Well, it’s at least new. Let me introduce a few of the changes. New location. I started this site in 2006 when Outreach magazine contacted me about being a blogger. I was an avid blog reader at the time, so I was honored to be among the original four bloggers for their magazine. I was also a bi-vocational pastor then, working in the energy futures industry. I just knew God was going to keep me in the corporate world while I pastored small and struggling established churches. Things change, and Read more [...]

All leaders have ideas, but not all ideas lead to change. What separates the dream from reality? Businessweek recently reported on the history of the bar code. It sounds mundane, but there is something to learn about change implementation from the story. In 1948 two graduate students at the Drexel Institute of Technology overheard a supermarket executive discussing a key problem: the need for an automatic system to read each product item. Working together, the two students helped change the way Read more [...]

Does the established nature of some churches hinder innovation? Is an established structure antithetical to quick, nimble changes? For most established churches, yes, but it does not mean established churches cannot innovate. A church plant is an innovation. Innovation is the process of successfully establishing something new. To introduce something new—and to get it to work longer than a month—is innovation. Perhaps some luck into the right change at the right time. Perhaps some churches land Read more [...]

Either people are on board with your leadership or not, right? Nope. There are degrees of influence and different types of followers. The mantra of “get on board or get off” does not take into account the numerous types of followers and differing levels of leadership influence. Most definitions of leadership allude to influence as the key driver. But I do not believe leadership and influence are synonymous—leader and follower exchanges are more complex than mere influence. However, leaders Read more [...]

Some people are just awkward. Awkward people are in almost every organization. The church—a place for all types—will have, by design, its share of awkward people.  As a leader, you might be tempted to avoid them (unless you are among them, but that’s a subject for another post). Too often leaders ignore awkward people in their organizations. We treat them like odd zoo creatures—they are best observed from a distance. So leaders ignore their emails. Leaders find ways to avoid meetings that Read more [...]