My friend and colleague Marty and I have turned in our manuscript for the book on educational planning in the congregational context. This is the sit and wait stage before the next phase of editing. For me this is always a time of gratitude for the break from writing and anticipation toward finishing the work.
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A colleague is making a change in his church staff position. He’s struggling with coming up with a new ministry job title. He says, “While I realize the main thing is how one functions, job titles are suggestive and important.”
He’s moving from a generalist position as Minister of Christian Formation, to a more focused ministry with adults. Here are some titles he’s considering.
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Every once in a while I get a chance to visit congregations with large Sunday School or Sunday morning Bible classes. Some of these classes have over 100 persons in regular attendance. While that may seem like a sign of success to some, others see those large classes as something to be wary of. Large Sunday School classes were, for a previous generation, both a goal and a measure of success. But even with the more contemporary emphasis on small groups (with 20 people in a group considered already too large) there remain pockets where bigger is better despite everything we know about how large teacher-focused classes are pedagogically ineffective.
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I recently read a post at Learnings at Leadership Network, by Warren Bird, Ph.D., Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 19 books on various aspects of church health and innovation. This was posted on May 16, 2008 in Church Visits.
Warren wrote, “Unfortunately, too many churches exist where the senior pastor is a tremendous leader but an even bigger bottleneck. In such churches nothing of importance can happen unless the senior pastor is at the hub of it. Neither long-term volunteers, nor senior staff, feel empowered to take initiative on anything major. They feel underutilized – and they are.
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Some years ago one of my boys worked for hours on a work of art on a computer graphics program. When he tried to print out his masterpiece, however, the color printer spewed out a monochrome facsimile of his creation, very different from how it appeared on the computer screen. Apparently, the ink had run out in my color printer’s ink cartridge. Well, I knew what I had to do, change the dreaded ink cartridge. I understood the process: remove the old cartridge and replace it with a new one, which I did. Unfortunately the only reward I got for my trouble was blinking error lights all over the place. The computer flashed an error message telling me the printer wasn’t working (“Thanks. Tell me something I don’t know!â€), and more flashing lights on the printer itself indicating something was wrong—but not telling me exactly what.
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So the time is finally here. The season most of our folks long for and the children actually pine for is here but are we as a church ready to fulfill those longings? Recently I sat in a team meeting where the focus wasn’t on planning for the Advent season but it did come up. My sense was that as a church we really weren’t ready for this moment. By that I mean we were not ready to educate our congregation about the meaning of the season.
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One of the most important qualities in any organization is the ability to solve its own problems. Organizations that cannot solve their own problems are in trouble. It won’t take long before they become overwhelmed as one unsolved problem begins to affect another. At that point the issues become systemic, and the only solution is to fix everything at the same time together. That’s a task that is more complex and overwhelming than most organizations can pull off.
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This is a recommendation for an interesting read that speaks to issues of centralization and decentralization regarding leadership. The description of the book is as follows:
“If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.
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Over the years I’ve heard the statement that the church is a business and needs to be treated like one. I suspect that any time money is involved there’s a tendency to think this way. Comments like this are, in my opinion, examples of an unclear theology of big “C†and little “c†church and more specifically—Christian stewardship. It’s to the latter that I would like to generate some discussion.
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