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NEW this month!

• Church Growth Factoids - Distinctiveness & Long-Tenured Pastors
• Coaching– delegating
• Software
       SermonBase 1.1 – easier to use than ever!
       FamilyFaces 1.3 – updated again!
• Sermons– “The Proposition – Key to Sermon Success”
• Seminars– most popular seminars
• Book Review  - The Coaching Starter Kit

Factoids

Distinctiveness
“Eighty-nine percent of growing church pastors said “yes” to the question “is it easy to describe for visitors how your congregation differs from other congregations in the area?” as compared to 66 percent of the pastors in both plateaued and declining churches.”
“Church Growth Principles”, C. Kirk Hadaway, Nashville: Broadman Press, 1991, p. 157

This is an important truth to comprehend; it is really be important to have something unique about your church.  You need to have something that sets you apart from everyone else.  When people in the community survey the horizon of churches available to them, they will ask friends ‘what is that church like?’  It is at that moment when the friends will state the one distinctive of your church which makes it stand out from all the rest.  They will say something like, “verse-by-verse exposition from the Greek”, or “incredible music”, or “they have a very formal worship service”, or “they have the best children’s program in town”. 

What makes your church unique?  Growing churches know what that is.  People in marketing call this your USP:  Unique Selling Proposition.  Every product and service, and every growing church needs to know what separates them from all the rest.   This is also what Jim Collins in Good to Great, calls the “hedge-hodge principle”;  what one thing can you do better than anybody else?  That is your distinctive calling as a church.

Is this too much like marketing?  Here is the Christian perspective:  just as God gives to every Christian a unique set of spiritual gifts which they can use to serve Him, so God also gives to each church a unique set of gifts; a calling for their mission on earth.  (This is like the lampstand from Revelation.)   If a church knows what is their calling, they can focus on that, and that becomes their distinctive calling in the community.  This will both help you grow, and it will help you to focus your church’s energies on God’s calling. 

The second Church Growth Factoid tied into this one.  Here it is:

Pastoral Tenure
“Long pastoral tenure is not a panacea or the single answer to struggling churches across America, but I believe that long tenure is one of the key requisites for churches to move from mediocrity to goodness to greatness.” - Thom Rainer, p.58
(Tom Rainer. Breakout Churches. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005.)  

So, how does this relate to the Distinctiveness Factoid?  Remember how I said that the Christian interpretation of distinctiveness is that each church needs to find its unique and distinctive calling from the Lord?  Well, the longer a pastor stays there the longer s/he has to figure out God’s unique calling. 

Now there are a lot of factors which are enhanced by long pastoral tenure, but one of them is certainly this:  the longer a pastor stays in one location, the better chance they have to discover/learn/develop their unique mission as a congregation in the community.

These and other Factoids can be found at ChurchGrowth Factoids

HighPower Learnings  Blog

WHAT I'M LEARNING RIGHT NOW IN THE AREAS OF MINISTRY COACHING, SIMPLE CHURCH, CHURCH GROWTH & CHURCH HEALTH

Recent posts:

• "Simple Church & (Willowcreek's) REVEAL"
• "Christ-centered Coaching"

Check out the Blog here.

Coaching

Delegating, part 2

As I said in the last “eNews”, while delegating itself is not directly a Coaching topic, it is very closely related, especially for those who work with staff in both a support and oversight role.

In the July “HPR eNews”, we looked at the four unspoken questions every follower asks when you delegate something to them.  This month, we will look at the “Four Types of Delegating”. 

Hans Finzel introduces the concept with this statement:

“An important principle that many leaders stumble on is the need to recognize that different kinds of followers need different styles of supervision.  Once I have delegated a responsibility, I must practice various forms of supervision and accountability according to the condition of the follower.”  [The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make, Hans Finzel, p. 107]

The four types of delegating, as explained in “Management of Organizational Behavior” are called:
1.  Telling
2.  Selling
3.  Participating
4.  Delegating

FOUR TYPES OF DELEGATING
[Management of Organizational Behavior, Hersey & Blanchard, 1982]

The chart is pretty self-explanatory; it is based on 2 principles:  Skill & Motivation.
Skill: 
As their skill level increases, the amount of TELLING decreases.  They do not need or want as much guidance.  Those with Low Motivation go from Telling to Selling, as their skills increase.   Those with High Motivation go from Participating to Delegating as their skill level increases.

Motivation:
As their motivation increases, the amount of SELLING decreases.  You don’t have to convince them it is important; just tell them what you need and let them go at it.  That’s why as their skill increases, so does your delegation technique.  Those who are Low Skill, need you to do it with them a once or twice.  Those who are High Skill, just need to be given the task and let go to do it. 

For more Coaching help, check out HighPowerResources/Coaching

Software

The purpose of software is to help you get organized and do a better job by using the software, than if you did not have it.

I created SermonBase ®  for myself because I did not have any easy way to track both my Series and Messages at the same time.   Here’s one feature which I love: if I am looking at a Series, maybe a series on the fruit of the Spirit; then with one click of the Messages tab, it transforms into the 9 Messages of the Series.   Or, maybe I have set the filter to view just the year 2007; from the Series tab I can see all 10 of the Series for the year;  I can print up these as a report and email it to the worship team.  Then with one press on the Messages tab, it reveals the 52 messages for 2007. 

• SermonBase 1.1 – easier to use than ever!
• FamilyFaces 1.3 – updated again!
  FamilyFaces is any easy do-it-yourself photo directory for your church. 

Click on HighPowerResources.com/Software to download your new Demo today.

Seminars

• Popular seminars which have been downloaded recently are:
  “Coaching” – this is any introduction to coaching in the local church context.  Coaching is becoming one of the most popular ways to practice Christian discipleship in the local church.  Through the efforts of Bob Logan and other Christian coaches, churches are discovering that coaching is a very powerful way of helping people to make spiritual progress in their Christian life, because it is one-on-one customized spiritual care.  This seminar introduces coaching to the local church context, by introducing the concepts of coaching, and giving participants a chance to try it out for themselves.
• “Prayer” – one hour seminar to teach the importance of prayer, and various methods for adding variety to your member’s prayer lives.
• “VIP’s” – The Seven Most Important People in your Church – based on some great teaching by John Maxwell, and then extended with additional teachings and supplemental help to train Ushers and Greeters.

Click on HighPowerResources.com/Seminars to learn more.

Sermons, Dramas, Bible Studies

“FORMING YOUR PROPOSITION”

One of the most important parts of sermon preparation is writing your proposition.  The “proposition”, as they call it in homiletics is your “sermon in a sentence”.   It is the core idea of what you are trying to communicate to your audience.

Many pastors will struggle in their sermon prep week after week because they haven’t learned the importance of this idea.   The proposition shapes your entire sermon.  You don’t know what you are going to say until you have shaped your proposition.  Oh, you might have a lot to say, and you might think you know what you are saying, but until you can state your entire sermon in a single sentence your AUDIENCE will not know what you are trying to say.  And the reason they will not know is that you have not developed the clarity of understanding to express your sermon in a single sentence.

A good Proposition includes a number of important elements:
1st – the Topic  - this is what you are talking about in one or two words  (faith, spiritual growth, Jesus)
2nd --  the Audience – usually ‘you’ but sometimes it could be “the church” “America”, “the world”, depending on the nature of the message
3rd – the Action – what do you want your audience to Know, Feel or Do
4th – the Rationale – why does it matter to your audience?

Example:  You can run a balanced race and finish well, if you follow the advice of Coach Jesus.
Topic – the “Race”
Audience – You
Action – follow/obey Jesus
Rationale – live a balanced  & finish well

Example:  Reconnecting with God is intimately tied to reconnecting with God’s family.
Topic – God’s Family; the church
Audience – “you” is implied
Action – reconnect with God’s family
Rationale – reconnect/relate to God

Example:  When you step out by faith, God steps in.
Topic – faith
Audience – you
Action – step out by faith
Rationale – God will step in to help you

SermonBase ®  helps you to write a good proposition.  It does this from the “Goals” screen.  Every Message has a section set aside for “Goals”.  SermonBase asks you three questions to determine your Proposition:
What is the Intellectual goal?  What do I want them to Know?
What is the Emotional goal?   (What do I want them to Feel?)
What is the Behavioral goal?  (What do I want them to do?)

By the time you have answered these three questions, you are well on your way to writing a great propositional statement.   And a great proposition is the foundation to a great sermon.

BOOK REVIEW

The Coaching Starter Kit
This book is a how-to guide, with highly interactive pages for putting together your own coaching practice.  The book is written from a secular perspective, so the author’s intentions are to help you to develop a successful coaching practice.  That said, there are a number of useful elements for pastors and Christian leaders who want to expand or develop their coaching ministry.

The book does not spend a lot of time explaining or teaching coaching concepts.  It assumes a lot of basic knowledge of coaching.  The book’s strong point is helping you to develop systems and processes for what you already have in place. 

The book is divided into a number of sections…

Most helpful are some of the interactive features in which it says something like “Top 20 steps to take to”   strengthen some aspect of coaching.  Then there are a series of bullet points with check boxes.  You just work your way through each bullet point, checking off those that you have already covered, and leaving it abundantly clear what you need to work on to strengthen your coaching ministry.

It is a helpful book for those who already understand coaching.  It will help you get your ministry organized.   For those who are still learning about what coaching is, I would recommend Bob Logan’s classic, “Coaching 101”.   Both “Coaching 101”  and “The Coaching Starter Kit” are available from HighPower books page with the Amazon link here.

For HighPowerResources Books from Amazon, click our "Books" link.