Creative Bites: Recent Episodes
Matt Curtis
The Creative Bites podcast is focused on helping pastors and creatives understand each other better so they can serve their church better. Join me as I break down Church Communication into bit sized ideas so you spend less time worrying about comm and more time ministering to your congregation.
This is it friends! The end of an era. Thank you so much for joining me along the way. If you'd like to join me as I continue to podcast about Leading Healthy Creative Teams, I'd LOVE to have you.
http://lunchtimeheroes.co/podcast
All previous podcast content will be removed at the end of September, so if there are episodes you want to keep, download them before them. I also have an archive, so feel free to contact me through the Lunchtime Heroes website.
Creative solutions are often most powerful because of the tension they create. But rarely does a speaker want to leave their audience in a prolonged state of tension. So how can we resolve this?
Matt and Aaron discuss the different things you get when you hire a Graphic Designer or a Communications Director for your ministry. Which should you hire first? Well, it depends.
What do you think? Which hire fits best for your ministry?
Is graphic design really a preference driven industry? Is there such a thing as objectively "good" graphic design? In this episode of the Creative Bites podcast, I talk through that topic. I also provide tips for both pastors and designer to have meaningful conversations about the work that is being produced.
I wanted to update you on the new schedule for the Creative Bites Podcast. I'm moving it to every other week instead of weekly.
I also wanted to share two new resources I've created for anyone spending time doing graphic design as part of their job.
The first is a free bundle called: 3 Design Secrets that Will Save Ministry Leaders Hours of Time.In order to get done the workload assigned to me early in my career, I had to develop some strategies to make myself dramatically more efficient. It worked, and I'm sharing them with you to help you save time.
The second is an online class that goes even deeper: Help! I'm Doing Graphic Design for my Church!This course will teach you the foundational principles of graphic design so you can make faster design decisions. This will help you spend less time doing graphic design so you can spend more time investing in your ministry.
For listeners of the podcast, I'm offering a 25% off coupon - CREATIVEBITES. The coupon is good through April 21.
As the potential of online ministry becomes more and more clear, should social media move outside of the Communications team and under pastoral leadership instead? Matt and Aaron discuss the pros and cons of each approach.
The promise innovation never seems to stop. Worse, if you aren't running on the treadmill of what's next, you are declared (by some) to be missing the opportunity of a lifetime. But God is working at His pace and in His way. So how can we balance taking advantage of opportunity while also avoiding becoming overwhelmed?
This is the last episode of the Communicate on Purpose Podcast. What a ride it has been!
But the podcasting is going to continue. Here is a bit of the backstory - I've started my own business named Lunchtime Heroes. My goal with it is to help the church communicate clearly effectively, and with integrity.
There are two belief that have really stood out to me in my time in ministry.
- Pastors need to spend their time pastoring people, not managing details.
- Pastors and comm people need to be in the same conversation.
The focus of Communicate on Purpose was to help church staff bring their industry to the church. That will still be happening, just a bit more focused on the creative side.
The focus of what's coming will be on helping ministry leaders have more time to fulfill their calling.
A bit about the new format:
I'll unpack an issue or topic, then talk to both sides about it. A message to those serving in comm, and a message to those serving in pastoral leadership.
- Hearing different sides of the conversation is important.
I'll also be introducing a new format for some episodes that are Church Communication Hot Takes. A friend and I will navigate some of the common challenges in the church comm space an work through the perspectives. The goal with these episodes is that you are able to listen and decide where you stand.
One of the most effective ways to implement change in your organization is by building the next solution before you remove the previous one. People rely on the tools you create and the way you communicate. If you transition between tools too suddenly, you stoke fear.
But beyond that transition, fear expresses itself in many ways. The communications role has a unique seat to see much of it, and to help others have more peace than they would have otherwise.
In the church and non profit space, we are told to be on board with the mission or get off the bus. This is a dangerous message. It adds stress to our lives, and it ultimately leads to division - more division than we realize.
In order for you to be effective in your role, you need to keep balance between all the different responsibilities in your life.
Jobs in the creative industry tend to be pretty high stress. They involve complicated work, tight deadlines, and high pressure clients looking for results. As you spend time in the industry, you develop skills to handle the stress, learn tactics to help get work done, and gain perspective that every emergency isn’t yours. As you excel in the execution, there is a good chance you’ll be given the opportunity to lead people.
People stress is different. All the tricks you learned to navigate projects and deadlines simply don’t apply. I’ve spent plenty of time stewing over behavioral decisions made by those that report to me. If they miss the mark, I stress about it. How can I help them improve? How do I challenge them well? Did this have a negative impact on the organization? Will I be on the hook for this?
Acknowledging that the stress is different is key to you being able to respond well to it. You can start identifying this even if you aren’t leading people.
This may seem like a silly realization, but for many years I thought of myself as the communication expert for the organization. I was hired into the communications role, therefore I was supposed to be the final authority on all things communication.
The problem, however, is that nearly everyone on a church staff is a communicator. Every department is broadcasting a message. It varies wildly, but emails are sent, volunteers are called, messages are preached, announcements are shared. There is an unfathomable amount of communication that happens. And it doesn’t all belong to you. In fact, I would argue that there is more communication happening outside of the Communications role than inside.
Once I realized this, my countenance changed dramatically. Rather than having to be the answer man that needed to do everything myself, I could shift my focus toward empowering and equipping others to grow in their ability to communicate. Now they could leverage something I didn’t haver in their communication - passion. I went from the sole communications person to one of many! What a refreshing change!
You are surrounded by people that are much more similar than you think.
The communications role is uniquely positioned to see the little areas where those in your ministry lose sight of what they believe. They announce confidently that God is in charge, but they get frustrated when your promotional strategy isn't yielding the results they want.
Obviously we need to be doing our due diligence in our trade, but we also need to be modeling faith even in these little things.
Beware of how much you are willing to do to get people's attention. While major campaigns aren't always a bad thing, they can create an unsustainable pace. When you stop, people leave - often citing completely different reasons.
There are times in ministry where you are the target audience for a product. While its great that companies are building products for ministry, the sales pitch rarely includes all the factors you need to consider when making a decision. Don't let the bells and whistles keep from looking at the bigger picture!
It doesn’t really matter how you feel about technology and innovation. It’s coming regardless of our opinion. But that doesn’t mean we should adopt every change that happens into our ministries. In fact, those that find themselves on the bleeding edge of adoption tend to spend a lot of money and time on things that ultimately don’t stick long term.
I’ve been through my fair share of battles around adopting specific innovation tools and I’ve learned that none of them are critical right out of the gate. The example of the race of our faith being a marathon versus a sprint is very important here.
Now, there isn’t anything wrong with integrating innovation quickly into your ministry, but there is something wrong with the communications leader (or any leader for that matter) sewing division over it. Regardless of where you stand on whatever the latest innovation is, it’s adoption needs to be filtered through the mission of the church.
This is one of the areas where I see a lot of leadership opportunities for church communications leaders. Many innovations have the potential to be good or bad depending on how we understand them. I wrote Hashtag Wisdom in 2013 for this reason. I wanted to address the behavior that one could choose to exhibit on social media. You can represent Christ in that space if you choose to. You can also choose to sew division and hatred. The choice is yours. This is true with every innovation.
As the communications leader in your church, you have the opportunity to help your pastoral leadership see where culture is driving in these areas. Ultimately it’s up to your leadership to decide how to lead the congregation through whatever comes, but you have an opportunity to help shed light on how innovation can be used for kingdom work. The way you do that is by connecting the dots between innovation and purpose.
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For years I fought last minute projects. I asked for projects to be submitted two weeks early. Then three weeks. At one point I think I tried one month. Nothing was working and I was frustrated. Inadvertently, the only thing I was doing by asking for more time was making each request seem even later than it already was.
I had created a doom loop of sorts. The only way the ministry teams could win with me is if they planned further out. But you know what my rules weren’t doing? Actually changing anything.
One day I walked into the office and I thought, “what if I designed a system that took reality into consideration”. That’s when everything changed.
Let’s just say you work in an environment where things don’t get to your desk until the last minute. Theoretically, of course. Rather than implementing rules that are trying to change the behavior of the entire staff in order to work with how you’d like to work, what if you accept that the team around you will be last minute? Would you build your system differently?
When I began considering other people's timelines as a constant rather than a variable, so much of the emotion and tension in my job shifted. I was no longer defensive when people came to me last minute. Instead, because my new process accounted for this sort of thing happening, I could lean in and problem solve. The relationships of me and my team improved dramatically, and we were more helpful to the ministry teams we were hired to serve.
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Effective communication moves people in a good direction for them, and it does so with integrity.
When you evaluate the effectiveness of your work, look closely at if people are moving. If they aren't, why not? Remember that you are not responsible for changing people's hearts and that you can't force movement.
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Join me this season on the Communicate on Purpose Podcast as I share lessons I've learned over the years serving in the communications role in the Church.
Now that I've stepped out of a communications role in my career, I feel like I need to close the book on that chapter somehow. I began writing what may eventually turn into a book, but it doesn't feel like the right time to build that yet. First I want to work through the ideas with you. Welcome to season 3!
In this episode:
Curse of Knowledge article: https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge
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This week I want to talk about how to handle other people’s problems.
As our world has been turned upside-down nearly over night, a lot of people are struggling. In a lot of ways we are experiencing an exaggerated response to change that has happened too quickly.
As we walk through this pandemic, we can learn a lot about how people respond to change.
We can’t know all the different ways people respond to change. There are simply too many variables. But we can hone our ability to be compassionate. If you are going to lead effectively at any point, you’ll need to develop the ability to listen before you feel.
A lot of people are being thrown in to tech.
- for a season, ministry is happening through tech
- facetime calls, zoom meetings, services streaming on weekends
- high discomfort for some
- learning new things is scary
- sometimes we can’t grasp it
- now the tool is the prohibitive element in our ability to minister meaningfully
For some, they feel that their ability to grasp tech will impact their ability to be safe.
- online shopping
- food delivery via apps
This is my native space. I see a million opportunities in this season. But that means I need to be extra sensitive to those who are scared.
This is like a water polo player jumping into a pool and feeling prepared to tread water for hours, while someone else in the pool doesn’t know how to swim.
Spend some time in your conversations focusing specifically on helping those who are afraid. Listen instead of judge. Be kind.
If you can learn to listen to the people you serve with before you make a judgement as to why they are having a hard time, you will be the kind of leader people want to follow.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a great time for us as people to negotiate stress in a way that we likely haven’t had to before. I want to talk through a technique I put into practice recently that has helped me apply God’s Word in a way I haven’t before.
If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that I believe all need in life, business, and organizational leadership is found in God’s Word. And that the principles of wisdom we find in business books are actually references to truths found in God’s word. So, let me share with you the approach I take when navigating stress.
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Write your fears
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Declare the truth
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Revise your fears
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Meditate on the truth of God’s Word.
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Make the switch.
As you pray through the things you are worried about, replace the fear with the truth. I go line by line.
Here is what you are doing. You are now going past Philippians 4:6-7, and you are stepping into verse 8. Instead of dwelling on your fears, dwell on whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, anything that is excellent or praiseworthy.
During a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, we begin to see what is most important. In this episode of reflection, I want to encourage you to think about what you are missing. What matters to you? How can you build that into the next season of life you live when things return to normal?
What is it?
Focus on creating a environment that stimulates growth.
Why is it important?
Wanting to grow isn’t the same as actually growing. There are a lot of conditions that need to exist for healthy growth to happen, and those conditions don’t happen randomly
How do you do it?
Let people jump in
Learning is messy. If you don’t let people jump in until they are ready, then you’ll never let people jump in. If they never jump in, they’ll never learn. If they never learn, they’ll never be ready.
There is something to the “prove yourself” part of leadership that can’t be assessed until someone is in the position.
In high school I struggled to hit curve balls as a batter. We were playing a team and we were tied going into extra innings. We had a runner on third with two outs. The pitcher on the mound was better than me, and had a great curveball. I couldn’t just put the ball in play to score the run, because I wasn’t fast enough to beat out a bunt or an infield hit. I needed a base hit.
If I weren’t actually in that situation, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how I handle pressure when the game is on the line. We could practice against good pitchers. We could practice against curveballs. But we couldn’t simulate the pressure of that situation in practice. I had to actually be in that moment.
The same is true for the people on your team.
Challenge people to be better
- Set clear expectations for where you want people to be
- Ask them where they want to go - help prepare them for what they aspire to be
Let learning be messy
- Mistakes will happen
- Projects will fail
- Imperfect work will be produced
- Things could have been better
Make the mistakes productive
- Model what it looks like to own mistakes of your own.
- Center your conversations around the project and the mistake, not the person. Mistakes shouldn’t be personal.
- Talk about why mistakes happened.
- Ask questions that help them see the problem.
- When you help facilitate problem solving, you increase ownership of the solution itself, and you help others put some skin in the game. That is critical to actual, lasting change.
Questions I ask:
- What happened?
- Do you know why this happened?
- Can you think of any ways to prevent this from happening in the future?
- How can I help you accomplish that?
What is it?
What is it that you are uniquely best at?
Are you a high caliber executor?
Are you a developer of people?
Are you a teacher and communicator of God’s word?
What is the most impactful thing you bring to a team?
What are you uniquely gifted or skilled at?
Why is it important?
As you look toward stepping up into a leadership role, you are choosing to say yes to some responsibilities, and no to others. You want to start understanding better what things you should do, and what things you shouldn’t do.
How do you do it?
- Ask coworkers what you are good at.
- Ask people close to you what you are good at.
- At the end of a day when you are drained in a bad way, take note of what you spent your day doing. Why are you spent?
- At the end of a day when you are drained in a good way, take note of what you did that day. Why are you drained in a good way?
- Try things you don’t normally do. Serve on a different committee, volunteer in a different ministry, step out of your comfort zone a bit. You might find that something completely unknown to you actually resonates deeply with you.
Once you being to get a glimpse of your unique role, begin pressing into that.
As you look to grow in leadership, empowering others is a major part of that. If there is any way you can start practicing that now, do it!
What is it?
Understanding that you don’t work for A church, you work for THE Church.
Why is it important?
If you lose this perspective:
- You will be mad when people leave your team
- You won’t trust new people for a while
- You’ll view other churches in your area as competition.
- You won’t be willing to invest in others
How do you do it?
- Ultimately you have to accept that ministry success is completely up to God, not you. Spend time learning more about who God is.
- Spend time reading about God’s sovereignty
- Spend time reading about Discipleship
What is it?
How you discuss problems in your organization matters.
Why is it important?
Calling out the wrong things in the wrong ways can cause frustration.
The four things I see elevated often are:
- Starting with complaints: "I didn’t like this."
- Starting with symptoms: "It seems like we keep getting behind on projects from a specific leader."
- Starting with problems: "This is broken."
- Starting with solutions: "I think we could solve this by doing something differently."
How to do it?
The best teams have the ability to translate from each of these tiers to the next.
This week we are going to talk through a couple ways your mindset needs to shift as you take on more leadership responsibility.
These may look different depending on the role you are aspiring toward, but these are new challenges you should be anticipating:
- Helping others grow safely
- Growing others while growing yourself
- Leading out of turmoil yourself
- Setting others up for success
- Taking their criticism on your chin
Three important mindset shifts:
- God isn’t just providing to you, he’s providing through you.
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Understand that you are not sole destination for God’s provision.
2. God isn’t just providing for YOU, He’s providing for others too.
3. Start being the type of person you want to follow
Ultimately what you value is what others will value. If you are leading people, who you are is what others will be become over time.
You are going to find that a lot of this season will point us to scripture. That’s because, in my opinion, Godly living is BY FAR the most effective way to develop as a leader.
In this week's episode, I wanted to share a conversation I had with my wife, Amy Curtis. Circumstances are often things used by God to "order our steps". Amy provides insight and encouragement for those times in life where our plans and the steps God is ordering don't seem to line up the way we think they should.
Proverbs 16:9
The mind of man plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.
- The call to Christian living is the foundation of effective ministry–regardless of vocation.
- If you want to learn more about your calling as a Christ follower, spend more time in God’s word. If you are stuck on a starting point, read the Sermon on the Mount in Mathew 5-7. There you will find a great overview of what Christ has called every single Christ follower to.
- If you have ambitions to be in vocational ministry, you should read the qualifications of Deacons in 1 Timothy 3:8-12. Or, if you have ambitions to become an Elders, read in Titus 1:5-9, 1 Tim. 3:1-7, and 1 Peter 5:1-4. Clarity around the requirements of these roles exist. If you do not meet the qualifications, then you should not be called to either of these roles by the church.
I think the bulk of the angst that exists around vocational decision making is that we don’t separate the two. We think we are making a highly spiritual decision when we choose a career path. One of the most beautiful things about our God is that He allows us to participate in ministry. And by our diligent pursuit of living a Christ centered life, we find ourselves in a very exciting position. Largely, we can do whatever we are skilled to do vocationally and have the opportunity to minister to a lost world. Simply because we are striving to be obedient to the call God has placed on our lives as Christ followers.
As you seek to assess where to go, here is what I would encourage you to ask yourself.
1. How should I respond to what is happening right now?
2. What do I care about? (What don’t I care about?)
3. What am I good at? (What am I bad at?)
4. What types of problems keep finding me?
5. What frustrates me?
6. What hardships has God allowed me to endure?
7. What situations can I endure?
8. What does scripture say?
Some cautions.
you typically don’t find success when you try to help people solve problems you haven’t solved.
- Be patient. It will feel like everyone else has it figured out before you do. That’s ok.
- Don’t assume your hardships are things you need to get away from. Sometimes the challenging things in life actually need to be leaned into, not run from.
- Don’t assume that things that are easy for you are easy for everyone.
- A career change isn’t bad. And chances are, your previous season will make you better at what you are moving into next.
5 things that can help you know when change is needed and actually change.
Information Helps You Change
Trust Your Gut
When Passion is Dying, Pause and Listen
Seek Trusted Counsel
Let Your Creation Live It’s Life
- The Courage to Change
Season 2 starts next week!
The assuming heart is particularly dangerous because of its tendency to scale in damage.
- We are too impatient to learn the truth
- We are scared to address a disagreement
- We are angry about something else (related or unrelated)
- We are lazy
Where The Assuming Heart typically gets us into trouble is when we make assumptions about the motivations of others.
Here are three phases of The Assuming Heart that I have seen. Each of them scale in damage, so our goal is to shut down our assumptions as soon as we can.
Phase 1:
The first phase of damage is to you. It erodes your ability to be unified with those around you. When someone makes a decision, you immediately assume that the decision was made with you in mind.
The most noticeable trait of phase one is that we begin to pull away from others.
Phase 2:
Now the assumptions that are expressed internally begin to show up externally.
Phase 2 is where we begin sowing division between others on the team and become an agent actively working against unity.
Phase 3:
At this point our assumptions have become facts to us. We make decisions to combat what we think is happening, and we start damaging relationships.
Phase 3 is where some relationships are significantly enough that they are altered moving forward. Often this is where trust is lost, and the relationship requires healing before it can continue to move forward.
- What you are upset about isn’t as important as unity.
When someone else makes a decision, assume unity, not division.
When you assume the worst about people’s motivations, you choosing to make their decisions more important than the unity of the body of Christ.
2. Never trust what anyone says.
I don’t care who it is, if someone shares the opinion of someone else with me, I don’t trust it. I always go to the source. Always.
3. Be patient.
Ultimately, if you aren’t willing to go to someone you are frustrated with, you are actively choosing division over unity.
Proverbs 25:15
Through patience a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone.
Working relationships can be very hard, but unity of the body of Christ is more important.
You have things that you have made a commitment to. And many of those are very important.
Don’t let them become too important.
This week, I want to look at the life of Moses in hopes of helping us recalibrate how committed we are to things in our life.
Exodus 18:13-23
- You can’t always see that you are overcommitted on your own.
- Don’t be frustrated when everyone can’t help at the same level.
- Moses wasn’t the only one capable, and neither are you.
- When you hear advice, pray about it.
First: giving or receiving counsel should always be with the understanding that prayer will supersede it.
Second: the advice in this situation was focused on helping Moses see that he wasn’t the condition upon which Israel succeeded or failed.
Whatever it is that you are investing in has the potential to do the same thing if you overcommit to it. Sometimes it’s because the need keeps presenting itself like it did with Moses.
Sometimes we overcommit because we think we are the key to success. It won’t happen without us.
Have you ever had a day at work that left you dejected? Maybe you were turned down for a promotion, or maybe your idea didn’t get approved. Or maybe there was tension on the team that you were a part of. Maybe you made a mistake that cost the organization money. Whatever the situation, it left you down.
For me personally, these things come in waves. I have seasons where it seems like I just keep getting lower and lower. As those seasons come, and they will, we can find ourself with A Dejected Heart.
Sometimes we struggle in these seasons because:
We think we are pioneers but our wagon wheels roll in the ruts of those who have gone before us.
Ecclesiasties 1:9-10
That means that somewhere, someone has walked the path you are walking.
- Look for people who have gone before you in real life
2 Corinthians 1:3-7
2. Look for people who have gone before you in scripture
Ezra
- We need to be reconciled to Christ ourselves (Ezra 9:3-5)
- In order to do that, we need to know God’s word. (Ezra 9:10-12)
- We must be willing to Obey what it says. (Ezra 7:10)
- We must be willing to direct others back into right living. (Ezra 10:10-11)
- Show grace in the process (Ezra 9:13)
Ezra and Nehemiah
- You will find things in your life that need to be rebuilt
- When you find something that needs to be rebuilt, pray first
- When you start rebuilding, expect opposition
- You can’t always rebuild on your own.
- God will not abandon you
- Your enemies will eventually lose confidence
- The Job isn’t going to be easy
3. Make sure you are disconnecting when you can
- Put your phone away
- Focus on one thing at a time, and full invest in it.
- Look at people in the eye
- Waste time
- Efficiency can add to dejection by making you think time spent resting and relaxing is a waste of time.
God is faithful to complete his work.
Philippians 1:6
We aren’t finished yet, thus God has not yet completed what he is working on. This is a part of that process, and likely the hardship will move you closer to completion.
There are 3 things I think we forget when we doubt. In order to look at these doubt, I’m want to to start with what is true, and unpack some of the ways these our doubt expresses itself.
1. We forget who is building the church
Matthew 16:18
2. We want our our way
Isaiah 55:8
Job 38:4-7
3. We want the entire plan
Genesis 22:1-18
God’s plan doesn’t always make sense to us. So often we have these plans in our mind that are so nice and tidy. What a wonderful roadmap! That isn’t usually what God’s plans look like. God asked Abraham to travel three days with his son processing the fact that he was instructed to sacrifice him. Can you imagine that walk?
When your heart doubts the plan because it doesn’t make sense, remember that The Lord Will Provide.
The most effective way to combat The Doubting Heart is to remember the truth found in Scripture. Don’t ever be tempted to think that a podcast, a blogpost, or a book can help you in the role you are in more than Scripture. I’m reminded of Psalm 105
“Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.”
Distraction is nearly unidentifiable in the moment, but it has incredibly far reaching consequences. It looks different for different people, but it has the same result - it pulls you away from what is important.
While distraction shows itself in a lot of different way, I want to focus on four signs of a Distracted Heart, and then look at what we can do about it. We are usually battling against distractions in our personal lives because it can help us avoid folding our laundry or fixing that leaky faucet that needs to get addressed. These all apply in that space, but I want to look at these from the perspective of our jobs. How does distraction express itself at work, and how should we respond?
1. The distraction of interruption
2. The distraction of talk.
Proverbs 14:23
In all labor there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.
3. The distraction of things.
Proverbs 12:11
He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who pursues worthless things lacks sense.
4. The distraction of pursuits.
Proverbs 28:19
He who tills his land will have plenty of food, but he who follows empty pursuits will have poverty in plenty.
Does any of this sound familiar? Can you see any of this fruit in your life? In a way, I want to encourage you that it probably will at some point. And really, the good news is that these things can change.
If this is where you find yourself, it doesn’t mean you are stuck here forever. Here are some things that can help you check your heart.
1. Focus on God
Identify God in the little things in life. If the weather is nice, thank Him for it. If you are enjoying your cup of coffee or tea, thank Him for it. If you see something beautiful, thank Him for it. When we see God evident in the things we see every day in life, we train ourselves to bring Him into every decision.
2. Focus on people
Put your phone away. Leave it on your desk. Set it on the counter when you get home. Choose to leave it in your purse or pocket. Don’t allow something to step in between you and the other human beings around you.
3. Remember that you can’t change hearts.
Often distraction stems from a misunderstanding that we can actually change the human heart. When you understand that God is who can harden or soften the heart, you begin to see early “solutions” as potential distractions.
Call it out. “While this may be good, it is not required for God to move”.
4. Be successful with what you already have.
Do you really need anything different to be successful? What if you budget was cut 10% next year. Would you have to shut your doors? Probably not. In fact, I believe that your ministry might actually get better. You have less money to spend on things that distract you from actually engaging in ministry.
5. Unplug
Fight against distractions.
- Leave your phone on the counter when you get home.
- Put it in your bag at work.
- Mute notifications.
- Don’t wear a smartwatch.
- Do whatever you need to to keep focusing on the things that are important.
- Protect time on your calendar.
- Work in a different location sometimes.
- Ask others to cover you while you hide.
6. Pray before you act
7. Remember the mission
At the end of the day, you can’t forget the mission of the organization that you were hired to serve. Your job is to help accomplish that mission. Remember it. Read it again. Go ask your boss why you are there. Talk to the one in charge of it all. Talk to people whose lives have changed in part because of your organization’s work. Remember why you are there and focus on it.
Scripture is clear about the importance of unity in the body of Christ, but our sinful nature drives us toward disunity. Like all of these heart issues, they aren’t always clear to us, so let’s look through some of the indicators that can help us see The Divisive Heart expressed through our work.
You care more about your roadmap than the mission
You major on the minors
You forget what is at stake
You become frustrated that people are getting in the way of your systems.
Have you ever been frustrated at a person because they are preventing your ideal system from working? Be careful. It might be leading you toward a divisive heart.
Does any of this sound familiar? Can you see any of this fruit in your life? In a way, I want to encourage you that it probably will at some point. And really, the good news is that these things can change.
If this is where you find yourself, it doesn’t mean you are stuck here forever. Here are some things that can help you check your heart.
1. Pray that God will soften your heart
2. Start praying for other people
3. Think before you speak
Proverbs 15:28
The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things.
Proverbs 15:18
A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but the slow to anger calms a dispute.
4. Remember your role
5. Work hard in the right places
Proverbs 18:19
A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city, and contentions are like the bars of a citadel.
Fight hard to maintain unity. Fight hard against a Divisive Heart. If division exists between you and others on the team, understand that it is hard to restore unity. But also understand that the work of that restoration is the most worthwhile work you can be doing. A clever new system won’t have more impact. An amazing new program won’t have more impact.
Fight hard to win your brother or sister back.
Signs of a critical heart:
You aren’t happy for someone else
You assume any decision leadership makes is a bad one
You are quick to become angry about everything
You spend your time tearing others down
Does any of this sound familiar? Can you see any of this fruit in your life? In a way, I want to encourage you that it probably will at some point. And really, the good news is that these things can change.
If this is where you find yourself, it doesn’t mean you are stuck here forever. Here are some things that can help you check your heart.
1. Pray that God will soften your heart
- You will not be able to change your heart without prayer.
- Ask God to reveal your critical heart to you.
2. Start praying for other people
- There were seasons where my heart was so critical that I couldn’t pray for someone else to be successful. So, I had to start praying that God would help me want to pray for someone to be successful. God is so gracious to lead us along in this way. Don’t take that for granted.
3. Don’t trust one side of the story.
Proverbs 18:17 The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him.
Essentially what this does is it forces you not to make a quick judgement. The critical heart lives in the moment. It doesn’t do very well over time.
Don’t trust what anyone says about anyone else. It doesn’t matter who it is. If the senior pastor of the organization comes to me and say something about someone else on the team, I don’t take it at face value. Go to the person in question and confirm it.
What this has done for me is almost completely remove the ability for me to have a critical heart. Why? Because I have ALL the information. Now I can make a fair judgment based on all the information, not a rash judgement based on my critical heart.
4. Slow down
- You don’t need to react immediately.
Proverbs 19:11 A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger, And it is his glory to overlook a transgression.
5. Heal the people around you
Proverbs 16:24 Pleasant words are a honeycomb, Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
What if the people around you are broken. Do you think that they are? Are they going through something? Is there something difficult happening in their job or family? Maybe a financial hardship?
When we make rash judgements about people born out of our critical heart, we lose the opportunity to understand what the people around us actually need.
Perhaps the most impactful recommendation I can give you is this: take all of the energy you spend making quick judgements about people, and use that energy on crafting pleasant words.
Something that I’ve started doing is targeting people that are in the midst of making big, scary, or risky changes. I’ll talk to them about what they are working on, and I will invest my energy into encouraging them. Into affirming how God has made them. On telling them that God is working in their lives. That they are valuable and appreciated.
And you can watch the sweetness of those words change their countenance, and give them a different perspective of the things they are doing.
Imagine if your whole office was that way. Or your whole church!
How about you start it.
If you left your job today, what would situation are you leaving behind? Have you made it better? Have you been a positive contributor, or an expectant consumer?
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ, [a]he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. 18 Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, 19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and [b]He has [c]committed to us the word of reconciliation.
20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
What are you doing to proactively cultivate reconciliation?
Is that happening in your private conversations?
What I want:
- my needs to be considered important
- Leadership to care more about my frustrations than the mission
- The team to focus on what is hard for me
- The energy of the organization to be spent making me feel comfortable and happy.
What scripture calls me to:
- reconcile a lost world to Christ
- Is it possible to reconcile a lost world if you aren’t living in the midst of brokenness? Is it possible to heal something if it isn’t broken?
- We are called to a mission that is far greater than our comfort.
I want to encourage you acknowledge that brokenness does in fact exist around you in your work. I also want to challenge you to leave a wake of redemption in your path. Care for the people around you. Look to serve rather than expecting to be served. Makes things beautiful.
Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets and examples.
What is a Responsibility Matrix?
- It defines who is responsible for various parts of a project.
- You may have heard of a RACI. That is perhaps the most well known of the responsibility matrixes. In my opinion, there is one that is better suited to the church space called PACSI.
- PASCI is helpful in organizations where one person’s work can be reviewed or vetoed by others who are outside the process. This is typically necessary in organizations that empathize collaboration. That is squarely where we sit, which is why I prefer PACSI.
- Perform: who is expected to carry the execution workload?
- Accountable: who is “on the hook” for the final product? Who do we talk to if things didn’t go the way we expected, or exceeded our expectations?
- Control: Who has the ability to speak in heavily and even veto the project? This person may not be directly involved in any of the development.
- Suggest: Whose opinion should be considered as counsel?
- Informed: Who should be informed of the result of the project?
What does a Responsibility Matrix do?
- The only thing a Responsibility Matrix does is clearly define who is responsible for each area of a project’s completion.
- I’ve found two things happen when project roles aren’t clearly defined.
- They are wildly inefficient.
- They create mistakes.
What does a Responsibility Matrix not do?
- A responsibility Matrix doesn’t mean these out of bounds conversations stop happening.
How did we begin to implement this?
- Anytime we had a major project to work on, a lot of things went wrong. Things would be pulled out at the last minute, but their impact wasn’t what it could have been.
- We were getting changes from dozens of people, and some of it was undoing what someone else had just asked us to change.
- We needed to simplify the process, so we started asking “who is the project point person”. In other words, we were saying “who is Accountable”. Once we defined that, we spoke to no one else. From there, the other letters of the acronym became more clear.
This can be applied to large projects like our example, small projects, job descriptions, and even major functions across the organization like “volunteers”, “giving”, or “the assimilation process”.
There are two reason I think you should begin implementing a Responsibility Matrix:
- You will be helping the organization get better. Every project you apply this to will experience less friction, and will encounter less inaccuracies. That could mean a lot of different things in your context, but less friction and more accuracy is a win no matter what you are doing.
- You will be gaining experience at managing projects well when you do move up.
The other great thing about a Responsibility Matrix is that you can implement it simply by behaving differently.
When I began doing this, I was worried that people would be frustrated. Quite the opposite. Everyone was thrilled at how much easier project went along.
Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets for each tool as each episode is released.
What is the Eisenhower Box?
- A simple structure that helps you understand the urgency and importance of each task on your list
- The basic analysis is broken into four categories
- Urgent and Important: Stuff you should get done right away
- Not urgent and Important: Great stuff to get done, but you have some time to accomplish it.
- Urgent and Not Important: This stuff is stressful–there is a lot of pressure with these projects, but they aren’t as important as others may make them out to be.
- Not Urgent and Not Important: These are just plain old time wasters.
What does the Eisenhower Box do?
- The Eisenhower Box helps you understand reality. When we have a lot on our plate, we begin to feel like everything is a crisis. The reality is that it isn’t. And that’s what this tool helps us see. It helps us course correct our emotional response to our workload.
What does the Eisenhower Box not do?
- The Eisenhower Box doesn’t actually do any of the work for us, sadly. It just helps us know what is important.
Let’s walk through the sample Eisenhower Box together
- Context
- High production life as a graphic designer in a church
- Projects coming in all the time - some last minute, some not. No constant turnaround times
- The world begins to blur at this point, and the weight of the design load can lead to burnout.
This tool works at every level of the organization. When I say to myself “I feel so busy right now”, that’s the trigger for me to pull this out. The same goes when someone says they are feeling overwhelmed. Great. Let’s assess reality together.
This week, we continue our Tools for Clarity series by looking at the PEST analysis. Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets for each tool as each episode is released.
What is a PEST Analysis
- a formalized way of thinking through different parts of your organization
- The basic analysis is broken into four categories
- Political: what are the political things happening in your city, region, state, or country that have the potential to impact how your organization functions or is viewed?
- Evangelicals and Trump
- Local politics
- Labor laws changing?
- Economical: what is happening economically that could impact the way your organization functions?
- Broaden this to include the impact economics have on your congregation
- Think back to the housing crisis: people losing their homes. That has a big impact on your people, and thus your organization.
- Social: what realities exist in the social space?
- What is the expectation of staff entering the work force?
- What are growing trend-sensitivities of the people in your region?
- Technological: what is happening in the space of technology that your organization should be attentive to?
- Are you speaking the native language of people, or are you speaking old language?
- Is technology changing the way people interact with organizations? Are you adapting?
- Political: what are the political things happening in your city, region, state, or country that have the potential to impact how your organization functions or is viewed?
What does the PEST do?
- The PEST Analysis helps you assess what things going on outside your organization have the potential to impact your organization. Often the PEST analysis will help feed the “opportunities” and “threats” portion of your SWOT Analysis.
What doe a PEST not to?
- A PEST Analysis doesn’t solve you problems, is simply identifies what is going on outside the organization so you can begin assessing how those things will impact the organization.
Let’s walk through the sample PEST
- Context
- Working through the consideration of an online expression of church
- We didn’t want to do this “just because”
- The PEST Analysis helped identify some of the reasons we should have the conversation, but also helped us identify some of the pitfalls we wanted to avoid.
Keep in mind, this tool was being used deep within the organization to identify something that we should propose to leadership. While leadership is served well by using a tool like this, it can be incredibly helpful by you in your department today.
This week, we begin our Tools for Clarity series. We are going to start our series off with the SWOT analysis. Some of the tools in this series might be difficult to visualize in your mind, so I’ve put together examples of each tool that you can use in your context on my website. Head to mcurtis.co/clarity to find worksheets for each tool as each episode is released.
What is a SWOT Analysis
- a formalized way of thinking through different parts of your organization
- The analysis is broken into four categories
- Strengths: what are you good at?
- Weaknesses: what are you not so good at?
- Opportunities: what are areas we can invest in that drive the mission
- Threats: what things can sabotage your accomplishment of the mission
What does the SWOT do?
- It clarifies and pinpoints specific issues that your team or organization need to be aware of.
What doe a SWOT not to?
- A SWOT doesn’t give you a plan of attack. It simply identifies what you should attack.
Let’s walk through the sample SWOT
- Context
- Just taken over a team with a really bad reputation
- People didn’t want to work with us
- The team was frustrated and bitter, and we needed to change our behavior.
- This example is based on that season.
Keep in mind, while I was over a team, I was nestled deep into the organization at this point. I wasn’t in charge. No one told me to do this. This is a tool you can use at any level of the organization to help add clarity.
This week, I to talk about the importance of clarity in you day to day. I believe that a lack of clarity is the most reliable way to fail.
Most of the time we are quick to blame leadership for a lack of clarity, but there are things we can do to cultivate clarity regardless of our place in the organization. Over the next few episodes, I’ll be going through different tools that I have found to be incredibly helpful for adding clarity within my area of influence, and they’ve even helped add clarity outside my ministry.
In this episode however, I want to unpack some of the specific reasons clarity is even important in the first place.
Why is clarity so important?
1. It tells you where to go
- Progress doesn’t happen on accident
2. It tells you where not to go
- Every destination isn’t the right one.
- Often our temptation is to do good things. In reality, though, we can’t do all the good things well. Focus on the few good things – usually connected to the mission of the organization – and say no to everything else.
3. It helps you identify wins
- What should we repeat?
- If we haven’t identified what a win is, we won’t know.
4. It helps you identify who needs to grow
- If clarity doesn’t exist in your organization, it won’t be clear how people on your team need to grow.
Ok, great. So clarity is important. But how do we get there when you don’t run the show? I’m glad you asked.
- Focus on adding clarity in your area first.
- Are you giving leadership status updates on your projects?
- If someone wants to work with your team, is it clear how they can do that?
- Are there areas within your team that aren’t clear? Make them clear!
2. Invite others into clarity
- When people participate in work with you, model what clarity looks like for them. Don’t expect them to be clear, or even to acknowledge the clarity that you are bringing. Instead, let your projects be more successful.
3. Protect the clarity you do have.
- Remember that this is a long term approach. You will not change the organization over night. That’s ok. You aren’t trying to change everything–you are trying to make your specific area better through clarity.
Now, I want to make it clear that while you can help improve the clarity that happens in your area, if clarity isn’t a cultural value, you might not be able to make significant change that sticks outside of your area. Usually when a culture doesn’t value clarity, it is because it values something else more.
- Sometimes it’s the “family nature” of the staff
- Sometimes personal preference is more important than clarity
- Sometimes there is an unwillingness to enforce a uniform approach to planning
Rarely, however, is it an active rejection of clarity. I like to think of it this way. Let’s say someone painted a wall blue. But you think the wall should be yellow. If you say to the painter “we need more yellow”, they’ll be a bit confused. Sure, yellow is nice, but we painted the wall blue. It was a matter of saying yes to blue more than it was a matter of saying no to yellow.
Clarity is often a casualty of another value.
But now what? How do I get there from here? That’s what the next several episodes are going to be about. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to feature a tool that you can implement in your job - regardless of your role. We’ll look at the purpose of each tool, how to apply it in your context, and what next steps it will help you take. Even if you are the only one in your organization to use these tools, they will help you bring clarity to your organization.
What an Organizational Hero is not.
- You stay late to complete a project every so often.
- You work a lot of hours over a short period of time because of an high-impact season
- Let’s say summer camp, Christmas, a major outreach promotion.
- You work really hard
- You feel like you can do a better job at something than someone else
- You take pride in your work
What an Organizational Hero is.
Essentially, the Organizational Hero is the extreme case of these tendencies.
- You stay late to complete a project regularly. You always feel like you have more work than you can get done.
- You always have a reason to work a lot of hours–regardless of the ministry season.
- You work really hard without taking breaks to rest
- You feel like you can do things better than others, but you take on more yourself rather than helping them do better work
- You find your identity in your work
How do people become Organizational Heroes?
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You love the organization.
-
Leadership affirms that you should invest more.
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You are proud.
How Organizational Heroes hurt the organization.
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They hide issues
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The drive a toxic staff culture
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They burn out and increase turnover
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They prevent others from developing
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They make it impossible for leadership to plan
What do I do about it?
1. Check your heart
- Address the root of pride in your life that is causing you to elevate yourself above your peers and look down on them. Instead, identify someone you work with that you can help make better.
2. Start measuring things
- It’s hard to tell if you are losing weight without weighing yourself
- It’s hard to tell if you are running faster if you aren’t timing yourself
- It’s hard to tell if you are lifting more if you aren’t keeping a log
- It’s hard to tell if you are under budget if you aren’t tracking your expenses
- How can you tell if you are taking on too much if you aren’t keeping track of what you are doing?
- Track your time over the course of a week. Look at where you time is going. Start learning how much time each of your tasks takes.
- For example, how long does your small group take? Most people will say “a couple of hours”. Is that true? Is it more like 2.5? Sometimes is it 3? The difference between an even taking 2 hours and 3 hours becomes really important when leadership asks you to add another responsibility to your plate.
3. Talk about it
- Have conversations with leadership unpacking what your workload looks like. If you just say you “feel busy”, you haven’t helped anyone. Explain what things take the most time, and see if there is something that can come off your plate.
- Leadership won’t react immediately because the conversations you have are the beginning of them studying the situation and seeing how they can best solve the problem, while also accomplishing goals for the organization.
- These are ongoing conversations that help you and leadership. Having them might feel embarrassing at first, or even like you are failing. But you aren’t failing. You are hanging up your cape so the organization can be made better.
Types of imbalance
Church of Chaos (not efficient)
- Things take longer, and its quite possible that staff is struggling to keep up with all of the things that need to get done. Not because there are too many things, but because each thing is taking too long.
- Everything is running inefficiently.
Church of Improvement
- Scale demands efficiency.
- And so, the process to make things efficient begins.
- Things like facilities, communications, productions, and even some high level ministry programs like small groups or weekends start finding a groove.
Obviously with all these improvements, we want more efficiency.
The Church of Efficiency
Then one day, you find yourself here.
- Efficient. Streamlined. High performance, but soulless.
- The joy just isn't there any more.
- What happened?
Efficiency happened.
The Balanced Church
- The role of efficiency in the church is to allow inefficiency to be used well.
- When inefficiency is removed all together, all the aspects of ministry that can't be streamlined suffer.
- The quest for efficiency is centered around the mission of the church.
- I believe that if you are regularly rushing through a counseling appointment or a shepherding opportunity for the sake of maximizing time, you are minimizing your impact.
How to identify a culture that has overvalued efficiency:
- Conversations are rushed.
- Relationships don't have the time to breath that they need to.
- We don't feel comfortable being still and listening to the spirit.
- Relationships are inefficient. Hospital visits take time.
- Ministry doesn't always go according to the script, and rarely can it be broken into the 30 minute calendar slots we allocate for it.
Two values I hold in high regard for our team.
- Take as much work off our ministry teams as we can so they can focus on the ministry they have been called to.
- Serve our ministry teams with joy.
What does that mean for our team?
- It means that we are willing to go out of our way if a helps free up our ministry teams, or if it supports them above and beyond their expectations.
- If it doesn’t move forward either of those values, we get it done efficiently.
We need balance
- Relationships are the context in which significant moments happen.
- Feedback, personal and professional improvement, encouragement, development, growth, change, and even Biblical correction.
- They all happen in relationship.
If you or your team are looking for ways to become more efficient as an organization, answer these two questions:
What is our primary ministry focus?
Where does my time get spent each week?When you see where your time goes, you will know what thinks you need to look at.
- Identify the areas where a lot of time is being spent, but wouldn't be identified as your primary ministry focus.
- The size of your team doesn’t matter. There is still value in becoming more efficient at non-missional tasks.
Bottom line:
Relationships are more valuable than completed work. Don’t just keep adding more work at the cost of relationship.
Seven Simple ways you can get better at your job.
- Show up on time
- When you show up on time, you begin to cultivate a reputation of being dependable
- If you are regularly late, people will filter what you say through their perception of you.
- This usually frustrates people. The good news, however, is that you can easily avoid this problem all together by showing up on time.
- Choose to grow in your discipline.
- Set alerts on your computer, phone, watch, shoes, whatever has notifications on it.
- Don’t book back to back meetings if you struggle with being on time. Leave padding between meetings.
- Communicate if you are going to be late.
- A proactive “sorry, I’m running late” lessens the frustration.
2. Be prepared
- Come to meetings having done work
- Stay focused on the agenda
- Understand the counter arguments and be prepared to address them
- Don’t make up answers. If you don’t know, say that you will find the answer and do it ASAP.
- Think about what those listening care about. What information do they need to know in order to make a good decision?
- Some care about budget. Some theology. Some data.
- Don’t judge what they want to know, provide answers.
3. Be a multilayered thinker
- Sweat the details when you are presenting
- Anticipate the next question, and have an answer for it
- Tie what is happening to the objective
- What are you trying to accomplish, and how does it help move the mission forward?
4. Put in more effort
- Try three things before asking for help
- Try to find the answer on your own
- Pay attention to what you tried before
- Projects seem to take way more or way less time than we think they should. Don’t lose your due diligence just because this project is taking longer.
5. Ask clarifying questions
- If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification
- There is nothing shameful about needing more clarification
- Projects I’ve been on that lack clarity usually lack success as well
6. Stop giving up
- Don’t stop with your assessment of a “no”
- Share what brought you to that conclusion, and let others speak into it
- The hurdles you see might not be as big as you think
- The project might be more important than you realize
7. Respect the time of others.
- Before you walk into a meeting or a conversation, have a clear plan of attack. Seek the information you need, and be ready to move on.
- Consider the time you are taking from others. Don’t demand more time than you need. Free them up to continue to pursue the ministry they have been called to.
Bottom line:
More often than not, the difference between success and failure is found in our willingness to work hard at the little things.
Six ways personal preference destroys your organization.
- Preference fuels division
- Someone wins, someone loses
- People become jealous when an idea you pitch gets approved
- People get disappointed when their ideas aren’t approved
- It becomes my idea vs. your idea - you vs. me
- we throw out ideas because of who they come from, not based on the caliber of the idea itself.
- People get labeled as “bad sources” and are functionally silenced
- Tribes begin to develop within the staff (and often beyond it).
- You need one of two things in order to make decisions: power or expertise.
- Leaders point to the org chart when advocating for their preference
- Experts design systems that only other experts can maintain in order to protect their preference
2. Preference feeds pride
- When someone’s preferences are allowed to move forward, it feeds a “build my empire” attitude.
- This doesn’t typically start as the main objective.
- We unintentionally create our own vision.
- I want our design to be off the charts creative
- That doesn’t actually work in our context
- I get frustrated that I can’t accomplish my vision.
- We unintentionally create our own vision.
3. Preferences alienates people
- Preference prevents us from considering anyone else’s opinion or perspective when “choosing a side”
- Approach to music
- Teaching style
- Approach to Discipleship
- Digital vs. print
- Approach to Evangelism
- Approach to community engagement
- What color our logo is
- What our welcome gift is
- How the website looks
- Without running these through the filter of your church’s mission, you will be less effective at reaching people in your congregation.
- I often see people want to get rid of printed programs without considering if printed programs are effective.
- Sometimes you do need to blaze a trail, but you need evidence to back it up. Don’t get caught up by the advice of other experts without assessing your context.
- I often see people want to get rid of printed programs without considering if printed programs are effective.
- Eventually, preference even pulls us away from God’s word. We no longer make our decisions surrounding what the church is called to in Scripture…we just keep chasing our preference. Our people are alienated as a result.
4. Preference wastes resources
- Preference is the fuel for mission drift
- Conversations are around “who is asking for this”, not “how does this help us move the mission forward”.
- Often a piece of someone’s preference is approved, but another part isn’t. This leads so incomplete or bad solutions.
- Over time, preference trains us to think wrongly. The organization loses the ability to think on mission, so the ideas become less and less effective at moving the right things forward.
- This is, in part, why organizations wake up one day and are in need of repair in dozens of areas.
5. Preference ignores facts
- Sometimes the truth is difficult. But that doesn’t mean we can just ignore it.
- If your congregation gives at a certain rate, you can’t just wish for it to be different.
- If kids aren’t coming to your VBS, you can’t assume the program can’t change.
- If people are leaving your church, you can’t assume it’s a “them problems”.
- The problem with presence, however, is that we often don’t want to make the changes that the data leads us to.
- Not every decision should be data driven in the church. But your defense against data should be scripture, not preference.
6. Preference usurps&
The approach to multi-site ministry has evolved over the years. In a lot of ways, there aren’t any clear methodologies that we can identify because each church tends to Frankenstein together their own approach based on their ministry goals. Often the primary direction of multisite isn’t clear to the staff because leadership allows the model to unfold. I’ve heard numerous stories of a particular model of multisite being pursued for years only to have everything changed–or in some cases, entirely undone.
Ultimately, time spent in the model reveals the implications the multisite model.
Three primary approaches to multisite
Franchise
- Least impact on central support staffing
- Least autonomy for ministry teams
- Few differences between campuses
- Evaluation stems from how well you implemented what you were told to implement
- Everything is led by the central team
Church Plant (or localized)
- Each campus can make their own decisions
- In some cases, leadership teams are developed on each campus (even independent boards)
- Each campus builds it’s own infrastructure and support teams
- In some cases, campuses eventually become independent
Hybrid
- Here is where things get crazy
- We want uniqueness, but we don’t want to hire more teams
- We want campuses to drive all decisions
- Central teams shift from contributors to responders
- Workloads increase, but depth of work decreases
- There is never a “final state”, as pressure tends to inform decisions more than strategy
- This is a very common model because it allows for some things to be franchise, but others to be unique and localized.
What changes with multisite?
Multisite requires more systems
- No single person owns anything anymore.
- No single students person, there are now multiple. This means a culture of partnership and collaboration are not optional.
Multisite requires more conversation
- I’ve heard it said that when your church grows significantly, the complexity grows exponentially.
- It becomes much more complex to minister to many more people
- In that line of thinking, I would say multisite makes reaching the same amount of people exponentially more complex.
- In the beginning, almost every decision requires a lot of people’s input
Multisite requires more humility
Moving something forward in the organization is rarely driven by a single person anymore
- Now, nearly every decision that is made impacts someone. Remember, you now have more than one of almost everyone. If you design a great baptism shirt for one campus, another campus might want to use it. Or, they might want their own shirt.
- This conversation happens regardless of your model. Just because you are franchise doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about being unique. Just because you aren’t franchise doesn’t mean people have stopped caring about being efficient.
- Now every decision requires a conversation. It could be “we need to be unified under our franchise approach”, or “is it ok to share this”, or “you need to be caring about making your campus unique”.
- Partnering to figure stuff out takes humility
Multisite requires more patience
When everyone comes around the table to try to make a decision, it reveals who is on mission, and who isn’t.
- It also reveals that the mission might not be as clear as we thought it was
- You can’t assume others are against the mission if they are advocating for something agains the mission. It probably just means the mission wasn’t as clear as you thought.
- This process make it feel like the organization has completely stalled. It hasn’t, you are just doing the hard work of bu
This week we are going to finish our conversation on branding. If you haven’t listened to part 1 of this conversation, hit pause and go listen to part one.
This week we will reference a case study on mcurtis.co that works through the transition from a house of brands to a branded house.
What does a strong church brand do?
- It delivers on the promise of growing people in their walk with Christ
- If you have an event, it moves people toward growth
- It helps clarify pathways for spiritual growth.
- It directs those with needs to biblical solutions
- It is an identifier of a specific gathering of the body of Christ
- It reveals the transformative power of a legitimate relationship with Christ to a doubting and lost world
- It is a testimony of the truth of God’s word, and of God’s promises through the body of Christ
- It reveals the transformative power of a legitimate relationship with Christ to a doubting and lost world
- It values the right things
- It can be a tool to articulate what is important
- Sometimes we lose sight of the larger mission because of our love for our own area of focus.
- Multisite usually focuses the conversation of house of brands vs branded house, but I think our values should.
Case Study
- Every ministry had a logo, and every ministry leader wanted their logo to be amazing. We were constantly rebranding ministries
- That isn’t a good branding practice, and it is an expensive use of time
- Multisite amplified the complexity. We were now tasked with overseeing, designing, revising, and maintaining hundreds of logos.
- We weren’t helping people find what they needed.
- Catchy names, witty abbreviations, and a completely internal language that visitors couldn’t engage.
- This is a house of brands - unique everything for everyone
- We moved to a branded house - one brand with minor, plain name customizations for each ministry.
Recommendations for a branding solution
You brand should establish a visual hierarchy based on importance
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Church first
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Campus second
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Ministry third
Everything your church does should function within this system.
- Affirms that a win for any team is a win every team.
- Affirms that a win for any campus is a win for every campus.
Your brand should have goals that move forward the mission:
Clarity: People who have never been to our church need to understand what we are saying without us explaining it.
Consistency: Consistent branding helps people understand what we are saying, and reinforces that we are one church with multiple ministry sites.
Scalability: This new branding philosophy can be implemented quickly which will allow us to move at the speed of ministry.
Flexibility: As each campus begins developing and investing in a local focus, this approach positions us to help support better.
Unity: As an organization, every ministry win is a win for our church.
Bottom line:
The strongest brand isn’t one that wins awards for looks, it’s one that points your congregation and your staff toward the mission.
- Schedule a meeting with someone just to see how they are doing.
- Take them to coffee, go to lunch, or just chat with them at work.
- Focus the conversation on them, not on you.
- Listen more than you talk.
By getting to know how others are doing, you force yourself to recognize that other people are going through things as well. Burnout is telling you that your life is worse than everyone else’s. It’s a lie. As you hear from others, you are warring against the lies burnout is telling you.
Church branding has become a more popular than ever. But what exactly is it?
What is a brand? Start by what it isn’t:
- it isn’t a logo
- It isn’t a product
- It isn’t your most successful ministry
- It isn’t the quality of your outreach
A brand is made up of those things, but at the end of the day, a brand is the entirety of someone’s perception of you from their perspective. This perception is what drives how someone decides to behave.
Sometimes this gets abstract, so let me share some stories.
We have a van that always breaks down. My perception of the brand is far more than the logo or the iconic look of the car. The brand has a negative connotation because of how it delivered on it’s promises.
We have a car that seems to keep going despite our lack of care for it. I have a positive view of the brand because I can’t seem to break it. This vehicle overdelivered on its promises.
I have used a certain brand of computer for a long time with great success. Lately though, it seems like the promises aren’t being delivered on as consistently. So my perception of the brand is changing.
- Not a bad single experience, and eroding wholistic experience. When you stop delivering on what you promise, people will leave over time.
Who contributes to a church brand?
Congregation - the way that those in your church family live their lives outside the wall of the church has heavy influence on the perception of the church. Interestingly, it also informs the perception of the capital C church. And even Christ.
This is is why pursuing Biblical instruction when it comes to the function of the ministry of the church is so important
Church Staff - You are being looked at more closely on all these things
Every decision you make says something about what you value.
Church Leadership - Your decisions are modeling the behavior that the Christian in your church thinks they should model. You need to be making decisions that are biblical, and that move your congregation to recognize that scripture is what defines their direction, not just to you. But they will look heavily to you and the decisions you make!
How do you define the brand?
- Defining what your church is known for isn’t really up to your preference–it’s up to scripture
- While we aren’t in complete control of the brand, we can encourage people toward something.
- Scripture tells us where to point them!
Throughout scripture we see things that point to behaviors the church should be known for. Some keys:
The church is about Christ, not the senior pastor, worship team, local outreach, social impact, look and feel, design, student programs, kids programs or facilities. It is about Christ. - 3 John
Making disciples, baptizing them - Matthew 28:16-20
Unity - Romans 14:19
Humility, peace filled - Romans 12:16
Restoration, Peace - 2 Corinthians 13:11
What you may notice in this is that any church’s brand will be defined by the believers that are a part of your body, not by things you control. And it should be. Your church should be pointing people to Christ.
Whenever I have conversations about branding, I can’t help but think of James 1:22 "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."
So then, what is the value of as strong church brand?
That’s what we will focus on next week. We are going to look at the role of brand in the church, and an example of how our branding (logo and brand strategy) can help contribute to what we learned about today.
Bottom line:
No logo, mission statement, tagline or ad campaign can overcome the impact of a congregation that is not living in line with the biblical mandates that have been placed on their lives.
We have to acknowledge this or we will become embittered
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Write down one thing you are thankful for at the end of each day.
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Keep adding to the list every day.
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Re-read your list as it builds.
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At the end of the week, thank God for the good things that have existed in your week.
By identifying that there are good things happening in your life, you are warring against the lies of burnout.
You can lead change regardless of the role you are in.
- Start within your proficiency
- If you aren't leading effectively within your own area of influence, you typically won't be invited to contribute to areas outside of your influence
- Identify who needs to know what, when
- Some people will be scared by change
- Some people will be hurt by change
- Some people will help support the change
- Connect the dots between what you want to accomplish with the mission of the church.
- Have a strong argument for the "why"
- Show your work
- Help lead people to understand how you came to your conclusion
- Take a no respectfully, and honor it.
- This feels like failing, but it leads to long term influence
- Play the long game, not the short game. A respectable loss today often leads to a major win later.
- Change is a marathon, not a sprint
Bottom line:
Change takes a long term, and has a cost. Be patient and kind.
Let go of burdens that aren't yours.
- Write down one thing you worry about that isn’t part of your job to solve.
- Write down the name of who it belongs to.
- Crumple it up.
- Pray for the person in charge of that problem.
- Go encourage the owner of the project.
What do you need:
- a relational baseline
- people who know you before you burned out
- people to walk with you through where you are
- a willingness to allow a perspective shift
- backup and gain some perspective
- our gut says “move closer to analyze this problem”. not helpful
- vacation in a dramatic way, visit a different church, learn something new, change the way you see.
- Change how you see - gain a new perspective
- clarify you values
- serve, or be served
- Is this role about you using your skills, or serving the church?
- get organized
- get help with prioritization
- get connected with scripture
- pray
- find things you are thankful for
- make a list of today’s thankful and write it down
- Every church will hurt you and heal you in different ways
- Do you believe that God can restore your situation?
- What small step can you make to show that you believe this?
- Can you let a project go? Can you identify a frustration to let go of? Can you identify what burdens you have not been hired to carry?
- Daily Quests
- Consider your company (people)
- Consider your company (job)
- Have you done everything you can to fix it?
- You need grace. So do others
- Focus on your focus (put down burdens that don’t belong to you)
- Manage reality
- Is it time to leave?
- If your values aren’t the organizations, it won’t work
Bottom line:
You can do this!
**Three reasons I think the church is so prone to burnout.
- We carry burdens for problems that don’t belong to us.**
2. The mission of the church has nothing to do with what we are good at.
3. Our gifts aren’t needed in the body we are serving.
Symptoms of Burnout:
- you lose your ability to be self aware
- You say things like “I’m not capable of anything, let alone this job”.
- you try to lead people into what you feel, not what you think.
- You share stories that provoke others to feel frustrated. You struggle to think rationally.
- you try to let everyone else know how hopeless things are
- Your conversations are focused on finding all the problems, and dismissing the solutions.
- you try to get someone to help you
- You’ll talk to anyone that will listen, but you don’t know how to ask for help.
- you can’t hear help when others try to offer it
- Even when you receive advice that could be helpful, you aren’t able to see it as such.
- You can’t pace yourself.
- You are trying to solve every problem and finish every problem concurrently. You can’t allow some things to be finished later.
- You wonder why no one else is helping you.
- You feel like you’ve walked into a sandstorm. All your self awareness is gone. You can’t hear or see as well as you used to. God is quiet. Does anyone care?
Two tests that can help you identify if you are burning out:
Fire Drill Test: - Are things as bad as you feel?
Write down a specific problem you are dealing with, then rate your response to these questions 1-10. 1 is lowest importance, 10 is highest importance.
- How important do you think it is that this problem is solved?
- How important do you feel it is that this problem is solved?
- How important do others say it is that this problem is solved?
- How important is it to your job that this problem is solved?
Compare you answers.
- Are they far apart?
- Do you know why they are far apart?
If you keep coming up with large gaps between what you think, feel, and hear, it probably means you aren’t recognizing reality accurately.
Reality Check Test: - Are you wasting your time?
Recalibrate regularly on the tasks you have. We often try to accomplish all the change needed in a single project. That isn’t possible. Here are questions to ask yourself when you find yourself frustrated with a project.
- What have I been asked to accomplish?
- Why is this helpful to the client?
- What goals do I see that aren’t being met?
- Is this project an appropriate vehicle to accomplish those goals?
- What can I do outside of this project to help further those goals?
How big is the gap between what you are gifted to do and what you are being asked to do?
- Can you leverage your gifts in any way in your current role?
- If you can, why isn’t that good enough? Write it down. Define it.
Two years ago from the release of this podcast, I quit my job. I was burning out.
That's typically how the burnout story goes. I'm burning out, so it's time to leave. We leave, find a new perspective in a new environment, learn from our struggles, and hopefully get better. That's not how my story goes.
I left, then came back.
Because of this, I was able to identify how I was unknowingly contributing to my own burnout. Coming back let me change those things. This episode is my unique story of burnout. I'm sharing my story so you can learn what helped me come back and last.
You can make simple changes in your perspective and attitude today that will help you bounce back. I hope this helps!
Avoid Mission Neutral events.
Here are the questions I ask when I’m developing something new.
1. What problem are we trying to address?
Establish a goal for your initiative.
- It isn’t a good idea to head out on a road trip without knowing where you hope to end up
- Without knowing what you hope to accomplish with the projects or events you plan, every other part of the planning process breaks
- Mission-neutral events waste a tremendous amount of resources
- Examples of goals
- Is there a need for Biblical literacy amongst those you shepherd?
- Does your congregation need to grow in their compassion for the community?
- Does your congregation need to be more generous with their skills?
- Each of these is a unique problem that needs to be addressed uniquely.
2. Do we need to invent, innovate, or adopt?
- Seeing another organizations final product can help us learn what we want to avoid
- Seeing another organizations final product can help you identify what needs to change in order to fit your context, your goal, and your mission
3. What do we need to track to know if we’ve hit the mark?
- Define what success looks like
- Some churches are content with online attendance, others value in person attendance
- What you track depends on the landmarks
- A win for one is a loss for another!
4. How do we implement based on our resources?
- There are a lot of great things out there that you can’t afford
- Sometimes we want things nicer than what works for our people
- Design what you implement for your specific context
5. How did we do?
- From here, we evaluate.
- Skipping an informed evaluation is a big loss for the church
- Repeatable success in our ministry
- Reputable success in other ministries on the team
- Best practices to share with other churches
Bottom line:
Asking yourself these questions before your next major project will help you align what you do with the mission of your church.
Why: A high level understanding of God’s word is critical to the Christ follower.
- It is important for us to know God’s word deeply
- It is also important for us to know God’s word broadly
- It Builds confidence in those who are inexperienced reading their Bible
How: Here is how we’ve done it to great success
Brand the year (this means plan ahead! We had everything finished by Early November)
- Brand subseries
- Creates a rhythm
- Creates entry points for new people
- Creates onramps for people who have stopped
Preach what you are reading
- Every plan I’ve seen fail was disconnected from weekend messages
- Identify challenging topics and ideas
- Interject midweek content to unpack additional challenges
Give people tools
- We printed Journals
- We printed reading plans for the year
- We printed reading plans for each series
- Constant reminders and encouragement
Keys to success
- All in - Everyone participates in the reading (small groups, weekends, midweek, (bonus points for kids and students)
- Tackle hard subjects when the arise
- Builds confidence for those reading for the first time - they have a guide!
- Gracious accountability - encourage getting back on board, don’t chastise getting off track
Bottom line:
When you communicate on purpose, it can lead to significant spiritual growth for those in your congregation.
We aren’t in charge of the mission
- That is the burden of leadership. That is directed by scripture.
- If you can’t accept that, you either need to do the work to be in leadership, or move on to a place where you are on board with the mission.
You are stalling the mission if you are:
- Spending your time defending your trade over the mission
- Verbalizing disagreement with the mission
- Arguing against on mission decisions that require more work or aren’t exciting
You are supporting the mission if you are:
- Spending your time figuring out how your trade can support the mission
- Asking questions about clarifying the mission
- Defending the mission even when it means more work for you or unexciting projects
You can the power to spread the mission by:
- Helping others make these pivots
Bottom line:
Each of us has been hired to move the mission of the church forward, not turn the church into a playground for our industries.
In this episode, I want to talk about the dissonance that happens between what we ask our people to do, and what we do our selves.
Topics:
- We tell people they need to get out of debt while we encumber debt
- We encourage families to budget strategically while we spend flippantly
- We tell parents we want to partner with them while communicating with their kids using social media services their parent's don't support
- We say “God will provide” while we panic because we don’t have enough volunteers
- We tell our people to be available for the people in their life while we are unavailable because of busy schedules
- We tell people to be willing to do anything to spread the gospel while we aren’t willing to entertain any new ideas
Bottom line:Every decision we make in these situations affirms or denies your church’s mission. Before you make a decision, ask yourself what it does to your organization’s mission.
For some, project management tools seem a bit overwhelming and limiting. In this episode we will talk through the value project management can play in your personal growth, and why the data you collect has the power to shape change in the organization.
Tips for using a project management solution effectively:
- Enter everything
- Define what a deadline is
- We use "in hands date" as the date we need something for promotion
- Log all conversations and updates
- This helps you identify where a project broke down
- Involve others
- This allows your boss to see where he can help projects get unstuck
Some concerns people have about project management
- Too complicated
- Too detailed
- I don’t think like that
The benefits of project management
- Helps others know how much is on your plate
- Lets you identify specific problems that need attention
- Lets you make a case for change
- Helps you hit deadlines
- Allows someone else to pick up where you left off
Project management helps you assess your growth
- Measure your accomplishments
Project management helps move the mission forward
- Leadership shouldn't make decisions based on how one employee feels
- Your boss doesn’t always know the nuances of your job
- Your boss doesn't always know how much is on your plate
- Your boss doesn't always know why specific projects stall
- Rarely are the problems you are encountering unique to you or this project
- Having data leads to change
Bottom line:
With effective project management, you are building a foundation of good data that needs to exist in order to make good decisions.
If you work at a church (or other organization) that has a clear mission, it can be difficult to lead change in your area of influence. I encountered this early in my ministry career as a graphic designer. I tried to influence change with arguments focused on trends and typography. Needless to say, I wasn't having much success.
Over the years, I've been able to make two key pivots in the way that I initiate change, and they have made a huge difference in my ability to move the mission of the church forward.
This podcast exists to be a weekly reminder of what these changes look like applied in real life situations. We will approach this idea of moving our mission forward from a four different perspectives:
Case studies: I've seen a lot work, and a lot not work over the years. I'd love to share what I've learned so you don't have to learn the hard way.
Tools: I've run into a lot of problems that I think I know how to solve, but I don't have the right tool at hand. I'd love to hand you some tools.
Philosophy: Thinking properly about tools is critical to your ability to move the mission of your organization forward. I'd love to frame your approach to the implementation of new tools.
Conversations: Outside perspectives are extremely helpful in showing us another point of view. I'd love to introduce you to some of the people I respect most in ministry.