Scaling up.

When I was at Orange Conference back in 2011, I sat in a workshop called “The Replacement Plan,” led by Terry Scalzitti of First Baptist Church of Fort Lauderdale. The gist of his workshop was about developing a good strategy of replacing yourself in your leadership role.

While I’m no longer a big fan of the term “replacing yourself,” the concept is a strong one, and it’s important for us to recognize its usage and instill its mindset in our ministries. Now, rather than rehash what’s contained in Terry’s talk on “replacing yourself,” I’d like to go into some of what’s come out as implicational thoughts as my executive pastor and I talked through implementation and what it might look like in our context (though in all honesty, our conversation was pretty generic, so our application could conceivably be another church’s application as well).

If you want to learn about “replacing yourself,” you can listen to a podcast here.

For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to refer to “replacing yourself” as “scaling up” from now on. The reason is that there’s a connotation that by replacing yourself, you’re leaving the organization. While that may be true, the likelier scenario is that you’re taking on new responsibilities and are no longer able to carry out the tasks that were once yours. As your ministry grows, it becomes necessary to think through how you’re going to scale your ministry to handle the growth. The best way to do that is by creating a culture of “shoulder tapping” (as my exec pastor calls it).

The idea is to build into your ministry the mindset that no one is doing what they’re doing alone. Always be on the lookout for someone whom you can invite to work alongside you and learn from what you’re doing.

Now, the longer you’re in a ministry, the more internally focused you become. What I mean is this: if you’re the leader of your children’s ministry, your immediate circle of influence is the core team that helps manage your larger team. For those people, their immediate circles of influence are the people on their teams. For the people on those teams, their immediate circles of influence could very well reside outside your ministry.

If everyone at every level of your ministry developed the mindset that you’re all scaling up, the task of shoulder tapping is one that invites people to new levels of ministry. In our children’s ministry, here’s what it might look like.

If every team member at ground level (teachers, caregivers, storytellers, etc.) were to invite someone along to serve with them, we’d have no need to recruit new KidMin team members from the main stage. At the next level, each member of the core leadership team invites someone from his/her team to work alongside him/her to develop as a potential replacement as that leader begins to move towards new roles and responsibilities. And then my responsibility is to take someone from the core leadership team and show that person what it’s like to handle my tasks, thus freeing me up to engage the ministry at a new level.

Growing in a healthy manner requires that you shoulder tap. If you want to develop sustainability, you want to always be in the mindset of apprenticing someone to do what you do so that you can have the freedom to care for your ministry in new ways.

(Many thanks to my executive pastor for the ongoing conversation he’s having with me about the concept and model of “shoulder tapping.”)

Those big Sundays.

I don’t know if you’re in the same situation that I’m in, and if you’re not, I apologize ahead of time for how this post may come across. I hope you understand that I’m not bragging, nor am I complaining about comparatively small issues. We all serve in churches of different sizes—big, medium, and small—each with its own set of challenges.

This past Sunday we had a children’s ministry attendance of almost 200. We’re not a large church, but we’re certainly not a small one either. Our building was designed with a certain number in mind, and we’re approaching that number faster than I had anticipated. Our rapid growth has been tough to navigate, and although our KidMin team is growing, it’s not growing quickly enough to keep up with how rapidly our attendance is growing. We’re also running into space issues. A few of our classrooms are becoming very crowded at our peak services.

I’m grasping at straws once again to come up with solutions to accommodate the size of our ministry given our space constraints. Do I rearrange the age groups again? Do I have enough separate rooms to create a new class in order to alleviate the crowding in some of the rooms? How do I organize my teams in order to have the best spread across our services for staffing needs?

I often find myself wrestling with these types of questions: questions that are more concerned with management and operation than with vision and trajectory. But it’s tough to think about that bigger picture when you’re constantly thinking to yourself, Sunday’s coming. You’d better be ready for anything.

I think it’s okay to live in that tension though. There will be seasons where I have to manage, and there will be seasons where I get to inspire and cast vision. Learning to live in the middle—never losing sight of the vision, but never getting the ministry to transcend the need for management—helps to keep me grounded while still offering me the freedom to soar.

Those big Sundays will hit you, and you’ll have to spend a few weeks managing, sorting, fixing, and tuning. But if you can keep the bigger picture in view, you’ll soon find yourself building, growing, and soaring.

Lessons I’m learning as a young leader.

I’m 28 years old, and I’ve been in vocational ministry for less than 5 years. I’ve learned quite a few lessons along the way, and I know I’m bound to learn many more as I continue to grow. But I wanted to share a handful of lessons that I’ve learned these last couple years, some of which I learned in just the last couple weeks (and that I wish I’d learned much sooner).

Prioritize character building. I have to admit, I’ve lived a pretty dichotomous lifestyle over the years, fueled in no small part by my 17 years spent in fundamentalism. I used to think that I could live one way in one area of my life and a different way in another area. But having been set free from fundamentalism 6 years ago, it’s time I stopped living like I were still there. (It’s also time I stopped blaming fundamentalism for all my problems.)

Whether you’re in ministry or some other kind of leadership, character-building is vitally important. When you’re in leadership, all sides of your life get scrutinized more and more as your capacity, skills, and time in leadership grow. Shore up every aspect of your life. As my executive pastor told me last week, “Everything you say and do is shaping people’s perception of you,” so ask yourself, “What kind of person do you want people to view you as?”

Pragmatically speaking, it’s kind of like being your own PR representative. Take stock of what you’re allowing people to see about you. Now, I’m not advocating hiding sin (in fact, any sin should be brought to light in the safety of godly community that you trust will help you grow in responding to God’s love and reflecting his image more clearly), but I am saying that you need to pay attention to what should be public and what should be private. Here’s an example from my own life: I enjoy a wide variety of things. My friends know this about me; I like everything ranging from NJ Devils hockey to taking brewery tours to James Bond movies to collecting comic books (DC over Marvel any day!). But while it’s good to enjoy those things and even have friends I can share those aspects of my life with, is that the person I want my ministry teams to view me as? The parents who send their kids to my programs? The congregation at large?

As a ministry leader, I should want to be defined not by my favorite sports teams, movies, video games, novels, or other hobbies; but by the work that God has called me to do. That means putting my priorities in order and publicizing those things that will positively mold people’s perception of me.

In Ephesians 4:1, Paul writes, “I…urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received.” Again, in 1 Thessalonians 2:12, he writes, “We encouraged, comforted, and implored each one of you to walk worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” And once more, in Philippians 1:27, he writes, “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”

What am I presenting to people as “me”?

Be hungry for development. My executive pastor gave a leadership workshop at a conference last week where he talked about different aspects of solid developing leaders (particularly in a ministry setting), and one of those aspects is that he/she is a “hungry self developer.” In ministry, the landscape is constantly shifting, leaders’ roles are always evolving, and the pace of these changes is extremely rapid. As ministry leaders, we need to grow, evolve, and change along with the ministries that we lead. Since it’s about caring for people’s spiritual needs, it’s never the same thing twice, so we need to always widen our skills and the foundational knowledge base that we’re drawing from.

Read books. Lots of books. From authors with different perspectives. As a leader in children’s ministry, the books I read are by people like Reggie Joiner, Dr. Michelle Anthony, Voddie Baucham, Jim Wideman, Sue Miller, and Timothy Paul Jones. None of them resides on the same side of arguments, but developing a broad perspective and understanding different viewpoints is crucial to being an effective leader in your area of ministry.

Get a coach. Maybe even two. Jim Wideman has a coaching program. My coach is with a group called Dynamic Children’s Ministry. I also maintain an open mentoring relationship with the family ministries director from my previous church (who’s led children’s and family ministries for over 15 years). Coaching relationships are vital because each person has a ceiling to their own growth and development as a leader, but if you truly desire to excel in your area of work or ministry, you’ll want to do everything in your power to learn from those who are more experienced than you are.

Take responsibility for your mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. And the more intrepid and passionate you are, the more mistakes you’ll make. But the worst things you can do are shifting blame, making excuses, and laughing it off. Own up to your mistakes. No, it’s not easy, and I can tell you from experience that my natural response is to make excuses for my mistakes. But the sooner you take responsibility for your mistakes, the sooner you can learn from them, grow from them, and use them to strengthen your ministry. When you take responsibility, you’re exhibiting humility in your lifestyle. When you don’t, you’re exhibiting immaturity and losing credibility, and you’ll be unable to learn from them.

It’s not easy for me to admit, but over the course of these first few years in full-time ministry, I’ve made one mistake after another, each one having potentially greater impact than the previous. But I’ve made them, they’re mine, and I hope I have learned from them so that I can take the ministry God has entrusted to me to new heights.

Talk almost never. As a young leader, I don’t have a whole lot to contribute to our staff meetings other than updates on how my ministry is going and potential solutions to problems within my ministry. What I do have a lot of is stuff to learn. That’s why I’ve decided that my default posture in meetings is listening. I’ll offer input and thoughts from time to time, but almost everyone else in the room has many more years of experience than I do.

I read a lot. I have a lot that goes on in my mind, and I know that I’m probably fairly intelligent. As a young leader I often feel like I have something to prove, so it’s very tempting to open my mouth and spray all the pertinent information I’ve gathered at everyone sitting around the table. No, it’s not easy to hold my tongue, but as a developing leader, it’s far more important that I learn from my fellow staff members than it is for me to offer my thoughts.

“Know thyself.” The Greek aphorism gnōthi seauton reminds us to reflect on who we are. I was meeting with my lead pastor a couple weeks ago, and he reminded me that this stage of my life is a time of growth and searching as I discover the type of leader God has wired me to become. I need to learn my strengths and weaknesses. I need to pay attention to what fires me up. I need to know my personality and leadership style.

My lead pastor often talks about “getting into your lane.” What he means is that over time, you should be growing into a role that fits all aspects of your personality, leadership style, strengths, and passions. That’s where you’ll shine as a leader. But if you don’t take time early on to discover those things about you, you’ll never “get into your lane.”

I could probably go on ad nauseam with dozens more lessons that I’ve learned, and I may devote a few more blog posts to them. But these are some of the most important things I’ve been learning lately, and I hope you’ll take them to heart as you develop your own leadership skills. Leadership is a never-ending learning and growing process that is often very painful. So be patient with yourself (which is another good lesson in itself) and allow God to work in your life as you grow into the leader he is designing you to be.

Leading a Children’s Ministry – Part 3: Leadership Styles

Part of leading a team well is knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and gifts. The combination of your specific traits can determine your leadership style, and your leadership style will influence the kinds of people you’ll likely work best with.

According to Alan E. Nelson, founder of KidLead, there are four major leadership styles to be aware of.

The first is the Director. The Director is often the style most associated with leadership. He/she has clarity of vision, is decisive, and often has a dominant personality. He/she is the “natural-born leader.” But along with those strengths come a few growth areas. Directors can often come across as bossy and abrasive, and they can become impatient fairly easily.

The second is the Inspirer. The Inspirer is someone who has the unique ability to motivate people and build team excitement. They’re passionate and charismatic, and they are good at helping their teams accomplish great things. Their growth areas lie in organization and commitment. Inspirers are often disorganized and fickle, and their excitement about something has a tendency to overwhelm strategy. They also have a tendency to hop from one project to another, leaving a wake of unfinished projects in their paths.

The third is the Strategist. The Strategist is very focused. He/she is excellent at developing good plans and is thoughtful and methodical. He/she is also not likely to get bogged down The Strategist’s growth area is that he/she can be paralyzed by over-analyzing his/her plan and sometimes takes too long to pull the trigger on a solution to a problem.

The fourth is the Collaborator. The Collaborator is a very patient leader. He/she is good at incorporating others into the mix and has the ability to get people to work together well. Collaborators often need to grow in their ability to face conflict, courage in taking risks, and in their laziness.

Odds are that you find some of your own strengths and weaknesses somewhere in this list. The challenge will be to harness them and to find people who can complement you. Are you an Inspirer? You might need a Director on your team to bring clarity to the project while you build the team. Are you a Strategist? You might need a Collaborator to bring together a group of people to execute your plan. Whatever your gifts, get to know your skills, strengths, and weaknesses so that you can surround yourself with the right kinds of teammates.

Leading a Children’s Ministry – Part 2: Leading Up

Leading a children’s ministry requires a healthy dose of humility. But you already knew that. Yet for some reason we don’t always act that way. Here’s what I mean.

In churches across the country ministries fight for everything from budget space to resources to volunteers to stage time. This fighting could be symptomatic of a systemic problem within the church, and more often than not the problem begins at the “top” (senior leadership) with a lack of vision clarity; however, there are things you can do as the children’s ministry leader to help alleviate some of the symptoms of the problem.

I’ve heard quite a few children’s ministry leaders talk about how their lead pastors don’t support their ministry, aren’t willing to make compromises for them, don’t offer assistance, etc. So many of these issues can be resolved by simply getting to know your lead pastor. I’m fortunate in my circumstance that I often see things the same way that my lead pastor does. While we have different personalities, we have similar leadership styles, prejudices, likes, and dislikes. We often see eye-to-eye on things. You may not have that benefit, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily difficult to connect well with your lead pastor.

First, always make the vision of the church your dominant priority. At Emergence, our vision is to see people discipled into men and women who are loving Jesus, loving people, and plowing a counterculture. So the question I asked myself is this: how does that vision statement flesh out in children’s ministry? Working with the vision of your church community at large communicates to your pastor that you’re prioritizing the unity of the church that he’s leading. After all, he’s not just your boss. He’s your leader and your shepherd.

Second, pay attention to your pastor’s personality and leadership style. If his style of leadership is that of a director, it’s likely that he’ll come across as abrasive or bossy, but you need to understand that it’s because he’s decisive and headstrong. He has a clear understanding of his vision and knows what it takes to attain it. If his leadership style is that of an inspirer, he’ll probably be disorganized and fickle, but that’s because he values motivation, charisma, and team building above other things. It’s also important to know what your leadership style is as well so that you can discern how you’ll best work with him.

Third, initiate updates on how things are going in your ministry. Don’t wait for him to ask about your ministry, or worse yet, wait for him to find out about a problem and approach you about it. Always offer updates. Your lead pastor is likely too busy to remember that he needs to get an update from you, but if you approach him with updates on your ministry, he’ll be more at peace about what’s going on.

Fourth, bring solutions with your problems. If you have an issue going on in your ministry that requires your lead pastor’s input, have a solution prepared. It may not be as good as his, or it might not be the correct solution, but having solutions prepared ahead of time communicates that you aren’t going to waste his time by assigning him tasks to accomplish.

Fifth, find ways to have your pastor interact with your ministry. For instance, if he says something particularly insightful during a staff meeting, ask him to share those same thoughts with your own leadership team during your team meeting. It shows that you value his input and that you’re learning from his lessons.

You might think of these things as sucking up to your boss, but that’s not true. Sucking up is about ingratiating yourself with your employer. Leading up is about getting on the same page as your superior and understanding his needs, desires, and prejudices so that the church can flourish. And that’s a goal you both can get on board for.

Leading a Children’s Ministry – Part 1

One of the lessons I learned fairly early on in my career is that you can’t lead a children’s ministry well if you’re in the children’s ministry. You can’t work on something if you’re working in it.

There are quite a few children’s ministry leaders that I’ve met who are frustrated because they feel like the ministry has grown far beyond their capacity. “I can’t handle all these kids!” is an all-too-common cry for help. The problem is that as attendance grows, the ministry isn’t scaling properly to accommodate that growth.

Most—if not all—children’s ministry leaders take on their roles because of their love for kids. And that’s extremely important! If we didn’t love kids, we wouldn’t be very good at our jobs, would we?

But a love for children isn’t the most important quality a children’s ministry leader should possess. He/she needs to be a leader. And, as tough a truth as it may be to accept, the children’s ministry leader is not a leader of children. Well, not directly at least. Your role is to lead the teachers of the children, not the children themselves. And as your ministry grows, your team of teachers will need to grow as well, and once again, you’ll have to reevaluate your ministry’s structure.

I’ll use my ministry as an example. We’re a pretty young church (the primary demographic right now is made up of people in their mid- to late-twenties), so our children’s ministry is relatively small in relation to our adult attendance. We have close to 200 children from birth to 5th grade. While that number is somewhat small, it’s still far too big for me to handle if I were trying to teach them all myself. So naturally, there are teachers in those rooms to care for the kids. Since we have three services with children’s ministry, we have a team of 90 caregivers, teachers, administrators, storytellers, etc., to operate the ministry each Sunday. I’d be foolish if I thought I could lead and care for all 90 of them well. But thanks to a little life lesson from Moses’ father-in-law Jethro (see Exodus 18), I have a core team of 8 team leads who handle each of the teams.

So what does that mean for me? That means that I pour myself into leading those 8 team leads well. That’s a much more manageable task. My role is to develop, care for, and lead those 8 people who will in turn lead their teams of teachers, caregivers, and storytellers.

I think it’s easy for us as children’s ministry leaders to lock ourselves into a particular role because we enjoy a certain age group or because we’re good at a certain job. Here’s an example. For a while I locked myself into the large group storyteller role. Why? Because it was something I enjoyed doing, elementary was my favorite age group to work with, and I was good at teaching large group. But in tying myself to that role, I was neglecting other parts of the ministry that needed attention, and even though elementary large group was thriving, the ministry as a whole was suffering.

How does this look on Sundays? I like to practice what my leadership coach calls “Hallway Leadership.” Alan Nelson lists a similar item in his “10 Commandments of Leadership” (part of a workshop he led at CPC 2013)—”Thou shalt lead by wandering around.” On Sundays, wander the halls of your children’s ministry environment. That’s where you’ll be most effective. It’s not in the classroom. That’s where you’ll be least effective. And while you’re wandering around, keep this in mind: you’re there to assess how well the service is going, encourage your team members, and take advantage of opportunities to teach and train.

Reworking this blog

So, I’m in the process of changing this blog a bit. I’m going through some transitions in my life and work, and this is a perfect opportunity to try to be more faithful to writing on this blog more regularly and developing some material that could really help you as a reader of this blog.