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The purpose of an Executive Pastor

This is probably the clearest I’ve got it so far, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while. The purpose of an Executive Pastor is to:

  1. Help the Team Leader ‘lead’.
  2. Support the Team as it ‘teams’.
  3. Keep gospel work absolutely central.

If an Executive Pastor plays a special role for the church, it is primarily helping the Senior Pastor as they “lead”. And right there you have to stop, because every SP is different with different skills, strengths, weaknesses and tendencies. As such, a good EP will “shadow” their SP and try to take on whatever takes up most of their SP’s energy. Thus no two EPs will be the same. (That said, some common EP responsibilities are; facilities oversight and management, strategic planning, resource management, financial management, policies, insurance, legal, IT, communications, calendar oversight, vendor relations, fundraising, etc.)

But the SP is not the only thing they help manage. The EP plays an important role in keeping the SP’s team to keep on being a team, to keep being on track. Again, since each SP and each Team is different, this will look like various things. One common aspect is to see what’s sapping the team’s energy most and trying to put things in place to offset that. (E.g. If all your team is exhausting themselves with IT issues, don’t wait for them all to fix it themselves, get someone to come in and help everyone. If they’re all struggling to keep organised, develop a system that will help them not hinder them.)

However, the last aspect of an EP’s role is the most important. It’s keeping the gospel work as the priority while they do the things around it. I’ve heard stories of Church Managers who have crippled their church staff with red-tape, policies and procedures to such an extent that the staff do less people work… they all become servants of the EP. But that’s the wrong way around. The EP is always a servant of the gospel and a slave of the team.

A great picture of this is Stephen in Acts 6. The Apostles can’t keep up with the logistic activity of food distribution, so to keep focused on gospel work and prayer they appoint people like Stephen… who then goes and preaches, gets arrested and martyred. Now that’s a good EP!

Aside: When is it an Executive Pastor, General Manager, Administrative Leader, etc?
We’ve made the decision that a large part of my responsibilities is to prayerfully pastor people and speak into pastoral situations in an executive (high-level) manner. I’d suggest that if an Exec Pastor is not preaching or playing a key role in high-level pastoral decisions, they might be better titled “General Manager” or “Executive Director”.

Joke around, but don’t veil complaints in humour

One of our Staff Team Values is that we love joking around. We love laughing, jokes, sarcasm and generally hanging out together. That hasn’t happened by chance… it’s something we’ve worked hard to protect.

But there’s a type of joking we don’t tolerate. Its the type of joking where you use humour to veil a serious frustration or complaint about someone else. It’s the type of humour where the butt of the joke is left feeling unsure whether people think something terrible about them. Using humour to thinly veil your issues or frustrations towards someone is cowardice.

The flip side of this deeply entrenched value is that when someone does make a joke about you, you can be sure they are never trying to hurt you… they’re really trying to love you.

Be careful giving feedback to people who don’t report to you

At one level, I think we all need to get better at giving specific, regular, behaviour based, feedback. But, we need to be careful that on doing so, we don’t undermine our peers, by encouraging their people to do things that they’re not meant to do.
So, instead, it might look something like… “Hey, I really appreciated when you [describe the ACTION you observed]. Is that what Ben (your manager) wanted you to do?”
They might say, “Yeah!” So you can say, “Great,”
They might say, “Actually, no… I think he wanted something different.” So you can say, “Well, it would be worth going back to Ben and making sure you understand WHY he wanted something different.”
They might say, “Actually, I don’t know.” So you can say, “Well, there were certainly some positives there, but it would be worth getting some specific feedback from Ben, heh?”
So, there… Feedback and keeping your team members first.

How many staff should you have per person?

Israel had about 1 Levite per 11 other Israelites. But that’s not particularly helpful.
This is a difficult question to answer because really… Who knows!?! The best you can do is have what you think is an appropriate ratio. But that then raises the question… Not only do you need to define whether “staff” means pastoral or also includes admin staff, but even trickier… What defines a “person” that your doing the ratio to?
See, imagine a church that has 1 paid staff. They might have 50 adults on average each Sunday. That’s 1:50 ratio. But there’s also 20 kids… So that’s a ratio of 1:70. And then there’s 20 or so people who come along irregularly. So that’s 1:90.
Sounds like good value, right? Wrong. A church’s goal shouldn’t be to get good value out of their staff – as if they are a 1900s factory worker you need to squeeze the most productivity from. You don’t want lazy staff, but that attitude is part of the reason why pastors burn out. Their church expects them to take responsibility for 90 people, and then reach the 10,000 other people in their suburb! That’s a ratio of 1:10090.
Rather than, “How many people can we spread our staff across?”, the better question should be, “How many staff can we get for all the lost people in our city?!”

How we arrived at the Purposes Model

After recently attending the very encouraging Nexus Conference I thought it’d be helpful to outline how we arrived at the Purposes Model.

  1. Back in 2008, we had 3 congregations and 1 more about to kick off. We had a Senior Pastor (Greg Lee) and we had a Staff member for each of the 4 congregations – I was the UniChurch pastor. We also had a Women’s Pastor and a part time kids pastor.
  2. We started to notice two areas of difference  between our congregations. First, there wasn’t an equal dispersion of pastors to flock.
    Unichurch had one staff to 150 people, PM had 1 staff to 60 people, AM had 1 staff to 80 people, the new congregation was going to have 1 staff to 30 people. Greg and Kelly (our women’s pastor) already had to spread themselves across all these people anyway.
  3. Second, we realised each of our congregations were doing well in some areas and poorly in others.
    1. So Unichurch had a pretty good meeting, but it didn’t welcome very well, nor did it have enough groups and there was no leadership development, nor a real heart for evangelism.
    2. AM was welcoming, but the meeting was awkward and there was no evangelism and groups were haphazzard.
    3. PM was really getting into evangelism, but it’s meeting was awkward, groups were struggling and welcoming was hit and miss.
    4. The new congregation were all in groups that were working well, but the meeting/mission/etc. were going to struggle.
  4. That’s when we heard about the Purpose model (from Andrew Heard at EV Church). We realised that the aspects of church that were going well vs going poorly were simply because our staff had particular “bents” towards helping people grow in those purposes.
    1. Richard (new cong.)  had a natural bent towards helping people just get the bible, and lead a group and grow in knowledge and obedience.
    2. Sam (PM) had a natural bent towards helping Christians WANT to be evangelists.
    3. Dave (AM) had a natural bent towards getting beside people, helping them into church and investing in one another as members of a body.
    4. I had a natural bent towards challenging people about their deepest love and purpose in life.
  5. So, rather than having congregations that just reflect their Pastor’s strengths and weaknesses, we decided (after a long period of prayerful thinking and reflecting on God’s word) to free up our staff to do for everyone what they were only doing for one congregation. This also meant that we each stopped being responsible for aspects of our congregations that we weren’t particularly gifted in doing.
    1. Richard took on Maturity (encouraging people into small groups, raising up leaders and helping those groups build one another up in love from God’s word).
    2. Sam took on Mission (encouraging people to see themselves as missionaries to Newcastle, facilitating events where people can be confident the gospel will be presented and where they gain confidence in their own evangelism)
    3. Dave took on Membership (helping people to join well and participate in church life of loving one another and church).
    4. I took on Magnification (helping people live their whole lives in awe of the gospel 24/7, especially through running Sunday meetings that tried to impact their whole week).
    5. (Kelly moved to under Richard in Maturity – just focusing on raising and equipping and helping Growth Groups).
    6. (Richard also wore the Ministry hat – helping people get equipped and find their way into serving with church).
  6. After 2 years, we found a guy at Church (Pete Witt) who was already helping me do Magnification 1 day a week. We put him on 4 days a week to replace me, and I started looking after Ministry (as Richard had too much to do in Maturity). We also re-titled my role to Executive Pastor, simply because I was finding myself taking on a whole heap of pastoral responsibilities that were the foundation of the Ms structure; facilities, database, planning, association, legal. (I’ll write a later post on why this is Executive Pastor stuff and not General Manager stuff).

We’ve made heaps of mistakes along the way, and spent 6 years refining what we’re doing… with loads of really healthy arguments along the way. If there’s one huge positive that came out of going to Team Pastoring around the Ms it is that our team is really tight and loves one another in the midst of the fight.

And God’s been amazingly gracious and allowed us to grow in size and grow people’s faith.

Before you go to a “Purpose model” of church (like the Ms)… resign!

If there’s one aspect of the Purpose model of church structure that you really need to get, it’s that you need to resign as a single Congregation Pastor before you do it.

I don’t mean resign in the sense that you hand in your notice. Rather I mean in your heart you have to stop thinking of yourselves as only responsible for “that” congregation at St Something Church. To move to something like the Ms model of a church staff team, you need to start seeing yourself as the pastor of the whole church. Everyone. No matter what congregation they go to. Even if you’ve been the 8am silver-haired pastor for 20 years… if you’re going to take on the Membership M, you have to choose which role is going to come first. Either you’re going to be the 8am pastor who happens to try and get people to welcome well so people join well, or, you’re going to pastor every single soul at all 4 congregations towards being welcoming and loving to their brothers and sisters in Christ and help them invite people to join whatever congregation well.

This shouldn’t put us off… it’s exactly what the senior pastor has to deal with as any church grows and as there are several congregations… He has to see himself as the pastor of all those people, not of those congregations.

To put it another way, the Ms structure of church stops staff teams from thinking so structurally about ministry.

The wonderful idea of using an “umbrella of mercy” when talking

I can’t remember where we got this idea but it’s brilliant… our staff team has this phrase “umbrella of mercy”. It’s what we say before we say something that could be taken the wrong way, or something that might be offensive or touchy for other people in the conversation.

When one of us says, “umbrella of mercy”, we’re asking the other people to prepare their hearts and minds to hear something graciously… mercifully… ready to assume the best… ready to ask clarifying questions rather than make accusations.

It’s a little bit like saying “with all due respect”, instead it’s not a declaration like that. Rather it’s a request… “Please hear this as best as you can, because I’m not trying to hurt your feelings or attack your baby.”

I seem to use it a lot.

Church “Org charts” are hard

Recently we thought it would be a good idea to try and visually communicate our church staff “map”. It was an attempt to try and describe how we’ve deployed staff across our 5 passions for our flock, and across our 3 Sunday meetings/congregations. Check it out here.

There’s still so much that isn’t described well in this org chart… lines of responsibility are kinda’ there (vertically), congregations are kinda’ there (via colour tags), many staff responsibilities are not represented (I’m waiting for staff to come and ask why their things isn’t on there! Sorry!), Staff type and time is kinda’ on there (but there’s so little difference between a senior staff and part-time staff – just looking at them).

Any other church org charts out there?

Reblog: Staff should fight and trust

A staff team is made up of different perspectives, strengths and weaknesses. A good team member will be aware of their own weaknesses, and the other’s strengths. And this will lead to good fighting based on strong trust.

I will want to hear my staff team’s opinions on things I’m doing because I know my weaknesses, and I trust they are not out for their own glory, for their own portfolio or to make me look bad. I don’t have I agree with them, and I might still argue my case. But that’s exactly what should happen.

Disagreement does not mean devaluing

It’s really important that we separate disagreeing from devaluing.  Being disagreed with does not mean that we’re being devalued. 
Just because my boss doesn’t agree with me, that doesn’t mean he devalues me. Just because a husband decides against his wife’s advice that doesn’t mean he devalues her. In fact, the Father doesn’t even devalue the divine Son when, after the Son says “take this cup from me”, the father implicitly says “no”. 
The issue is that disagreement is something we can see, but devaluing is something we can’t see because it happens inside people’s hearts. We can’t see whether other people are devaluing us or not. Therefore, we should never accuse someone of devaluing us, because there’s no way of proving it. You can ask them, but that’s all you can do. 
If they say, “No way!! I totally value you. I just don’t agree with you on this point” then you have to take their word for it. That also means we should attempt to stop feeling devalued because that feeling isn’t based on anything real, we’ve just been disagreed with.

Why you should have purposes #6 : It’s not unbiblical! In fact…

Eph 4 was the kicker for me. Here’s how it goes:

  1. Jesus gives certain people to the church; [“Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastor-teachers”] (Leaders)
  2. These people are meant to “equip Jesus’ people for works of service” (Training, Mentoring, Encouraging)
  3. So, Jesus gives leaders who train church members so that “the body of Christ may be built up”.

That all seems ok, until you consider 2 things.

First, what does he mean that an “Evangelist” should equip Jesus’ people for works of service? Shouldn’t an Evangelist be out, you know, evangelising? Well, it’s not that they can’t do that, it’s just that Eph 4 says if they are one of Jesus’ gifts to his church, their primary role is to equip others so they can serve (presumably then more people can be better evangelists).

Second, this doesn’t read like an exhaustive list of roles, does it? In fact, it starts very similar to 1Corinthians 12:28. And there are other similarities between Eph4 and 1Cor12. E.g. Jesus gives people certain strengths, Gifts are to be used for the common good of Jesus’ people.

So, your staff all have certain gifts that Jesus has given them, right? Your staff and leaders aren’t all carbon copies! Jesus has given them to your church with certain skills and abilities. Eph4 says that, as leaders, they are primarily there to use those gifts for the common good of the church.

So, how are your staff/leaders built by Jesus? How are they being freed up to equip the saints in their particular gifts?

Why you should staff “purposes” #1: Because you have a team of leaders

If you have a team of staff you should assign them purposes not congregations. In other words; staff “team” = Purpose based model is usually best.
The reason for this is kinda simplistic, but it seems it needs to be spelt out. The fact is, if you already have a team of staff working in one or more congregations, they are already specialising in different areas of ministry. And they are already doing poorly in other areas of ministry. That’s ok because Jesus gave them gifts to serve the body in their own special way. They are, by the grace of God, particularly suited to helping the church be and do particular things.
Secondly, either you are a team working together, or you are a mother’s club getting together to talk about your respective children. Some church staff talk like they are part of a team, when they’re not; they just get together to talk about their respective congregations and then go their merry way.
You have to choose first and foremost; are you going to be a church staff team, or a gathering of church staff?
If you’re going to be a team, then leverage that to the best of your ability for the glory of God. Use one another’s strengths, give some people responsibly for some things and others responsibility for other things.

Externally solid, internally flexible

Great teams think highly of each other, trust each other, and are reluctant to jump on the bagging-out band-wagon when its aimed at their team mates. For example, even though I wasn’t the most liked guy on my rugby team (’cause I didn’t drink, do crack and sleep around), if I was ever threatened my team mates would come to my defence in a second (usually more overaggressive than required).

But, great teams don’t just put on a united front to the world. They also enter into real and deep conflict on the inside. Once the doors are closed and its just you and me, great teams take each other to task, they challenge, dispute, argue and fight for what they think is best.

And the key is keeping the right attitude in the right context.

If you start arguing with your rugby captain while he’s running with the ball towards the opposition, you’re an idiot. You put your issue aside and you be there for him no matter what. When you’re back in the locker room, and the other teams out of earshot, that’s when you have it out. And after you’ve had it out, you leave it there, in the locker room. You don’t bring it out again.

Then, if I know that you’re not going to attack me in public, well, then I’m all the more likely to trust you when you come to me with an issue in private.

My old IT boss use to say it like this… “X is X. If your partner tells the client X, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with X or not. X is X. You run with it, and change it later. Don’t undermine each other in front of the client. X is X.”

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Beware divorcing rules from their reasons

Sometimes, setting rules is really helpful. Call them guidelines or self-imposed limits if you don’t like the idea of rules. But the fact is we do it all the time anyway. For example, we have a staff rule that male staff members or not to be in a house alone with a member of the opposite sex (apart from their spouse, etc).

But if you only ever discuss the rule and never discuss the reason behind it, two things are likely to happen.

1) Your rule will become a boasting point. It will become a rule in the bad anti-gospel sense. It will become something you are tempted to boast in before God and say, “Look! I never did that thing (that I self-imposed on myself!)”

2) It will become a tradition rather than a culture. That is, people will break the spirit of the law, and think nothing of it (e.g. going for a half-day walk in the bush with no-one else around – really isn’t much different to being alone in a house together).

So, have rules (because they help people understand the reasons and they do stop stupid decisions), but always talk about the reasons that make up the rule.

Solve or manage? What type of tension are you dealing with?

There’s only two things you can do when you face a tension; a situation when you are faced with two good things and you can’t easily do both they way you’d like to.

You can either solve the tension or manage the tension.

Solving the tension means coming up with a simple solution. It usually ends with all parties agreeing they they will loose something they think is important. It often looks like a “policy” eg; “we will give twice as much to mission as we do to maturity, financially, time, effort, prayer, etc”. It attempts to have the conversation once, get it all clear for everyone involved, and free people up to get it done, so they don’t waste time having to keep hashing it out to see who gets what, and never getting anything done.

A tension to manage, however, is the opposite. It’s about not having a policy and keeping the two principles always on the table. It means that no one is ever satisfied. It’s choose to live with dissatisfaction on both sides. It’s choosing to always want both sides of the tension to be perfect. It’s a decision to have conversation after conversations and verge on arguments again and again. Yes, you will need to make a decision and it will fall on one side it the other, but that’s just that time, next time it might fall the other way.

I reckon almost all the Christian life is a tension to manage. Now but not yet, sinners and saints, mission and maturity, work and rest, duty and awe, respect of outsiders and being a fool for Christ.

I wonder what that says about God?

Turn feelings into numbers

Not every time, but sometimes, its really helpful to ask people to translate their feelings into numbers… just a simple scale of 1-10.

It’s great because it avoids too-positive and too-negative assumptions. When someone says, “Yeah, I’m ok” what do they really mean? Can you trust your gut to read their facial expressions and non-verbal cues? The fact is, I’ve been married for 14 years, and I still have trouble working out how “ok” Julie is when she says she’s “ok”. So how do you expect to know your staff, your members.

So ask them to put it on a scale… “1-10 How are you dealing with this? 1 being a complete mental breakdown, 10 being like you don’t even think about it?”

If their “ok” turns out to be a 3, you’re going to deal with them and help them very differently to if they’re a 7.

And the good thing is, there are loads of categories; how tired are you feeling? What’s your energy levels? etc..

Influence requires association

If you want to change someone’s mind or a culture, you can’t do it from the outside. The less associated you are, the less influence you can ever have. Its unbelievable how people think that simply by complaining from the outside, they will ever see any change on the inside.

But the reverse is also true. The more associated you are will someone or a group, the more influential you can be. The person who sidles up beside their leader (or the leader who invests time in their people), by supporting them, encouraging them, etc… they have a position of influence.

Before you complain that no one ever listens to you, ask yourself if you would listen to someone who’s acting like you.

Jesus’ database

“but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” Rev 21:27

The universal church is a list. Your local church is a list. Its a list of names, people, souls, individuals.

That list is very, very important. Its a human attempt (that we know won’t do justice) to replicate Jesus’ list – the lamb’s book of life.

But the list’s importance is derived from the importance of the people on the list – not the other way around. The list is important because it holds names of people whom Jesus thinks is important.

Applications:

1. Have a list. Whether you’re a church-planter or staff-team. Whether your a group leader or just taking it on yourself to pray for a few people. Write it down, make a list, because each name is important to Jesus.

2. When do you look through your list? Having a list is pointless if you don’t look through it. Get your team to look through it. Get your co-leader to look through it with you. Pray through it. Act through it.