First Baptist of Orlando is a role model of the strategy Becoming Christ-Centered, which senior pastor David Uth summarizes in a statement he routinely makes to his 6,000 congregants:
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When church administrators work at building their team or merely conduct a meeting they must “compel the process,” says management consultant
Patrick Lencioni, and when it doesn’t happen it is more often because “they have a misplaced sense of humility.”
Lencioni, president of The Table Group that specializes in organizational health and executive team development, is a favorite speaker at church conferences. He has authored nine books with more than three million copies sold, and the latest one is The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012). Church Executive asked Lencioni to apply the advice in his book to pastors and executive pastors of churches as well as to companies: We don’t hear much about humility in business? Being humble is one of the most critical things a great leader must be. But being humble means that leaders know that they are not more important than the people they lead. They are servant leaders. However, even servant leaders need to understand that their words and actions are, in fact, more impactful than those of others.
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Retirement. We all hope one day to do it. As church and ministry executives, you likely want to make sure you can offer your employees a competitive, robust retirement plan at a reasonable cost to your bottom line. But how do you know if your current plan is on the right track, or, if you don’t have one yet, how to choose the right one? “Establishing employee benefits is a very important consideration for any church or ministry and its employees,” says Dixie Beard, director of business development at GuideStone Financial Resources. “But before rushing into establishing an employee retirement plan, it is important to establish your ministry’s objectives, such as meeting your moral obligation to employees, evaluating your cultural environment and establishing cost parameters.”
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Every leadership system has a capacity limit, a point beyond which it can no longer effectively function. When the activity level of the congregation significantly increases or decreases, leadership systems hit their limits. A senior clergyperson assumes a particular leadership role that is highly effective in a church with weekend worship attendance of 700. The clergyperson is surprised to discover that the leadership role begins losing its effectiveness when the church adds an additional worship service and now hosts 850 in weekend worship.
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We even have a special month for pastor appreciation (October). Gary Chapman and Paul White has written The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace (Northfield Publishing/Moody Publishers), and Church Executive asked the authors to apply their concepts to the church. Dr. Chapman is the director of Marriage and Family Life Consultants Inc. in Winston-Salem, NC, and has served as senior associate pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in that city for 40 years.
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There’s a renewed focus on the Bible in churches these days, as biblical literacy is making a comeback in congregations and publishing houses in the U.S. “What’s really encouraging to me is that deep Bible engagement within the congregation is eminently doable,” says Paul Caminiti, vice president of church and Bible engagement for the publishing firm Biblica. “But people today realize that we’re in trouble and that we’ve not given the Bible its due,” says Caminiti, himself an expert in this area. “There really is a Bible engagement vacuum in the church. I’ve watched lives transformed when pastors treat Bible engagement like a varsity sport. I’ve watched congregations transformed when instead of little camp fires, a big Bible engagement bonfire is built in the middle of the church.
Read More >“Every generation needs to go back to the source and put the Bible in the English idiom for themselves.”
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