Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Daniel Im

Freelancing and Pastoral Ministry

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Have you got your side hustle on?

“I love it, I’ve been ubering for the last year, and for the first time in my life, I actually have spending money!”

This past year, when I was invited to speak on No Silver Bullets to a group of church planters in the San Francisco Bay Area, I ubered over to see one of my friends in the city. During the 30 minute ride, it was fascinating to hear the story of a mid-50s Mexican mother who immigrated 30+ years ago.

Although she had been working full-time for the last 30 years taking care of her family, she had never brought home a paycheck that could be deposited at the bank. While she was definitely competent to work outside the home, adhering to a strict part-time work schedule simply wasn’t manageable due to her family life.

Enter Uber.

Since she could drive whenever she wanted to, Uber was a perfect fit for her. So for the last year, this mother of teenagers has been driving from 9 pm-1 am, since by that time, everything’s settled down at home.

When asked whether or not she enjoyed driving, her response was eye-opening, as it precisely illustrated the new economy that we’re now living in,

“I love it, I’ve been ubering for the last year, and for the first time in my life, I have spending money!”

Welcome to the “gig economy”

The “gig economy” was originally coined during the financial crisis of 2009, when so many people were forced to “gig” or freelance to make a living by working one-or-more part-time jobs.

Though this phrase is now almost 10 years old, it has only recently normalized and become a part of our everyday language.

There are many reasons for its normalization, like the affordability and mass adoption of smart phones, our shortening attention span, our desire to be our own boss, our culture’s obsession with experiences (we are living in the experience economy), and the rising number of jobs that an individual will work in his or her lifetime, just to name a few.

So today, if you have a car, you can drive for Uber or Lyft (click here to read an article I wrote on What Church Leaders Can Learn From Uber and Lyft). If you have a spare bedroom, you can rent it out on Airbnb. If you are handy, you can charge for your services on TaskRabbit. And if you love pets, you can take care of them through Dogvacay.

According to a recent study, on freelancing and the “gig economy,” there are now 55 million freelancers in the U.S.

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Building a Discipleship Culture That Will Grow Your Church

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Are you happy with your existing vision, strategy, and values, or do you need to revisit them?

Are you producing disciple-makers, disciples, or consumers? Are you worried that what you’re currently doing isn’t sustainable or scalable? Do you need to overhaul your church, but aren’t sure what to do differently?

The fact is, we often lead the way we’ve been led, disciple the way we’ve been discipled, and teach the way we’ve been taught…unless we consciously decide to do otherwise.

We often lead the way we’ve been led and disciple the way we’ve been discipled!

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And with the accelerated pace of life, the unceasing demands of ministry, and the relentless fact that Sunday is always around the corner, who has the luxury of time to stop, audit, and make systemic changes to the way we lead, disciple, and teach?

As a result, the two things that we often (unintentionally) end up neglecting is self-development and team-development.

In a previous article, I address the issue of self-development and provide you with a list of questions from my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry. So be sure to go back and answer those questions before moving on.

Let’s now talk about staff or team development.

The fact is, as a pastor and church leader, you are both a boss and a disciple-maker—and this applies whether or not you’re the senior leader.

(Now I understand that you may not like the word boss because it sounds domineering, but I’m simply trying to emphasize the fact that you’re the leader and that you have responsibilities that directly affect others.)

So take a moment and think about everyone on your team—whether it’s your staff team as the senior leader, or your volunteer team as a staff member.

On the one hand, you are responsible for the ministry that God has entrusted you with.

So in order to get things done in a scalable manner, you can’t do it yourself. You need to work with and through your team—just think about Exodus 18 and the account between Moses and Jethro. This makes you the boss, the leader, or depending on your culture, the chief cheerleader or number one servant.

On the other hand, you are also responsible to equip those under and around you for the work of ministry (Eph 4:12-13).

And I’m not talking about equipping others to make coffee, clean the toilets, and carry your purse, or murse…I’m talking about “equipping the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness” (Eph 4:12-13).

While making coffee and cleaning toilets can definitely be a character shaping exercise and be a part of moving you to maturity, that’s not what I’m talking about…

I’m talking about building a culture that allows your team to develop both professionally and spiritually.

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What Kind of Church Leader Are You?

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In order to grow and multiply your church, you have to start with yourself.

I’m not talking about picking up a self-help book to learn how to get your best life now. I’m talking about figuring out why it is that you lead the way that you do.

But Daniel, that means I need to slow down and reflect…I don’t have time for that! Sunday’s coming, and I need to…

Yes I understand that Sunday is coming and that you have things to do! But here’s the thing…

If you don’t take the necessary time to learn why you lead the way you lead, disciple the way you disciple, and teach the way you teach, you will never be able to grow and multiply your church.

In order to grow and multiply your church, you have to start with yourself.

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In my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry, I start the first chapter with a self-assessment to help you discover why it is that you lead the way you do.

Here’s a portion of it. I hope you’ll slow down and take a moment to work through each of these questions:

1. Who do you look up to as a pastor and church leader?

Who has shaped your view of church practice and practical theology? Is it Eugene Peterson? J. I. Packer? Tim Keller? It could be someone you know personally, or someone you’ve admired from a distance.

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The Obscure Link Between Instant Gratification and Change

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Do you remember when it would take so long for your computer to start up, that you’d have time to brew a cup of coffee or make yourself a sandwich?

Oh how times have changed…

If we want to read a book, we can download it instantly. If we want to listen to one, we can literally press play the moment after we purchase it. If we want toothpaste, laundry detergent, or a few bananas, we can order it on Prime Now and get it within two hours. And now, with the launch of Amazon Go, we don’t even need to line up and pay the cashier at the grocery store!

Sure, this is convenient, but the unfortunate side effect is that we’ve been conditioned to need, want, and long for change.

We’re addicted to change…and secretly we love it.

Now change isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but change for the sake of change must be avoided. It demoralizes your team, causes unnecessary stress, and is simply unproductive. However, if you have decided that change needs to take place in your life and in your ministry, following this eight-step process that I wrote about in a previous article, is critical.

Change for the sake of change must be avoided at all costs.

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Now while the likelihood of succeeding in leading change without the eight-step process—or some variation of it—is pretty low, how you view and approach change matters even more.

When burdened with a new idea, or a desire to change something specifically in your life or your church, definitely start with prayer. But don’t move straight to implementation after you say “Amen.”

We need to slow down and take a different approach.

Now I understand that this is hard to do because of our on-demand, stream-anytime, find-an-answer-to-anything, go-anywhere, and swipe-now-pay-later instant gratification culture.

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Systems and an Encyclopedia

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As a child, I remember flipping through the human anatomy section in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

As a curious child with an insatiable love for learning—I remember times when I would just open up the encyclopedia and read. My favorite section was the human anatomy, since I wanted to be a doctor. In fact, I vividly remember looking through and being amazed by the layers of complexity that the human body presented.

This section was always several pages long.

In fact, it always stuck out from the other pages in the encyclopedia, since each system in the human body was printed on its own plastic, transparent page.

If you had one of these old-school encyclopedias in front of you, the first system you’d see would be the integumentary system—the body’s outer covering. In other words, you’d see a naked human body with skin, hair, and nails. If you flipped that transparent page over to the next—I apologize for the graphic nature of this next phrase—it would almost be like you were peeling the skin off of a human. You’d be left with the muscular system. If you flipped that page over again, you would see the circulatory system.

With every progressive page turn, you would uncover another system that makes up the human body. The nervous system, the lymphatic system, the skeletal system, and so on.

Just like there are different layers of systems in the human body, so it is with the church.

The systems in your church are designed to work together, like they do in the human body, to help your church function as God intends it to. After all, “God has arranged each one of the parts in the body just as he wanted” (1 Cor. 12:18).

So what exactly are those systems for your church?

While there are many more than just these two, your discipleship pathway and leadership pipeline are what makes up the two core systems that drive everything in your church.

Your discipleship pathway & leadership pipeline are the two core systems that drive everything.

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