Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Church Multiplication

My Seminars for Exponential West 2016

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I’m excited to be speaking this week at Exponential West 2016!

If you are at the conference, I’d love for you to join me at one of my seminars. If not, then be sure to tune into the livestream that we at NewChurches.com are hosting for Exponential.

Thirty Network Pre-Conference: Initiative and Vision

  • The Thirty Network believes that Asian American pastors have something valuable and unique to contribute to the Church with the very essence of who they are and who God has created them to be at this time in this generation. The Thirty seeks to facilitate conversations, provide resources, and make connections that will actively strengthen the mainstream evangelical church. I will be speaking at their pre-conference at Exponential West on the topic of Initiative and Vision.
  • Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:30pm
  • Location: Port Mariners Kids room #237

Workshop Session 1: Using Residency Programs to Develop Leaders that Multiply

  • Learn about five different types of residency programs, the spectrums that each are built on, and how to start one in your church. Are your residents fully funded? Are they full-time? Do you pursue partnership with a seminary? These questions and more will be answered in this workshop so that you can develop homegrown leaders in your church that multiply.
  • Time: Tuesday, 2:30-3:30pm
  • Location: Life Development Building – Room 203

Workshop Session 2: How to Create a City Multiplication Movement

  • Learn how to create a church multiplication movement in your city. Whether you’re a church planter, a staff member, a campus pastor, a lead pastor, or a denominational leader, you will glean insights to help you cultivate a multiplication movement in your city. When this session is done, you’ll leave with a strategy to employ in your city to see multiplication happen.
  • Time: Wednesday, 8:45-9:45am
  • Location: Life Development Building – Room 203

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Campus Pastor Skill #4: How to Lead Up

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Campus pastors who never lead up will always hit a ceiling in their development.

Think about the team that you lead. When in a meeting or working on a project, how do you feel when everyone always agrees with you and never offers another suggestion? Or, how about when someone disagrees with you or offers a better idea? How do you feel then?

Refusing to lead up can either be seen as a lack of competence or a lack of care.

When you always seem to agree with those who are leading you, this is often viewed as a lack of knowledge or skill. After all, there’s no way that your boss can be more competent than you in every area, especially if you’re hired to be a specialist in a particular area. For example, how would you feel if you always knew more about children’s ministry than your children’s director? It’s one thing if you were more of an expert in their area when they started on your staff (this is referring to S1 in Situational Leadership, as we addressed in the previous post), but you wouldn’t want them to stay there.

In addition, repeated silence or unconditional agreement is typically interpreted as a lack of initiative or a lack of care. After all, if you truly cared about the project or the task at hand, wouldn’t you have been thinking about it, researching it, and trying to bring your best ideas to the table?

Now don’t misinterpret me. I’m not saying that you always need to have something to say, nor that you should play the devil’s advocate. There’s definitely a balance needed here, but what’s not an option is repeated silence.

When you do speak out and try to lead up, this can either be seen as a challenge to authority, or allegiance to the organization.

Let me explain. If those leading you are authoritarian and have big egos, they typically see ideas other than theirs as sub-par, and as a result, a challenge to their authority. When team members speak up, leaders like those are typically thinking, “How dare you say something other than yes? Do you really think you’re better at this than I am?” Or, if the presented idea is actually better than theirs, they will probably find a way to minimize it, and then secretly implement it, while taking all the credit. If that’s how the leadership is at your church, then consider asking the Lord for an opportunity to leave. This is not a healthy environment to be in.

What if your idea is taken into account? What if your idea is actually better than the leader’s? And then, what if your idea is actually the one that gets implemented? In a healthy organization or church, this wouldn’t be seen as a challenge to authority; instead, it would be seen as allegiance to the organization. The fact that you brought a good idea demonstrates that you are all-in, and want everyone on the team to succeed.

When you present a better idea, alternative solution, or even initiate a brand new idea, you need to think about the way you present it, as much as the content of it.

After all, the fate of your idea, and the fate of your future in the church, ultimately depends on your level of emotional intelligence, how you present the idea, and the amount of relational capital and trust that you have built with others. This reminds me of that often repeated phrase in relationships, “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it!”

So instead of saying, “No, I don’t like that. I have a better idea. Listen up!” Next time you have a better solution than the one that the lead pastor presents, try saying something like this. “I love __________ (find an aspect of the leader’s idea that you appreciate). What do you think if we did this as well? __________ (present your idea).” Or, if your idea is completely different than what has already been presented, then try this, “I have an idea that’s pretty different than what’s been suggested, but I think it might work, or at least aspects of it. Do you guys want to hear it?”

Leading up can either be seen as a challenge to authority, or allegiance to the organization.

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When you lead up, you are demonstrating your leadership capacity and competency, while also declaring your your love and allegiance to the vision and mission that your church is trying to accomplish.

Here are four areas that campus pastors NEED to lead up in:

1. Preaching

Effective multisite churches coordinate preaching across their campuses. If you consider yourself a multisite church, but aren’t doing this, then you’re missing out. More than a common budget and a vision statement, it’s coordinated preaching that keeps multisite churches together and in unison. Whether you do this via video, or with a live teaching team, it’s important that every campus is hearing the same core set of points on a weekly basis. There is definitely room for Campus Sundays where the campus pastors are preaching unique messages to their campuses, but this is more of an exception than the norm.

[Read more…] about Campus Pastor Skill #4: How to Lead Up

4 Ways God Shapes Us For Mission

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“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.

[Read more…] about Campus Pastor Skill #3: How to Lead Down

Campus Pastor Skill #2: How to Lead Across

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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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