prayer! This is because once you finish praying, you often have the opportunity to share one more thing while people are beginning to leave. Don’t make this too long, otherwise, the positive impact of your closing will wane.

An Example…

I’m blessed to serve as a Teaching Pastor at The Fellowship, alongside two great campus pastors: Len Taylor and Scott Matthews. While being different in personality, leadership style, and demeanor, I’m so encouraged to tag team in ministry with them. There is no one perfect way to close out a service because every campus pastor needs to be true to their unique personality and leadership style. There is, however, a wrong way to close out a service—and that’s to just copy someone else and try to be someone you aren’t.

Earlier this year, I preached a message on prayer at the Two Rivers Campus of my church. Check out this video of Scott Matthews, the campus pastor, closing out this service by:

  • Shepherding the church
  • Sharing how it impacted him
  • Reiterating some important points
  • Celebrating ministry wins and creating a sense momentum
  • And offering next steps

Join me next time as I share Campus Pastor Skill #2: How to Lead Across.

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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