Pastor + Author
Recently I filmed a 90 Second Leadership video for LifeWay Leadership on this important insight about leadership and change.
I hope you enjoy it!
Click here to watch other 90 Second Leadership videos by LifeWay Leadership.
There are no perfect church vision statements.If you’re looking to change yours, or create one from scratch, the thought of copying another church’s vision statement has probably come across your mind.
Don’t do it!
While it’s fine to see how others have worded theirs for ideas and inspiration—whatever you do—don’t short circuit the process.
Now obviously, copying someone else’s vision statement would be easier and faster, but in this matter specifically, the process is as important as the outcome (I’ll explain why later on). And while the foundation for every church’s vision statement is built with the same building blocks of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, the way you put them together needs to be different than the way the church down the road did theirs. This is because the vision statement for your church is for your church—it’s not for the church down the road! So your vision statement needs to be contextualized and worded into language that your church understands.
One more note about vision statements, and then I’ll get to why the process is as important as the outcome.
It needs to be feel real and tangible, but not fully here, since vision is more about the future than the present. It’s more like a foretaste, than it is a full meal. Here’s how I describe it in my book, No Silver Bullets.
Vision is about the preferred future. It’s the ability to conceptualize a picture of a golden tomorrow that does not yet exist. It’s about seeing both the difficulties and possibilities so clearly that you can actually visualize a different reality than the one you can see with your eyes. Simply put, vision is about painting the dreams that God has laid on your heart for all to see. In order to discover those God-given dreams, you need to start by considering “everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8) so that you can stop wondering “what kind of mission God has for me,” and instead begin asking, “what kind of me God wants for His mission.”
[Read more…] about How to Create a Vision Statement For Your Church
For the rest of us, it’s nearly 5 times the price of the classic edition of the game. And when you look it up on eBay, I think a lot of people are hoping it becomes the most wanted present this Christmas, much like Tickle Me Elmo, Hatchimals, and BB-8 in previous years.
It’s Hasbro taking a dig at millennials. It’s them putting all the stereotypes of millennials into a box and selling it for a profit. I wonder if any millennials were even on the team creating this, or if it was just a bunch of boomers and Gen Xers?
Let’s try and list all the millennial stereotypes that we find on the box:
Inside the box, instead of buying property, you can purchase experiences.
“Money doesn’t always buy a great time, but experiences, whether they’re good—or weird—last forever,” says the description on the box. So forget Boardwalk! On this version of Monopoly you get a week-long meditation retreat instead. And instead of Park Place, you can buy a 3-day music festival.
Who takes the train anyway? On this version, you can use bike share instead. And instead of staying at cheap motels, millennials apparently just live in their parent’s basement or on their friend’s couch.
And let’s not forget that avocado toast that millennials are so famous for. Or that live/work loft that all millennials envy—if they can actually afford it.
Does that surprise you? Albeit, I’m an older millennial, but I’m still a millennial—so stereotypes like these are getting pretty old. And knowing how long it takes to create a physical product and then get it out for distribution—this wasn’t someone’s side hustle. Hasbro invested a lot into this, they bet big, and it’s paying off.
[Read more…] about Monopoly for Millennials: Lessons for Boomers, Gen Xers, and Everyone Else
In a Chicago Sun-Times article on the most influential Illinoisans, Hefner and Moody were listed one after the other. Here was their rationale:
Hugh M. Hefner (1926-2017), publisher and bon vivant. Steinmetz High School graduate Hugh Hefner was a product of the Northwest Side Bungalow Belt. His imagination and drive forged a publishing empire and changed the social and sexual mores of American society in profound ways during the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever else one may think of him, he was one of the most influential people of the mid-to-late-20th Century.
Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899), American Christian evangelist, author, publisher and founder of the Moody Bible Institute. Born in Massachusetts, but influential in Minnesota and Illinois. Moody converted to Evangelical Christianity as a 17-year-old in April 1855. During the Civil War, President Lincoln visited and spoke at a Sunday School meeting he sponsored on November 25, 1860. Moody preached on many battlefronts including Shiloh, Stones River and Richmond. After the Civil war he moved to Chicago begin a congregation in the Illinois Street Church. Wiped out by the Chicago Fire, Moody began anew and over the next 20 years he became internationally known, holding many religious revivals in Great Britain and Sweden. Moody led the Chicago Bible Institute, and after his death the Chicago Avenue Church was renamed the Moody Church and the Chicago Bible Church became the Moody Bible Institute we know today.
And if influence is what we truly want, then we’re living in the best time of history, since everyone has a voice—all you need is a smartphone or a computer to amplify it. Just take a look at your social media feed and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
[Read more…] about The Influence of Hugh Hefner and D.L. Moody
We’ve tried that before!
What makes you think that this will work better than the last idea?
Why can’t we just do things the way we’ve always done them?
Believe it or not, situations like these shape us more than we know. Resistance after resistance, shut down after shut down—they just stock pile on top of each other until we wake up one morning being the one that is now resisting change.
Change is difficult to implement in our churches because the immune system of our church body knows when we try to transplant foreign ideas. And not only does it detect the new idea, it sees it as bad bacteria, a virus, or foreign material—thus resulting in its rejection.
But as a leader, you know that change is not only inevitable; it’s necessary to reach a new generation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Although the Gospel is timeless, methods aren’t. After all, when’s the last time you saw teenagers or young adults in your church using a pay phone or hand writing a letter?
If you want to raise up the next generation of leaders in your church, you can’t just do what you’ve always done. Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work. The rate of change in our culture has sped up to the point where we are now measuring cultural shifts, not by the century or decade, and not even by the year anymore. But now by the month, the weeks, and in some cases, minutes.
Rather than feeling overwhelmed or suffering from a paralysis of analysis, I want to suggest three shifts that will change the trajectory of your church so that you can raise up a new generation of servant leaders, or harvest workers as Jesus mentions in Matthew 9:35-38.
[Read more…] about How to Develop Servant Leaders