How To Lead Critics

Get up before they get up.  If you are lazy and don’t get started on things until the last minute, your critics will have already accomplished an alternative less effective way of doing things.

Do your homework – Study the situation.  Don’t take other peoples word for it.  Research the problem and with God’s help, find the best solution.  

You run the meetings – Never let anyone but you or someone you desire, to run a meeting.  If they take the platform, shut them down.  Don’t let them take over the meeting.  Never walk into a meeting without knowing the direction and result that the meeting will bring.

Know the trouble makers past – Find out what makes that person tick.  Why are they the way they are?  Knowing more about them will enable you to understand why they feel the way they feel about things and enable you to change them.

Share your vision with others before your critic gets the opportunity to share theirs.  These are busy little people and they work hard at spreading their opinions.  Work harder!  Have coffee meetings where you tell others your dreams and vision.  Go to congregants homes unexpectedly (As your critics do.) and open your heart to them.

Be confident.  No one wants a sissy for a Pastor. (Sorry if that sounds demeaning, but I’ve seen some.)  Don’t be bullied.  Be strong.  Know your calling.  Walk tall.  Square your shoulders.  Lead!  People will follow.   You may lose some critics along the way, (Let them go!) but you will gain a congregation who will follow you into revival.

Transitioning Through Transition

I remember my first romantic heartbreak. I actually recall crying myself to sleep on multiple nights because I was moving away from my girlfriend. I didn’t want to do it, but my parent’s decision to move was above my pay grade and I had no choice in the matter. She was the girl of my dreams and I was head over heels in love but I had no choice but to leave her.

I was only in the second grade when that particular family move seemingly destroyed my romantic life. Although it was difficult I eventually got over it and learned to move on with life. Yes, I am being facetious, but in reality this early event taught me that times of transition are sometimes very difficult for everyone involved.

Do You Need A Mentor?

Leadership is a complex issue in the 21^st Century. Christian leaders at every level in business, church, school, and at home are faced with numerous challenges. A common feeling is that of being overwhelmed. 

Christian leaders face difficulty and uncertainty every day. The world is changing rapidly. The political, economical, and social pressures are encroaching more and more into everyone’s daily lives. Although leaders face the same challenges as everyone else, they have the added burden of trying to have answers for others as well.

Ask Yourself a Few Simple Questions

As a leader:

·        Who do you turn to for guidance, advice, and instruction?

·        Who can you trust not only in their advice, but also in confidentiality?

·        Who already knows what you need to know and is willing to share their knowledge with you?

·        Who equips you to meet challenges when you do not yet know what tomorrow’s challenges even are yet?

·        How do you know if you are lacking the skills required to lead and succeed in the 21^st Century?

·        Are other leaders outpacing you? 

·        Are you facing new and more complex challenges that you never faced before?

·        Are you struggling with the challenge of developing leaders around you?

If so you need a mentor.

Formula for overcoming failure

Recognize

What is failure? Is it permanent? Is there a second chance? Complete the sentence by circling the right phrase “a person is a failure when…”

1. He makes a mistake;
2. He quits;
3. Someone thinks he is.

Review - Failure should be a teacher, not an undertaker. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end street. A winner is big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them and strong enough to correct them.

Repress - Perhaps your own personal problems and hang-ups caused the failure. If so, begin to work immediately on self-discipline. If you were the problem, put yourself under control. Lord Nelson, England’s famous naval hero, suffered from seasickness throughout his entire life. Yet the man who had destroyed Napoleon’s fleet did not let illness interfere with his career.

Thinking Big - For a Change

One definition of insanity is to believe that you can keep doing what you’ve been doing and get different results.  We want revival.  We want growth in our churches and we think that it is somehow going to miraculously happen by the methods and programs we have used unsuccessfully for the past 20 years.  We think that because we did have “some” growth using manmade antiquated methods, that we are definitely on the right track. 

Someone once said , “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”  I’m not so sure you have to run twice as fast to get somewhere else.  All you have to do is change the direction you are heading.  Many of us are “running as fast as we can and yet, we find ourselves stuck in the same place”.  Some of us are trying as hard as we can try.  We are working very very hard and yet at the end of the day, our efforts for the Kingdom are rewarded only minimally.  Why is that?

Peter and his co-workers had labored all night.  Using techniques and skills they had learned over a lifetime of working on fishing boats, they toiled fruitlessly in dangerous seas.    Their response to the Lord was, “We’ve caught nothing!”

Jesus who probably never spent a single day fishing on a boat tells them, “Cast your nets on the other side.”  Peter must have inwardly thought, “What does this carpenter know about fishing?”  “What can he tell me that I don’t already know?”  “I’ve been doing this all my life!” 

You know what happened. They caught a ton of fish, simply by changing the side of the boat they were casting their nets on.  Now you may also say, “Well, Jesus did a miracle for them”.  He may well have, however, notice that He did require them to do something they had never done before, to get the miracle.  Had Peter cast his net one more time from the same side of the boat he had been casting on, he would have again, pulled in empty nets.

Too many of us have worked all the night also and caught little or nothing.  We may brag that we’ve had a 10% or even 20% increase of growth to our church in the last year, but is that truthfully the kind of revival our Lord would want to give?  Considering the tens of thousands of people in your city, is 10% growth in our church really what He would want to give. 

The early Apostolics turned all of Asia upside-down in just 2 years.  What have we honestly accomplished in our city in the last 20 years?  Too many of us have only held onto the status quo.  While many churches have folded up (We don’t like to talk about these.) and others have barely grown at all.  

We call ourselves Apostolic.  We identify ourselves and our movement with the people of the book of acts.  We speak as if we have arrived at the same conclusions and understanding as those who turned Asia upside down in two years, but this preacher believes we have sadly fooled only ourselves. 

Let's be honest …  20 years ago, didn’t God give you a much greater vision than what you’ve realized.  Didn’t you step into this boat thinking, “I’m going to win my city!”.  “I’m going to have a great drought.”  “We’re going to have a great revival!”

The Power of Power Point

From the earliest messages of the Gospel that were preached by Jesus, until today, preachers have wanted their message to be heard by the masses.  We have done everything we could to ensure that our preaching can be heard.

Luke 5
 1And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret,
 2And saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets.
 3And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon's, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land. And he sat down, and taught the people out of the ship.

There was a twofold purpose in Jesus using the ship as a preaching platform.  The first reason was that as vs 1 mentions, the people were pressing against him.  The crowd was getting too great.  As with any size crowd of people, the natural voice can only go so far.  The more people you add to the crowd the less His voice could travel as sound bounces off of obstacles which, in turn, hindered His ability to get His message across to everyone that was there. 

This brings us to the second reason why Jesus launched out onto the ship to preach.  Sound carries extremely well across water.  From the ship, more people could line the shore of the lake and His voice would carry to them without being hindered.  (Have you ever been on one side of the lake and heard the voices of people speaking on the other side  which might be thousands of feet away?  When the wind is still, you can literally hear a casual voice speaking from thousands of feet away as the sound travels across the surface of the lake without hindrance.)

Jesus took full advantage of this simple technique.  However primitive Jesus’ sound system was on this day, it worked.  It enabled him to get His message to many more people than His previous method of simply standing or sitting in a place on the beach as He taught.

Preachers today face the same dilemma most often.  We struggle to get our voice out to more people.  We purchase sound systems costing everywhere from hundreds, to literally tens of thousands, of dollars for the simple purpose of getting more people to hear our preaching.  We oftentimes stop at nothing to get our message across to more people.

Reducing Organizational Costs

The fundamental purpose for organization is to coordinate a system of talents, resources, and operating structure toward the purpose of attaining a shared corporate vision.

It must be understood that in the pursuit of a vision an organization can be either a benefit or a detriment. In its purest form organization is merely a tool to achieve a specified purpose. Since it is merely a tool the organization can be changed or modified at any time. If it is achieving its purpose then simply improve it as needed along the journey. If it is hindering the purpose one must always remember that as a tool it can be modified or redesigned at any time in order to fulfill its essential role in vision attainment. Simply stated, organization can be a blessing or a curse, an enabler or a hindrance.

One of the stark contrasts between God and man is that God always organizes by creating organisms, and man organizes to create organizations. Since an organization is a tool and is organized by man it can never be allowed to take on the form of a holy thing.

The perfect Biblical illustration occurs when the children of Israel were being plagued and bitten by fiery serpents and dying. Numbers 21:7-9 says:

7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD that He take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. 8 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live." 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.

NKJV

God allowed the structure of the brass serpent to fulfill a designated purpose. However, after the purpose was fulfilled, the people should have destroyed the brass serpent, but they did not. Later it became a curse to them, because when Hezekiah began to purge the kingdom of idolatry the Bible says in 2 Kings 18:4:

KJV4 He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.

Anytime an organizational tool becomes elevated to the role of a holy thing it then becomes an idol. Organizational idolatry is as real as any other form of idolatry. Once the tool has fulfilled its useful purpose and intent and is no longer relevant it must be discarded. Otherwise the tendency of people is to elevate it and reverence it beyond its original intent. 

Normally an organization begins when a small group of people unite around a common and shared vision. As success occurs, support positions and processes are put in place to forward the progress and maintain momentum. However there is a great risk in growing the organization, because there can come a point in which it cost more time and resources to maintain the organizational system than is expended on pressing toward its vision and purpose. At this point the organization begins to atrophy. At best it becomes stagnant and unresponsive to change as a slow but inevitable death begins to overtake it.

The only way to offset this is to keep the organization relevant, fresh and flexible. One way of doing this is to continually focus on minimizing absolutely all non-essential operating costs of the organization. There are several layers that must be considered when reducing operating costs.

The Peril of Solipsism

Solipsism is the belief that nothing exists outside of your self. If you, while reading this article, believe that this article and everything around you are figments of your imagination, you are solipsistic.

Sounds strange? No, it is very real.

Engine Charlie Wilson, former CEO of GM, once said, “What is good for GM is good for America!” Engine Charlie was indulging in solipsistic thinking on behalf of GM.

Grades in school may be another example of solipsism. The purpose of school is learning. We create a surrogate indicator of learning: grades. Then we collude with each other to pretend that grades are an accurate indicator that learning has or has not taken place. We no longer even question the legitimacy of grades.

Another example is sweeps week. Twice a year there are weeklong surveys of TV viewership. The ratings during sweeps week are important because they determine what the networks charge for advertising. The solipsism is this: We pretend that the programs during the sweeps week are representative of the network’s regular fare and that the ratings during sweeps are indicative of something real.

Another example: The Discipline of Market Leaders, a book that made The New York Times list of best-selling books. This occurred because those behind the book were able to identify which stores around the country were used by The New York Times as their sample for calculating which books were best sellers. By buying up their book at these stores, they could artificially inflate the figures. The solipsism: pretending that The New York Times list accurately depicts the sales of books (and that the volume of sales of books is an accurate measure of what is worthwhile to read).

Are You Trained To Fail?

“Have you been trained to fail?”  You have been trained in ministry to fail if you have been taught to do the ministry rather than to train others for ministry.  I am grateful to the teachers who taught me to perform the functions of ministry:  visiting, counseling, marrying, burying, teaching, witnessing, and a host of other duties.  All are needed.  By themselves, however, they help us only to maintain, not to maximize ministry.  We can never be effective ministers until we learn what it means to be a leader and how to function as a leader.  The following are five common ingredients in growing churches:

• (1)  The pastor and the congregation understand their God-given gifts and use them in ministry.
  
• (2) The pastor’s hands-on ministry decreases and the congregation’s increases.
  
• (3) Both the quality and the quantity of ministry increase.
• (4) The pastor’s ministry influence increases as he shares ministry responsibilities with the congregation.
  
• (5) A biblical philosophy of ministry is established.  That is, leadership plus lay ministry equals growth.

How can you build a leadership team and maximize ministry in your church?  The following six steps are proven and effective.

1. Identify the leaders in the church.  Who are the influencers?  These persons may hold formal or informal positions of leadership.  They are the ones to whom others look for decisions.  Write down their names and rank them on a scale of 1 to 10 as to their leadership and influence within the church.
2. Intentionally take time to build relationships with your current and future leaders.  Do not ignore or exclude the others, but focus on developing leaders.