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Last week a pastor from our district called to interview me about church planting. It caught me a little off guard, but it was a great conversation and made me think over the past year. Ever since that conversation, I've been meditating on things I've learned over the past 15 months. So, I've decided to write a series of posts on lessons we've learned over our first year of church planting. This is the second. Make sure to check back for the next posts in the series.
One of the questions that was asked of me, was "what are the top 3 leadership insights you've gained planting a church?" I'm sure I said um about a thousand times, but I actually knew right away what I thought.
I'm not a huge fan of lists like "top 3" or "top 5" or "5 steps" of or to whatever, but there are definitely 3 prominent leadership skills I've noticed as being invaluable this year.
Flexibility. I thought of this one right away. This is something that has been a cornerstone in ministry (or life for that matter) as a whole, but has been especially helpful church planting.
Every day is different, and things rarely (if ever) go as expected. There must be flexibility in your approach, or you will go crazy.
There are a few ways this has played out in our ministry.
The first is just in renovating our building. There is a reason people site home renovations as a reason for divorce. Now make that home a nearly hundred year old church building, and it's a recipe for disaster. Everything took longer than expected, EVERYTHING! Cleaning took twice as long, because of pests, so not only did everything need to be vacuumed, but you needed to wear a face mask, and bleach the shop vac AND the area after cleaning. Painting took longer than expected because first we had to removed stuff off the walls, (which took days in and of itself) and then there was sanding and patching. You get the point. Our schedule and time line had to be somewhat flexible or we would have drove one another insane. Being flexible allowed us to stay married (hooray) and our leadership team to not hate each other by our launch, despite how exhausted we were.
And that's just with the building. Flexibility applies to the ministry as well. People are not easy to control, and even if they were, that's not the best method of ministry. That means that sometimes you plan things that don't work out at all. Sometimes expectations are not met. Sometimes things don't fit our urban context, or the specific age group. When 5 kids show up on a Sunday morning, and kids outnumber adults in church service, suddenly flexibility is needed as the sermon has to be reworked on the spot to engage them a little more. Or, when we were trying VBS for the first time, and the kids were nervous to come inside the church. It was important to go to them, to change our schedule, to completely rework what VBS looked like, or we would have missed the ministry victories and beauty of that week due to our need to be rigidly on task.
Lastly, there must be flexibility with the schedule. Being co-vocational means that I must be creative with my time. Sometimes that means studying during lunch break, a lot of time that means reading the sermon text on Monday and not getting to write it until Friday (or Saturday... or sometimes Sunday morning). It's not ideal, but it's life. Being rigid would only continually cause frustration. Now, there is necessity in planning and balancing life and work, but if that planning gets in the way of engaging with my family or with my community, it becomes a hindrance and not a help. Feeling guilty about not staying on task, would only be one more hurdle to jump, and we already have enough of those, so I try to be as flexible as possible, while still getting things done.
Humility. This may be the most important leadership skill when church planting. Everything must be approached with humility. Everything.
It is an arrogant thing to walk into a neighborhood and tell people what's wrong with their lives based on a few statistics and demographics you read. It is an arrogant thing to assume that everyone in your church planting area is un-churched, and it is arrogant to assume that those who are un-churched know nothing of God or faith. If we had done any of those things, our work would have ended before it began.
There's an old saying "God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason" this applies even more so to Church planting. You must always listen first. You must always intentionally listen, and the listening may take weeks, or months, or years, before you earn the right to speak into that person's life, but you must earn that right. That takes a lot of humility. And once you've earned that right, you still have to be humble enough to love them without strings attached. They may never come to church, they may never follow Christ, we must be humble and respectful enough to love them in spite of that, because Christ does.
It takes a significant amount of humility to ask for help. To realize that the task ahead is one that you can not do on your own, that you need Christ first and foremost, but that you need other people as well. Everything is a group effort. Church planting should never be an island, and if it feels that way, it may be because there isn't enough humility present to ask for help. Sometimes that's just asking someone to pray, sometimes that's asking for money (though we've been grateful to not have to do that much.... yet), sometimes that's asking another pastor over for dinner or calling another ministry couple to vent too. This is important, and we need to have the humility to do so.
You must also have humility when looking at the people around you. It is incredibly easy to judge. Just the other day Mac and I were talking about how difficult it is to not judge people when watching them make unwise food choices at the grocery store. We come into that situation incredibly privileged, to have parents who taught us how to cook, who educated us about good nutrition, who taught us that pre-processed foods aren't worth the money, etc. Not everyone comes from the backgrounds we do. This could be said about multiple situations we encounter on a regular basis. Hammond is different than where either one of us grew up. Very different in many ways, and we continually have to check our biases and privileges at the door, to humbly view people as the beloved of God. To view people with different eyes. To be less judgmental.
It is incredibly humbling to realize that maybe our views of poverty, of urban culture, of food insecurity, of race, of gender, or whatever other biases and views we might have are wrong, BUT it's incredibly necessary to be humble enough to admit that. We can't grow if we don't, and we certainly can not sow seeds of the Kingdom if we come from a place of arrogance. Christ became human, he served alongside humanity, as humanity, to show the extent of God's great love for us; we must do the same, no matter how many times it takes for us to mess up, ask for forgiveness and start again.
Thick Skin and Soft Hearts. I am unsure of who first taught me this phrase in relation to ministry, but whoever it was, I am grateful, because it has been a phrase I go back to over and over again.
Ministry is hard. It doesn't matter if that is teaching a Sunday School class, running an after school program, teaching at a christian daycare, pastoring a church, or church planting. People are messy, and broken.
There are times when I come home from school, and I tell Mac about a student who was particularly difficult, or who told me about their life at home, and he gets teary eyed and says to me "how do you not just bring them all home at the end of the day?" And I say "because I can't."
I physically can not take every kid with a rough home life home, and even if I could, we don't have the emotional or financial resources to care for them. It is heart breaking. My heart grieves over and over again for many stories I hear from day to day.
When my al-anon ladies come in each week, I work in my office, and I can often hear their sobs from the other room, and my heart breaks again.
My heart breaks, it grieves, it mourns, and bleeds for so many wounds here and around the world, and that should never ever change. If it does, that is the day I should leave ministry. Having a callous heart is not the heart of God, a God who mourns when we mourn.
However, in the midst of that world I must live, care for myself and my family, and be a pastor that can pastor her people. If I end up in the fetal position on the floor of my office, I am no good to anybody.
That's where having a thick skin comes in. I have to be strong enough to wake up each day, to do the tasks that God has called me to. There is a time and a place for falling apart, but that time is generally not at 8am Monday morning, or 10am on Sunday, that time is usually during prayer, as I lament to God the breaking of my heart for a broken world. That's often with Mac as we reflect on our time here, and our day to day life. Sometimes that time is with close trusted friends and family, who get it, who get me, and who get the task we are called too, who bring me back to the reminder that I do not have to carry these burdens alone, but there is a community (the Church) who walks with me, and a Holy Spirit who gives me strength.
The other area where having a thick skin and a soft heart is necessary is when dealing with difficult people.
It happens. It happens more often than you think, that someone is critical. Someone tries to tell you that your entire ministry philosophy is wrong, I've had someone go as far as to question how much I love Jesus. It truly gets ugly sometimes.
Sometimes as Christians we believe it is our call to be a doormat, maybe there is a time for that, but that time is never when you are caring for your flock. I don't like confrontation, I don't like it at all, but it is sometimes necessary, and it is sometimes impossible to avoid.
I have to be able to stick it out, to stand my ground, to be able to state clearly what we are doing and why, without reverting back into that fetal position in my office. If I become a sobbing mess in front of that person or people, I lose credibility. I become a horrible shepherd, because I need to protect and care for my flock, and sometimes that means standing up for them and for what we do. However, if I ever get to the point where I am too big for criticism, where I care nothing for what others think, I've lost my humility and my soft heart. Every word shouldn't wound me, but I need to still have the ears to hear, and the humility and wisdom to see beyond the shrapnel hurled in my direction. Because soft hearts are able to recognize when they are wrong, and to move in a different direction. Soft hearts are malleable to the Holy Spirit, and are able to be flexible and humble. Soft hearts are able to grow.
These are the top 3 leadership insights I've found helpful this year, but they apply to any ministry, and are helpful in life in general. There are many other skills I could list. I'd love to hear if there are any leadership insights you would add, or if you have found one of these skills particularly helpful in your ministry. Leave me a comment, I'd love to read them.
And, if you missed my first post in this series, you can find it here: Lessons We've Learned our First Year: Is it hard?
