Leadership Development: A Four-Part Process

HI All,

You probably already know that most churches never get beyond the 150 mark. But did you know why?

There are a few key factors to help a church break beyond the so-called "200 Barrier" (more like 150 - 250). One of those factors is the pastor's leadership. The pastor has to want to, and be able to, develop leaders. Some pastors don't want to develop leaders, because they are insecure. They want all decisions to go through them, or they want to be in the 'know' about anything happening in the church. But lots of other pastors do want to grow, but don't really know how.

In both cases, if they can not or will not develop leaders, it is nearly impossible for the church to grow beyond the 200 Barrier because about 150 people is getting to be the limit in terms of most pastor's administrative and leadership and interpersonal limits. Any more than that, and the work, the decisions, the interpersonal demands begin to mount up along with everything else a pastor is required to do, besides Sunday preaching. Thus between 150 - 250 gets to be the limit. That's why 85% of churches are at or below the 250 mark.

But if you want to get beyond this, there are some things which you can do.

Let's talk about some of the steps necessary to develop more leaders in the church to help you carry the load.

If we want to break it down into its elements, leadership development has four elements: Recruit, Train, Delegate, and Supervise. (I want to thank my friend, Bill Price, Executive Pastor of Autumn Ridge Church in Rochester, MN for summarizing these for me. This blog is about what I'm learning, and currently I am learning this.)

Four parts of leadership development: Recruit, Train, Delegate, Supervise.

Ephesians 4 says that God gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers "to equip the saints for ministry".

The mission and the task of the church leadership is to equip others for the work of ministry. Leadership development is about equipping the saints for ministry. The way you equip saints for the ministry is through the four-part process of Recruit, Train, Delegate, Supervise. They each have a biblical form and function.

Pastors - and their staff - should be spending a significant portion of their time developing leaders. According to Dann Spader of Sonlife, it should range in the order of at least 15% of their time. Some business leaders, like Jack Welch I am told, spent the majority of their time developing up and coming executives, because they know that leaders are the future of any successful organization. As Bill Hybels says, the church is the hope of the world, and the hope of the church is its leaders.

Pastors, do you hire your staff to DO ministry or to EQUIP for ministry? Are they spending all of their time doing the Bible studies, leading the groups, presenting the talks, etc. How much time do they take to train others to do ministry? Are they practicing "Show-How" ministry training? (I have several other blogs over the last couple of years focusing on apprentice training.)

If the staff is not developing leaders, and if the pastor is not developing leaders, then the future of your church is in jeopardy. Leaders must be constantly moved into the pipeline and developed and trained and be given leadership opportunities so that your church tomorrow will be as strong or stronger than it is today.

In the next four blog posts, we will talk about each of these four elements of leadership development: Recruit, Train, Delegate and Supervise.

Until then, for the Kingdom of Heaven,

Dr. Bill

Why I need Shepherd Care

Hi All,

Coincidentally, I also have a comment this week about some other software I am developing. I mentioned SermonBase Message Planning Software last time, because I was preaching and needed some old files that I had developed before SermonBase. Well this week, something cool happened with another piece of software which we are developing, called "Shepherd Care" Group Software.

Here's what is my problem, maybe it is yours: tracking the various people who are in the various groups in the church. I've tried other software to help make this happen, and have not been satisfied. Mostly the software is overkill - both in price and installation and usability. Most of the group software which I have found is one 'module' in a gigantic software package that tracks all aspects of church life: finances, membership database, giving, groups, emails, directories, etc. But in some cases this is way more trouble than it is worth. I know, because we have some of this at our church now, and it is very cumbersome to enter & manipulate information and get reports.

Installation is overkill too, because often they are either server-based, which means I must be at church and hooked into the church's main server; or else they are web-based and slow.

I needed something that was nimble and quick; easy to access, desktop-based, and inexpensive to deploy. So then I was contacted by "Pastor Pete" from a church called "Cowboy Fellowship' in Pleasanton, TX that was growing gang-busters and needed a software package to track their progress. So we are developing a tool which I call "Shepherd Care" and it is group tracking software. It uses the metaphor of Shepherds, Sheep, and Flocks for tracking groups, and classes, and small groups in your church.

We are testing it right now in both churches and making usability improvements as we go along.

Well here is what happened just a couple weeks ago with Shepherd Care, and which is convincing me that this could be really useful software: One of the reports we've included in Shepherd Care is a monthly "Flock Report" which is emailed to the leaders each month. They complete it and send it back. One of the questions on that report is 'who did not show up this month at your group?' And the name of a particular young man was listed on the report. So our discipleship team gave that leader a call to check on why this individual did not show. When the follow-up call was then made to the young man, he said something like, "I'm going to take a break from church for awhile." The leader was able to lovingly let that young man know that that wasn't really OK with him or the group because they loved him and would miss him. Because of that conversation, the man stuck around, and it was really a joy for me to see him in church last week!

Shepherd Care helped us prevent one of our sheep from straying.

Now you may say, "Well any alert small group leader should be able to do that on their own!" And that is true; but you and I both know that doesn't always happen. People are busy, and sometimes they either don't notice, or don't get around to contacting a straying member. The value of having a piece of software like "Shepherd Care" is that it helps provide redundant systems of care, so that if one person misses the chance to follow-up a straying sheep, through monthly reports like the "Flock Report" someone else might notice a pattern and catch it. And in this case it works. It is an example of how the right easy-to-use software can make your life as a caring leader easier, not harder.

It convinced me that we need to keep fine-tuning it and getting it ready to release to churches soon, because it is useful for kingdom work. And that is what it is all about.

Yours for the Great Shepherd of the sheep!

Dr. Bill

I wish I had SermonBase

Yes, even though I am the one who created SermonBase, I still feel this way: I wish I had SermonBase 15 years ago. Here's why: this week I am working on a Father's Day message. So I opened up my copy of SermonBase, which I have had for years, and started doing some research. Using the search tools of SermonBase, I first did some title search's for "Father" or "Fathers" or "dads", with no luck. So then, I did some search under the 'Topic' category. I searched for "Father" and "Dad", with no luck. Then I did a search for "spiritual leader", and was blessed with a matching result. When I clicked on the search result, here is what I found: a reference to a sermon which I had preached on a Father's Day, a number of years before I created SermonBase. That's all it was, just a reference to the title. So I went to my paper-based files and looked for the sermon.

Where had I filed it? Was it under the topic of "Fathers"? Was it under the Scripture I used? Was it filed by calendar date? I never was able to locate it. So it was back to the drawing board to re-write a sermon I had previously preached. If only I had SermonBase 15 years ago!

Here's how it would have been different, if I had SermonBase. I would have filed the title, topic, Scripture text into the proper search fields. I would have copied the content of the sermon into the main content field. Finally, I would have stored both the document and the powerpoint copies of the sermon into the digital FileFolders contained in SermonBase.

Besides the ability to plan out my sermons well, probably the feature I most appreciate in SermonBase is the ability to do complete archiving of every sermon I ever had - as long as I had and used SermonBase. Which for me, has been just under 10 years.

SermonBase Message Planning Software - you can get a free demo and try it out if you like.

Dr. Bill

The Preaching Proposition, Part Two

Hi All,

Last blog I talked about the definition and significance of the Proposition in your sermon. Your proposition is your sermon in a sentence. It says everything in a single sentence. Then preaching is just a matter of unpacking and releasing all that pent up meaning from your high-powered sentence into an entire sermon.

One of the foundations of preaching a good sermon is crafting a really quality propositional statement. If you do not get your proposition correct, you will be off-kilter for the entire message. If you cannot express what you want to say in a single sentence then you do not really know what you want to say. And if you spend an entire sermon of 30-40 minutes only kind of hitting at your target, you will never quite hit the mark and your listeners will be less than impressed by the time they spent with you.

But how do you form that really good proposition so that you are clearly and succinctly saying what you want to say?

The way to get at a good proposition is by clearly stating your goals.

Every single time that I preach I determine what are my goals for the sermon. I write them right at the top of my sermon sheet before I get going. From that I can begin to write a good Proposition. In fact, this is so important, that when I designed my SermonBase software, I created a separate tab just for the Message Goals. There are fill in the blank spots for Intellectual, Emotional, and Behavioral goals. Then when you have written your sermon, you hit the "Sermonate" button, and your entire sermon is printed out. And right at the top of the sheet, already printed for you by SermonBase, are your goals. That way you will not forget them as you begin your sermon.

But how do you write the goals?

Determine your Intellectual, Emotional, and Behavioral goals for every sermon. An easy way to remember this is by using the phrase, "Head, Heart, Hands". Head - what do you want them to know? This could be doctrine; it could be specific content of a Biblical passage; it could be the consequences of sin; it could be the assurance of salvation. The fact is that unless you preach and teach truth, they will not know it. You must give them some content to feed their mind.

Heart - What do you want them to feel? Emotions, as you know, are the key to behavioral change. People must feel it in their heart before they will ever change their ways. And so a sermon must challenge the heart in some way. You may want to give them a sense of joy at knowing Christ; or fear of the consequences of sin; or a sense of confidence that God will never take His love away. But if you want to make a behavioral change, the doorway is through the heart.

Hands - What do you want them to do? Changed life is the proof. Where's the fruit? One result you may want to have as a result of listening to your message is that people will behave differently.

And so you put these three together, and they form the foundation to figuring out your proposition. Let's take the example of finances and debt. Intellectual Goal (Head) - I want the congregation to understand some of the Biblical principles of finances. Emotional Goal (Heart) - I want the congregation to have a proper respect (maybe even fear) of debt. Behavioral Goal (Hands) - I want them to get out of debt!"

Put this into a propositional statement and we might get something like, "Rigorous application of the Biblical Principles of Finances will help you experience financial freedom." Although the proposition doesn't use the word debt, we use the positive side of that by mentioning "financial freedom". But we clearly get at the topic of debt by calling the sermon, "How to Get Out of Debt". You can find it in the sermons section of HighPowerResources.com. And so in this sermon their are three key parts that get at each of these goals: First, the emotional is addressed by "signs that you are in too much debt". This has enough hooks to grab most people who have any debt. The second part of the sermon teaches the actual Biblical content of the Intellectual goal by teaching seven principles of Biblical Finances. And then the third part of the message gets to the behavioral goals by addressing "Seven Steps to Financial Freedom". This sermon is unique in that each section has a completely different goal; most sermons mix up the emotional and intellectual and behavioral goals for each point. But the sermon on debt clearly shows the divisions of the goals and how they are tied in tightly to the Proposition.

Having clear goals helps you to write a proposition that gets to the heart of what you are trying to say. Then once you have the proposition you want, you are well on your way to a good sermon.

God's best to you on your sermon prep, for the sake of your listeners!

Dr. Bill