Leadership

Cultivating Missional Community in the Summer

June 7, 2016 By Daniel Im

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Back when I lived in Edmonton, Canada, it was literally winter six months out of the year. We used to say that there were only two seasons in Edmonton: winter and construction. So you could guess my excitement for those blissful summer months where it didn’t take a century to get in and out of the house with all of our winter gear, and I could just walk out with flip-flops! For some, summer is about jumping into a pool, with no worries, timelines, or meetings. For others, summer is about hiking, biking, being outside, and enjoying God’s creation. And still for others, summer is about getting those honey-do lists done. In any case, as adults, summer vacation is usually a couple weeks long, and then we have to get back at it and put our noses to the grindstone.

Although we all love taking a break in the summer, and the natural rhythms of life dictate our need for one, the one thing that doesn’t stop over the summer is our need for community.

So here is that infamous question that every small group or missional community needs to ask over the summer, “To continue, or not?”

Here are a few of my suggestions:

Two Ear Active Listening

May 31, 2016 By Daniel Im

There’s this old episode from Everybody Loves Raymond where Debra (Ray’s wife) is scolding their daughter, Ally, because she ripped her brother’s giraffe. When Ray walks into the house, and sees that they’re fighting, he runs to the scene with joy exclaiming, “Oh great!”

“This is Michael’s giraffe and he’s crying, so why did you do it?” says Debra.

Ally responds back, with folded arms, and pursed lips, “Because!”

Debra then says, “Because is not an answer!”

It’s at this point, that Ray responds with, “Active listening. It works. I use it on the worst kids in the neighborhood!”

While the live audience is chuckling to themselves, Ray then goes on to coach his wife—in real time, while she’s trying to talk to Ally—by telling her how she needs to reflect back instead of accuse, while also be accepting, instead of judgmental.

Saying Versus Hearing

Active listening is one of those things that is often made fun of because it seems so elementary and basic. “Why should I repeat back exactly what the other person said? They heard themselves and so did I!” This is one of the common objections that people share while learning the skills of active listening. However, the fact of the matter is, just because something is said, doesn’t mean that we all hear it the same way.

We see this most with children—they are the best at selective listening. For example, we might say, “Go and clean up your room, before we get ice cream,” but they probably heard, “Blah, blah, blah, ice cream.” It’s reminiscent of Charlie Brown’s teacher, isn’t it? Or how about in meetings when someone is rattling off information that doesn’t relate at all with your area—how often do you remember what they say?

Most of us are better at selective listening, than we are at active listening…hence this article.

Active listening is about being fully attentive to the other person during a conversation. While it might require you to verbally reflect back what the person just said—“If I heard you correctly, you are trying to say…”—oftentimes you can convey that you’re listening with your body language as well.

After all, 93 percent of communication is “non-verbal” in nature, according to a UCLA study conducted by Dr. Mehrabian.

SOLER

Gerard Egan developed something called the SOLER theory in 1986 to easily describe the non-verbal techniques required for active listening. He defines SOLER as “micro-skills” that allow you to convey to the other party that you care for them and are present, without using words.

Why We Need to Be Mean About The Vision

May 24, 2016 By Daniel Im

A Personal Conversation with Shawn

I remember having a conversation with Shawn Lovejoy a year after starting my new position with LifeWay Christian Resources. I had moved my family down to Nashville, TN to figure out how LifeWay was going to resource church planters, multisite churches, and multiplying churches (we started NewChurches.com as a result).

So we were together at the Exponential conference, and Shawn asked me, “How’s everything going?”

I just responded the way I normally do with a big grin, “It’s going great!”

But then, he stopped, looked at me straight in the eyes and asked me one more time, “How’s everything going?”

I remember thinking to myself, Shawn’s a really nice guy, and I enjoy working with him, but why is he asking me this question again?? We’re in a public place at a conference…does he expect to “counsel” me here?

Sure, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed, but who wasn’t anyway? After all, in the previous months, I was rewriting Planting Missional Churches with Ed Stetzer, developing and launching the strategy for NewChurches.com, leading a major software redevelopment initiative with the North American Mission Board to better assess, train, and coach their church planters, launching The State of Church Planting research project, and now speaking four times at the Exponential conference, but this season was eventually going to pass, right?

I was at a conference and had to put my “game face” on, so who was Shawn to be confronting me like this? Well, the reality was, Shawn was just being himself. He was acting as a wise mentor who had travelled this path many times, and was seeing someone else who was heading down the same path.

So he looked at me and said, “I’ve been where you are bro, I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and it just wasn’t worth it.”

At that, I decided it was time to sit down and have a real conversation with him.

Trends for Church Conferences

May 17, 2016 By Daniel Im

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Today, I am in New York speaking at the first-ever New City Gathering and spending time with my friend, Drew Hyun and his new network. Learn about the five values that they see as being critical for new churches here.

What’s interesting to me is that their church planting conference is brand new.

I’m not against new conferences, nor am I against church planting; after all, I serve as the Director of Church Multiplication for NewChurches.com! But, what’s fascinating to me is how the trend with church conferences seems to be heading in the direction of small, regional, and specialized.

Take the Catalyst conference for example. They grew their single location conference in Atlanta to 10,000+ attendees, and then started a West Coast version of it. Soon afterwards, they introduced smaller one day regionals across the country.
Exponential went the same route. They had their Exponential East conference of over 5000+ attendees, started a West Coast version of it, and are now introducing regionals in the U.S. and in other parts of the world.
The Verge Network did the same. After growing their Austin based conference to 3000+, they shut it down for a year, and have now opened up with a regional only strategy.
The SEND Network had a 10,000+ sized conference in Nashville last year, and are moving to a regional strategy this next year. They’ve decided to alternate between one big conference and smaller regionals every other year.

–> The tension that big conferences face is the push to generalize their content, in order to broaden their registration base.

–> The benefit of small conferences is knowing your target audience, so you’re able to specialize and specifically equip your niche audience with what they need.

Multisite AND Church Planting

May 10, 2016 By Daniel Im

Through the research LifeWay conducted surveying multisite pastors, we discovered a trend among many pastors considering multisite. For them, “the multi-site strategy [did] not replace any other method of participating in kingdom growth. It [did] not replace church planting, personal evangelism, visitation programs, investing and inviting, servant evangelism, or evangelistic training.”[1]

For them it was merely another strategy to reach their city:

Planting churches, building larger buildings, adding services, adding venues at your current site, and relocating a campus are all still viable solutions today. Multi-site does not replace these other solutions. It adds one more possibility for consideration.[2]

Some once believed this move to grow via multiple campuses was a temporary trend, but it appears to be a trend that’s here to stay. After all, there are more than 8,000 multisite churches in the US alone with more than 5 million people worshipping in them![3] While it was once the domain of only the largest megachurches, multisite is now a common option for smaller churches to consider. In fact, although a thousand is the average size of the church that goes multisite, many have gone multisite at eighty.[4]

What’s interesting though, is the number of churches that utilize a multisite methodology and are also committed to church planting. The two are definitely not exclusive of each other.

Take a look at these three different models that are committed to both multisite and church planting: