Clif McKinley Dot Com

More from Swerve…

Leading During Financially Challenging Times—3

Give Bigger

Giving takes faith. And giving takes more faith when there might be less to give. That’s why in tough times, I believe it is important to give bigger.

As the spiritual leader of the church, we tend to set the tone.

• A generous pastor typically leads a generous church.
• A stingy pastor typically leads a stingy church.

My whole family met recently to plan how we could dramatically increase the percentage of our giving. It is easy to give what we know we can give. I love what God does in us when we plan to give more than we thought we ever could.

Whether your church knows what you give or not isn’t important. God knows. And I believe He will honor the faith and sacrifices of the ministry leader during rocky financial times.

What is God showing you about this?

From Swerve

Leading During Financially Challenging Times—2

Create Margin

Churches in many parts of our country (and the world) have been tight financially. As the economy tries to find solid ground, giving to ministries could suffer.

I would suggest you don’t wait until things get even tighter before you start cutting back. Now is the time to create margin.

Here is what I’m telling our staff:

• We are not becoming less aggressive on reaching people—just financially more aware. Just because we can spend money in some way today, it may not be wise. Don’t let off the pedal of your passion, but apply the brakes some when it comes to spending.
• Modeling good stewardship to our church is important. I want our church to see us cutting back some in hopes they will follow in their personal lives. Even though we can afford certain ministry luxuries, I am encouraging our team to find ways to creatively cut back.
• We will be “cash strong” in hard times. We want to be able to help people who are in need, care for our staff, and remain evangelically aggressive in financially slow times. We don’t want to be begging for money, but positioned to make a difference.

How are you leading through this season?

I’ve been a lazy blogger as of late, lots of stuff going, bla, bla, bla, etc…. anyway I have been reposting things from some of my favorite blogs/bloggers, so here is another cool one from Tony Morgan so enjoy and please throw in your two cents.

I’ve experienced failures. I’ve watched others fail. I’m guessing you’ve seen plenty as well. This morning I tried to think through some common reasons why failure happens. I’m looking forward to some healthy conversation on this one. With that, here are:

10 Reasons Why You’re Probably Going to Fail

1. It’s not your passion. If it doesn’t make your heart beat fast or cause your mind to race when you’re trying to sleep, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.
2. You don’t have a plan. You need a vision, and you need to identify specific steps to make that vision become reality. That includes a financial plan. (I happen to believe you need direction from God on this.)
3. You’re waiting for it to be perfect. Test-drive it. Beta-test that new idea. You’ll fall into the trap of inaction if you think it has to be absolutely right from day one.
4. You’re not willing to work hard. Everything worth pursuing in my life has involved discipline and perseverance.
5. It’ll outgrow you. Keep learning. Keep growing. But more importantly, build a team of people including leaders that can be who you’re not.
6. You’ve had success in the past. I’ve watched organizations hang on to a good idea for too long. Time passes. Momentum fades. It’s risky to let go of the past and jump on the next wave.
7. You’re unwilling to stop doing something else. Complexity is easy. Simplicity takes discipline. You can’t build a healthy marriage if you’re unwilling to give up dating other women. Who/what do you need to stop dating?
8. You won’t build a team of friends. Anyone can hire from a resume. You need to find people you want to share life with. In the long run, great relationships will get you out of bed in the morning.
9. You won’t have the tough conversations. When breakdown happens (and it always does), someone needs to put on their big-boy pants and initiate the difficult conversation that leads to relational healing.
10. You’re afraid of failure. When fear consumes you, it will cause you to do stupid things. You’ll let negativity distract you. You’ll embrace the known, and grow comfortable with mediocrity. The more often you fail, though, the more often you’ll find success.

Here’s the deal. I don’t think this list is just about personal failure. This is about organizational failure (your ministry, your church plant, etc.). This is about business failure (your start up, your turnaround effort, etc.). This is about relational failure (your marriage, your dating relationship, etc.). The same principles apply.

Now it’s your turn. What else should be on the list? What are some other ingredients for failure you’ve experienced or witnessed? What would you add/delete from the list?

I have been reposting stuff from Swerve, Lifechuch.tv’s blog a lot lately but the posts have really good and timely so dive in on this one and let’s hear your thoughts.

Leading During Financially Challenging Times—1

This week, I’ll share a few thoughts about leading a ministry during shaky economic times.

Some have asked if I’m nervous about the church and the future. Although my financial strategy has slightly changed (with a potentially dramatic change), I am deeply confident and excited about the future.

When others are fearful, I’m confident for two main reasons:

1. Christ’s church is resilient. The church has survived persecution, poverty, terrorism, genocide, and wars. A slow or crippled economy will not destroy the church.
2. People will turn to Christ. In our prosperous country, people have never had to pray, “Give us today our daily bread…” because our cabinets have always been full of bread. In many ways, our blessings have interfered with a need for the Giver of the blessings. In hard times people will turn to Christ.

Instead of being paralyzed with fear, church leaders should be postured with faith for how God will use these rocky financial times.

Thoughts?

Repost from Swerve

Right Hand Team

Many leaders have a right-hand-man (or woman). To maximize your leadership effectiveness, I would suggest a right-hand-team.

For years, many churches that grew large enough had a senior pastor and his right-hand-man, the executive pastor. In my opinion, this is a dated and limited model of church leadership.

I suggest breaking the traditional “second spot” into two to four roles. I can’t tell you what those roles will be for you, but I’ll offer some broad suggestions.

Serving alongside the leader, you’ll probably want two to four team members that cover these roles:

• An administrative player. You’ll want to ensure someone is capable of building systems, structures, and accountability.
• A relational player. Hopefully you’ll have someone who is very good with people. This person could be an expert in recruiting, team building, pastoring, relational problem solving, or some combination of the above.
• An innovative player. In the best environment, you’ll have someone who is an idea-person. This team member is often young (but not necessarily). You’ll want to make sure this innovative mind isn’t rebellious and is a team player. When you find a person like this, she’ll be a great asset to your team.
• A stabilizing player. Most good teams have a person who can rise above the details and see the big picture. This person may not be the most visible, but is often one of the most important. He is someone who can bring objectivity and stability in the middle of challenges.

Jump into the discussion!

Repost form Swerve

Team Dynamics

In the early stages of ministry, I suggest you never make anyone a permanent member of a leadership team. Things change too quickly. Determine limited time periods for a leader to serve. You can always ask her to rejoin easier than you can ask her to leave.

When you’re building a team, you have to remember a team takes time to build. (When you determine you have a “wrong” player on the team, you must remove him sooner rather than later.)

You must be willing:

• To fight together. A team that can’t work through conflict will never be a team.
• To be loyal to the death. Even though you can fight behind closed doors, you ALWAYS stand together publicly. Disloyalty is never tolerated.
• To be transparent. If you can’t be brutally honest about everything, you don’t have a team.
• To care for each other. A team that is “all business” will eventually deteriorate. A ministry team must become a family.
• To have fun together. I always know a team is not healthy when I don’t hear them laughing often.

Thoughts?

This is a repost from Swerve

Team Leadership

I don’t like committees. Big groups of people rarely make the best decisions and often slow things down.

When I talk about leading as a team, I am NOT talking about ministry by committees.

On any good team, there is a head coach. Someone must be in charge. But if the coach is wise, he’ll build a team of coaches.

In any ministry, I suggest the following:

• One leader who is ultimately responsible for the direction of the ministry.
• Three to seven people who become some sort of a leadership team. (Two is not enough. Three drastically improves the dynamics. More than seven becomes bulky. For some reason, I like odd numbers.) This could be an advisory team, executive team, leadership team, directional team, or whatever suits your purposes.
• When possible, the people on the team should be a diversified group.
• Each person has an equal voice—but the leader reserves the right to make the final call. (On our team, it has been years since I have overridden the wisdom of the team. I still reserve the right at any time to make the hard call.)

More to come.

Thoughts?

Last week I posted some of Andy Stanley’s closing thought from Catalyst.  We discussed them for awhile at our Elders meeting Tuesday night.

“To reach people no one else is reaching, we have to do things no one else is doing.  We must become preoccupied with those you want to reach rather than those you are trying to keep.”

In Rochester there are about 35,000 people, and about 25 churches.  Bottom line, there are a lot of people who are not being reached.

What can we do that no one else is doing to reach them?

Are we committed to reaching the lost or satisfying the saints?

If we were to get into the head of those outside the church, what we would we want from the church?

I am a fairly simple guy.  I like things that are simple.  I don’t like a lot of fluff.  I have been in a lot of church in my 35 years of life.  I have read and about and studied even more.  The more I read and the more I study the more I just want to keep it simple.  We drift toward complexity.  We tend to make things more convoluted then they need to be.  I want to keep things simple in our church.  Everything we do need to revolve around 3 simple  loves.  Love God, Love Each Other, & Love The World.  With everything we do or think about doing, we need to bring it back to those three loves.  Will this “program, activity, guest speaker, small group, ministry, etc” help us to Love God? Love Each Other? Love The World?  If it isn’t helping us toward one of those loves we should let some other church do it.  Let’s keep things simple.

• First I want to say again a big “THANK YOU” to everyone for the outpouring of love and support last Sunday. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you
• Today was great, it awesome to see all the faces, this is becoming a nice trend.
• Worship was fun, great job everyone.
• Supernatural is drawing to a close, maybe one more, possible two weeks
• We hit the Holy Spirit today and hopefully it was information and transformational for everyone.
• The food pantry benefit is this Saturday, we hope to see you all there.
• It is so exciting to see all that God is doing in our church and I can’t wait to see what He does next.