Category: Church Leadership

Episode 058: An Interview with Jimmy Mellado

In this episode Pastor Brady sits down with Jimmy Mellado, the president of Compassion International, for a wide-ranging interview on his background, the sources of poverty, and the challenges of leadership.

 

 

My mom said to me, “When someone grows up in poverty, they never think it is going to be a benefit to their children… and yet I can see how my growing up in poverty impacted not only you in a positive way, but is using it to be central to your life’s calling [to serve the poor]…”

 

We [at Compassion] are a church-equipping ministry… we believe that the strategy that Jesus invented of discipleship through a local church is in fact the best strategy to release anyone in any circumstance from poverty…

 

When we talk to pastors [in central American countries], we’ve learned that they’ve earned the respect of gang leaders, because the gang leaders don’t want their kids doing what they’re doing… so they’ve declared Compassion sites “no violence” zones…

 

Life in leadership is hard; life in leadership alone is impossible… I have to do life in community… I used to do mentoring groups with pastors, and on average 70% of them would say they didn’t have one friend that they could be fully disclosing with…

 

In my experience, as you lead over the long haul, you’ll either end up with a cynical heart, a hard heart, or a soft heart, and how you design your life will take you down one of those three paths…

 

The most important contribution you will make to the kingdom of heaven is not anything you do, but who you are becoming… I can’t stress that enough… that doesn’t mean we don’t care about results… “doing” matters a lot… but it is not more important than “being” in Christ…

 

A spiritual discipline can be any activity that you have dedicated to the Lord to either stop the natural flow of sin in your life, or increase the flow of the fruit of the Spirit in your life… spiritual disciplines help you do what you cannot do by “trying” alone…

 

Life will give you a lot of pop quizzes, and if you try to make the right decision when you get a character pop quiz, you’ll probably fail… you need to try to pre-decide how you’re going to handle the character pop quizzes that come your way…

Episode 057: The Pastoral Workweek

In this episode we sit down to talk about the central tasks of pastoral ministry and how to delegate and manage your time accordingly.

 

 

I have to do three things: lead the team, teach and preach, and be a shepherd to the congregation that’s in front of me… it’s hard to put a percentage to those things… the demands of people cannot be scheduled or predicted…

 

I tend to spend a lot of my time leading… 5-8 hours I spend studying for content for sermons… the rest of my time is available to pastor the congregation, to be present with them…

 

I try to keep track of ratios… generally I’m spending twice as much time on staff as I am on congregants… on an average week I might have four or so congregant meetings, and twelve or so staff-related meetings…

 

Most pastors that I coach have a hard time saying no, which means that the tyranny of the urgent tends to rob them…

 

What’s different about our job is how much content we have to create… most CEOs and leaders of small businesses might have to speak 4-6 times a year… we do that in a WEEK…

 

The pastoral vocation requires us to come up with so much creative content while also giving out so much emotional energy, which makes our job different from any other job on the planet, and most pastors don’t know how to manage that space and their energy…

 

For me, I have to think bigger than “sermon prep”… there’s something deeper than just preparing “the talk”… we have to cultivate a life from which messages emerge… we have to enrich the soil from which future messages will spring…

 

An older pastor once said to me, “Brady, don’t drown under the weight of people’s love… if you’re not able to say no to good things, you will drown under the weight of their love for you…”

 

The greatest gauge for me on whether I’m managing my schedule right is whether there is joy… I want to end my week with a certain sense of joy… if I can’t be joyful at home because of what work costs me, then something has to shift…

Episode 052: Leading From The Middle

In this episode we discuss the opportunities and challenges of leading “from the middle” of an organization. How do we become catalysts for health, creativity, and even vision when we don’t occupy the so-called “first chair”?

 

 

There’s a whole band of leadership that takes place “from the middle” where we are leading “upward” to those we report to, “downward” to those under our charge, and “laterally” among peers on the org. chart… we can be agents of change in that space…

 

We believe that vision can come from different places in the organization… Pastor Brady has prepared the way for that… it requires a leader who is willing to do that, to extent the trust, and people who can be trusted…

 

A lot of the work of leading from the middle is the work of translation… you have to be able to relay the feeling on the ground upward, but you also have to be able to take the 35,000 foot view and translate it downward…

 

I want to always remind the leader above me that I know they are in charge so that they never have to wonder about it… there’s a deference that we need to show…

 

Give the leader above you a document that they can edit… propose something, come open-handed, and let the leader above you make a good decision…

 

When no one is trying to win at the other’s expense, everything is fine… it takes all the fear out of the room…

 

Brady has created opportunities for us to practice our craft, giving us covering without always imposing… he’s given us space to practice and fail and has wisdom right there when we need it…

 

The goal on a team is not consensus, the goal is collaboration… for that to happen, everyone needs a voice… if they can weigh in, they can buy in…

 

Don’t squander the opportunity while you’re waiting for the first chair… are you pouting as we wait, or are you actually leading as though this is the place Jesus has planted you, and doing it with everything in you…?

 

And don’t assume that you actually want the first chair… as long as the Lord asks you to wait, wait…

Episode 050: The Pastor As A Student

In this episode we sit down to talk about the pastor as a student. Why is it important that a pastor be an ongoing learner, and what does that look like?

 

 

One of the traps for a pastor is to only listen to your peers, to people who are right where you are… we need input that is qualitatively greater than our output…

 

We are those who have been entrusted with a message… for pastors, our work is words… so much of our life and ministry lives at the level of perception… that means that the pastor is the ‘first student’ in the congregation…

 

It’s too easy to let the culture at large co-opt our language, where our words all of a sudden carry meanings that wouldn’t have resonated with followers of Christ 1500 years ago… so we’re fighting for an accurate perception of God’s world as it lives at the level of language…

 

We need to be a student because our faith is a received faith… we shouldn’t be the first ones to talk this way about God…

 

In terms of a study rhythm, a lot of us try to keep the mornings open to read, write, or take notes on something… the trick is to devote a few hours a week to study that is not sermon-related…

 

When all you’re doing is taking in and then cranking content back out, it becomes functional and utilitarian… I feel a displeasure in my soul over that… it’s important to submit yourself to the pleasure of reading and learning that is not directly useful to your preaching…

 

All of our learning goes somewhere… we’ve been entrusted with the most beautiful story in the world, you need to tell it beautifully… we submit ourselves to the wordsmiths so that we can tell the story well… I don’t want to tell the greatest story in a mechanical or sleepy way…

 

The enemy of so much of this is our phones… I used to wander around the office with a book, but now I’m [on my phone] scanning Twitter… something is taking up our time… we need to be proactive and choose sources that nourish us, since we are giving out so much…

 

Don’t just read the stuff that’s been written in the last 15 years or so… access the ancients because they are there for you… that’s part of how we sit at the feet of the great cloud of witnesses…

Episode 049: When Is It Time To Resign?

In this episode we sit down to talk about what qualifies and disqualifies a person for ministry. How do you know when it’s time to resign? What kinds of structure and culture do we need to have in our churches to keep them and those who lead them healthy over time?

 

 

God is not after perfection, but he is after holiness… I’m concerned that we’ve lowered the standards of holiness in the church… which means we’re holding leaders everywhere else in our culture to lower standards…

 

In our media-driven culture, we no longer look to 1stTimothy 3 and Titus 1… instead we ask, “Can this person light the stage up?”

 

We made a decision here at New Life that when we ask a guest speaker to come to our conference or church or to impart to our people in any way, we are asking, “Is their character intact?” Sometimes that has meant we don’t invite people…

 

The problem is there are fewer and fewer spiritual moms and dads in the church… we have a lot of young men and women leading the church now with no spiritual moms and dads in their lives…

 

What holds the church together over time is lives that are rooted in Christ Jesus… genuinely righteous lives… if you don’t have those kinds of folks in leadership, the thing will ultimately blow apart…

 

When you have unrepentant sin in your life, where you get caught and you aren’t repentant… where you made efforts to hide it, conceal it, to live a double life… that is a sign that something is really broken inside of you and you need to step away…

 

The world is watching…. and one of the reasons the church has lost so much influence in the culture is that we have not handled our scandals well…

 

Abuses of sex, money, and power are disqualifiers… but also heresy… knowing that you are wrong but continuing to teach it… all of a sudden these people becomes apostles of a new theological movement, standing against the great tradition and doing it defiantly… when you catch a pastor in this kind of condition, it’s time for them to resign…

 

You can scour the documents of the early church all you want, and you won’t find a coordinated evangelistic strategy… mostly the church leaders minded the integrity of their common life… when we mind the integrity of our common life, it’s actually our best ‘growth’ strategy…  

 

Churches that do not have clear government structures inside and outside, I would avoid… a church that doesn’t have a discernible network of elders within and a discernible group on the outside that can hold it to account—chances are it won’t be safe long term…

Episode 048: Starting The Year Out Right

In this episode, we sit down to talk about how to start the congregational year out on the right foot. What should we do? What should we not do? How can January poise us for what the Lord wants to do in our churches over the next 11 months?

 

 

For us, we believe that starting the year out with worship, prayer, and the presence of the Lord does something for the rest of the year in the life of our church… if you can start the year in a holy way, the chances of you finishing in a holy way greatly increase…

 

The essence of the gospel is a new start… we always get a second chance… January gives you a chance to start over and get fresh wind in your sails…

 

Praying churches produce spiritual fruit, and if you’re not praying, then a lot of energy is going to be wasted over the course of the year… when we’re praying, it feels like we do more with less…

 

The right time to teach your church to pray is before a crisis happens… New Life was able to survive its dark seasons because it was a praying church before those seasons…

 

Some of the best prayer meetings that I have been in have been the ones that were stripped of everything and all you had was your naked longing for God… God moves on meetings like that…

 

When people know that their pastors and leaders are willing to sacrifice, are willing to fast and pray, they will show up…

 

There’s a difference between being planned and being produced… we have an idea of the songs we’re going to sing and who is going to lead… but once the service starts, we are saying “Come, Holy Spirit” and we really don’t know what’s going to happen next…

 

I like the fact that these meetings are organic, that we can call audibles… you can feel the room respond to the spontaneity of it…

 

This time of year is the wrong time to try to grow the church… this is the time to build depth and strengthen your core… we need to go deep so that when we go wide later, it can sustain itself…

 

The rest of the year is about to get very busy… if you’re going to add more events at the first of the year, don’t wear your staff out… this needs to benefit them… they’re going to have to empty their cups in the next few months… this is a time for them to fill their cups…

Episode 044: The Pastor in Relationship

In this episode, we sit down to talk about the kinds of relationships pastors need to cultivate in order to live and lead from a healthy place.

 

This is particularly tricky for young pastors or church planters… on one level, this is the last question you think about – who’s leading me, who’s caring for me?

 

Part of the reason this is so tricky is that there’s a power differential here… it can make it tricky to know what you’re seeing with people… are people drawing near to us because they care for us, or because they need us?

 

Only recently have I begun to think about the kinds of relationships I need… it’s not just about “having friends”… maybe we need to think of the pastor like Frodo Baggins… on the quest, you need several different kinds of people around you…

 

We need relationships inside the community certainly, but also relationships outside the community in order to stay healthy… keeping this in the right balance is crucial…

 

There’s already a distance between the pulpit and the pew in the very first interaction that people have with us… sometimes we unwittingly increase that gap… but we can also intentionally decrease that distance…

 

A spiritual director is someone that you see not exclusively when you’re in crisis… they are someone to help you see and pay attention to what is going on in your life, and even to bear witness to that…

 

What happens to us when we don’t have real relationships is that we become a parody of ourselves… we start being our persona and cease being the person God made us to be…

 

The fruits of the Holy Spirit are still the best index of whether or not we are healthy…

 

Episode 041: The Art of Making Big Decisions – Eight Questions to Ask

In this episode, we sit down to discuss eight questions leaders should ask themselves as they follow the Lord’s leading through big decisions.

 

 

[You can see Pastor Brady’s Eight Questions at the bottom of the podcast notes. If you are able, it might be helpful to view these while listening!]

 

I’m finding that seminaries are turning out great preachers and teachers… but by their own admission they have fallen short in preparing young men and women for the entrepreneurial [aspects of pastoring]… A lot of pastors make big mistakes that cost them equity with their congregations…

 

A lot of people have a “good idea” and THEN they pray about it… it can be hard to talk yourself out of a good idea… the best ideas come when we are in prayer—they don’t start with us…

 

I need to check my motives and be self-aware… what is motivating me to do this… is God really leading me to do this…? In Acts, the Scripture says that “it seemed good to them,” and then they prayed some more…

 

I know God is leading me to do it when I can’t do it on my own, when it requires faith, when it is scary and unsettling… when there is a peace about hearing his voice and a terror about following it through…

 

We have brilliant people at New Life that understand systems, structures, and budgets… they’re not there to throw a wet blanket on the plan… plans get tested in the fires of community and scrutiny…

 

One of the ways that God confirms that he is calling you to do something is that he sends you the people you need to do it with you… often, pastors have great ideas but not the right people to execute them…

 

A lot of young leaders get hijacked in this process… does the leader have the right TEAM around them… we don’t see any missionary journeys in the New Testament where people go alone… they go out two by two… even the Apostle Paul needed a team…

 

Do you have a plan to communicate the need? If you’re embarrassed about talking about money, then you’re not going to do anything big for the Lord…

 

Often, even after all is said and done, the Lord will say “Not yet…” We don’t always see everything that’s going on, so we need to learn to trust those little “pauses”… this is about taking the finalized plan and laying it at the altar one last time…

 

Knowing what the “win” is ahead of time will give you clarity and help you celebrate…

 

The Art of Making Big Decisions

Eight Questions

1 – Have we prayed?

2 – Is God leading us to do this?

3 – Do we have the right vision or plan?

4 – Do we have the right leader?

5 – Do we have the right team?

6 – Do we have enough money?

7 – Is this the right time?

8 – What is the win? Why are we doing this?

Episode 038: A Conversation with Clayton King

For this conversation, we sit down with Clayton King and discuss the leadership structure of Newspring Church and the value of healthy confrontation.

 

 

http://www.essentialchurchconference.com/

 

We have lead pastors, teaching pastors, and campus pastors… each one of our campuses has a campus pastor who handles the day-in and day-out and preaches occasionally…

 

Our lead pastors—there are four: a pastor of culture and vision, a pastor of ministries, a pastor of finances and facilities, and a pastor of campuses—serve together in a lead pastor role…

 

Then we have three teaching pastors who preach and teach and create the series’ we’re going to go through…

 

The team approach is a beautiful thing for us because it forces us to submit our egos to the Holy Spirit; you can’t hide from ego in that kind of space…

 

The system is important, but it’s really the goodness of the people that makes the system work…

 

There’s nothing like personal integrity… it is indispensable… for us, what we’ve learned is that the Holy Spirit wants to bring unity… and while there isn’t a model prescribed in Scripture, there are some bedrock principles…

 

One of the decisions we made after our change was that we were going to quit reporting our numbers… we wanted to be more focused on discipling and shepherding our people… We changed the culture so that our pastors and shepherds were part of the family…

 

We’re also more open to the Holy Spirit… his presence and gifts… we’ve sensed a fresh wind and fire, a revival, where we’re seeing people healed at our gatherings, where we’re praying over and for people and sharing prophetic words…

 

We are not telling people “This is the only way to do church”; we are saying, “This is what the Holy Spirit has told us to do…”

 

Every church has opportunities to make changes… and we should seize those opportunities… but don’t make them quickly or out of panic… don’t get in a hurry… slow down, take your time, and labor before the Lord… and God’s church will prevail…

 

When you embrace healthy confrontation, while it is hard in the beginning, eventually it becomes normal… once an ego has been exposed, bruised, and then recovers, as a team we’re less likely to get hurt or take offense… it’s a maturing process…

 

http://www.claytonking.com/

Episode 034: Reflections on Willow Creek

For this conversation, we discuss the situation at Willow Creek and how this should cause us to reflect and pay attention in a deeper way.

 

This situation should cause us to reflect and pay attention in a deeper way…

 

There are three groups of people here: the victims, the congregation, and Bill and the leadership—it’s important to separate those groups of people, and each group needs special attention…

 

But it starts first with those who were violated… those victims need to be listened to and given every opportunity to heal… they need our primary attention…

 

The first thing the new leadership must do is re-establish trust and credibility, or they won’t be able to help anyone… they need to slow down and simplify…

 

At New Life [after our crises], we cleared our calendars, stopped doing outside events, and became a church family again… for us, it was about prayer, worship, Scripture, and sacraments…

 

What I would say to Willow Creek is that you don’t know how hurt you are right now… take some time, take a deep breath, and do a full evaluation before you move ahead…

 

There are some systemic problems in the American church culture… number one: pastors are not designed or called by God to be celebrities… the moment we embrace a celebrity culture in the church we are headed for a train wreck… it has to stop…

 

We have a lot of orphans that are leading churches who haven’t learned how to be sons and daughters… you can’t be a mom or a dad before you’ve been a son or a daughter… in the church, we’ve skipped this step…

 

If your first thought is “We have to protect the church” you are in huge error… the call is not to protect the institution but to help people get healed… Jesus was not interested in guarding the religious institutions of his day, he was interested in bringing healing… if it cost the institution, then so be it…

 

If you think about the parable of the lost sheep, the 99 represented the economic good of the shepherd… Jesus was willing to risk the institution of the 99 for the sake of the one… if Jesus is the Head of the church, he is capable of sustaining the church when there is bad news…

 

The Lord brought Willow into existence and he is going to bring it back to a place of fruitfulness, so let’s pray and speak blessing over them…

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