Leadership

We all hit speed bumps in the path of life or business or ministry.  An occasional bump is OK; when they come at you in rapid succession, it's easy to get discouraged. One way to remain positive when you find yourself in a season of testing or trial is this: change your focus.  It's too easy to focus on the speed bump and forget that there's an entire road ahead.  In fact, there's more than just the road ... there's landscape and scenery and other stuff to look at, too.

When I first started in ministry, one of the most beneficial things I did was to find a group of like-minded pastors to hang out with.  These guys became my sounding board and offered a unique form of group therapy.  It's a practice I've continued ever since. When we started our new church in San Diego in 2005, I found a group of church planters who were in various stages of starting their churches.  We were an interesting bunch: Assembly of God, Southern Baptist, Acts 29, and me.  What we found was this: we had more in common than we thought.  Our first children's tent was a gift from the Assemblies of God guy.  We shared leads, ideas, and marketing designs.  It was a ministry incubator. Too many guys in ministry don't take the time to network outside of their own church.  And it's a shame.  They lose the perspective…

"The most important first step for leaders in growing others is to place them in the soil of belief." -- Kevin Eikenberry, author and consultant, writing at KevinEikenberry.com

"Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee, and human behavior is much more challenging to change than any muffin recipe or marketing strategy." -- Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, as quoted in BNET

For any church to remain healthy, grow, and expand, the leadership must be about duplication -- the art of equipping others to do the work of ministry as God has gifted them.  The temptation most ministers face is to be doers, not duplicators. It might stem from insecurity ("What if they do it better?") or pride ("I'm the only one who can do it right").  Either way, being a doer stunts the church by capping the growth at the ceiling of our individual abilities. Are you a duplicator or doer?