Today is the 5th anniversary of one of the worst days of my life.

I was working at the Geek Squad at Best Buy (double time & a half!) when some old friends came in to tell me to call my mom. Immediately I knew something was wrong. I’m pretty sure I called every phone number she’s ever had before my fingers finally typed in the correct number. My mom picked up and, voice quivering, told me my dad had died completely unexpectedly.
(more…)

“The Church may be the most leadership intensive organization in all the world.”

I’ve been reading John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and that quote stuck out to me…and I completely agree with it.

It’s hard to work with volunteers because you have little to no leverage. You don’t hold their well-being in your hands. You aren’t the key to that next promotion. Sometimes you’re little more than an acquaintance. And you still have to lead and ask more from them than they’re readily willing to give.

It’s a huge leadership challenge.

But it’s worth it.

I can’t think of many things better than seeing a volunteer connect into an area of passion. Watching volunteers grow and take ownership of the mission of the Church is incredible. If you’re not asking your people to give – and to give much – then you’re missing out on so many opportunities and so many things God wants to use to raise up His people.

How does it feel to be used as part of God’s plan for His people?

I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

In production leadership, and ministry in general, it’s not uncommon to fear not having enough volunteers. In fact, you may have already noticed something: we’ll never have enough volunteers.

At least not enough to make us comfortable.

Confident, yes.
Effective, yes.
Comfortable, probably not.

So what do we do? We set the bar low and beg anyone we can to help. It’s a natural reaction. We can’t find enough high-capacity, passionate volunteers to help us with our ministry so we lower our expectations and beg people to help us. And while this may make us fully staffed, it doesn’t make us good. In fact, it is a recipe for disaster. Here are 3 common problems and their solutions.
(more…)

Ok. So have you ever looked back on college and laughed? I just did that. This is my Senior Research Project for my Electronic Media degree. I entitled it:

The Revolution will be visualized: a research study of media in church worship.

Although, I didn’t write well (probably still don’t), the content in there is really interesting…especially for you visual worship guys. Enjoy. (more…)

I had a great lunch today with Kent Boyd, my production director at our Dalton Campus. We got together to talk about something that I’ve noticed in the past few weeks.

As I’ve moved from leading volunteers directly into leading leaders (who lead volunteers), I’ve become more disconnected from the daily lives of the volunteers.

For some reason, it took me by surprise. I really don’t know why. It shouldn’t have. In fact it makes complete sense. The problem is that when I became disconnected from the daily lives of my volunteers, my ability to care for them decreased. So we had a good long discussion about deliberately trying to care for our volunteers. It can’t be driven by my personality or ability to “catch” when someone is hurting. We have to make sure that we’re being deliberate and asking the right questions – the system to care for people has to be in place. Why did this take so long?

Think about it this way. As churches, we typically know where every dime gets spent. We spend hours and hours budgeting and planning and tracking and reporting about our finances – whole teams are devoted to managing the budget and to making sure we’re being good stewards of those resources. How much time and resources do we spend stewarding our people?

I let this happen to me recently. A volunteer was not meshing well in her new role and I let it slip. She didn’t tell me, but if I had been around to ask her she probably would have told me. She lost the vision, got burnt out and no longer comes to church regularly.

It hurts.

I really believe that God cares more about the one person who fell through the cracks than your whole budget.