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Guest Post – Calling All Leaders by Doug Koop

May 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Our friends at Christian Week have shone a spotlight on this year’s Global Leadership Summit. Thanks to Doug Koop for sharing his thoughts on how the Summit can impact Canadian church leaders.

Leaders gather for the 2010 Leadership Summit in Windsor, OntarioKELOWNA, BC—“I really do believe that the local church is the hope of the world, but for it to reach its redemptive potential it must be well led,” says Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor the Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois.

Propelled by that undergirding vision, the Willow Creek Association produces an annual Global Leadership Summit that is telecast to more than 200 cities in more than 70 countries.

This includes Canada, where The Leadership Centre Willow Creek Canada is partnering with 22 host churches to make the Summit available to some 7,300 participants throughout the country.

This year they lowered the price and changed the date in order to increase the impact of the Summit in Canada.

“When we consulted leaders in our network we quickly realized that the traditional date in August doesn’t work very well in the Canadian context,” explains marketing director Brian McKenzie. “It was inconvenient for the host churches and limited access for potential participants.”

The Canadian edition of the Summit is now slated for the end of September.

The roster of presenters for the 2011 event is a stellar line-up of accomplished leaders from a wide range of fields—business, arts, church, academy, ministry. The list includes Hybels, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, “innovator and cultural architect” Erwin McManus, Australian minister John Dickson, and many more.

Scott Cochrane, executive director of The Leadership Centre Willow Creek Canada, is urging Canadian pastors to sign up and bring teams of both veteran and new staff and lay leaders.

“I know of many churches who intend to capitalize on the new dates and use this event as a leadership retreat… where the can build relationships while sharpening their skills and abilities together,” he says.

The deadline for early bird price break is May 24.

Filed Under: Canadian, Church, Development, Guest Post, Leadership Summit Tagged With: , ,

Why Leaders Walk Towards Barking Dogs

April 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You’ve just found out that petty arguments might be brewing among staff in your youth department.

What do you do?

You’ve noticed that weekly giving is slipping below projections.

What do you do?

You’ve picked up on the news that your board is spending a lot of time discussing matters that really don’t further the direction of the church.

What do you do?

Barking DogIf you’re a leader, you walk towards the barking dog.

I learned this axiom at a seminar I recently attended, and it has painted for me a vivid mental picture as to how leaders must respond at the first signs of trouble.

The expression, I’m told, comes from training postal letter carriers receive concerning what to do when a barking dog appears.

The instinct is to move (or run) away quickly. Instead, so the training apparently goes, sometimes the best move is to walk firmly towards the barking dog. Often this will cause the aggressive dog to ‘pull in his fangs’ and walk away.

Each of the scenarios I’ve painted above (and you can fill in the blanks with dozens of your own) are faced by church leaders every day. Each may, or may not, represent a real problem. In other words, each is like a barking dog. As a leader you can ignore it, inviting the possibility that the barking dog could become a biting dog.

Or you can walk towards it. You can move aggressively towards the issue and deal with it before it becomes a major problem.

As I sat in that seminar here are the three notes I gave myself. Perhaps these can be incorporated into your own leadership skill-set.

1. Develop listening ear for the sound of barking dogs in my world.

2. Develop the discipline to resist the instinct to walk away from these dogs.

3. Develop the courage to move firmly towards the barking dogs.

What are the barking dogs you can hear these days?

How do you avoid the natural tendency to walk away?

Filed Under: Church, Development, Discipline, Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

How Leaders Know When to "Be Still"

February 4, 2011 By 3 Comments

Last night I was reminded of a powerful leadership truth as I read the story of one of the great leaders in the bible.

The timing of this reminder couldn’t have been better.

I was reading the account in Exodus where the Israelites were trapped at the Red Sea, with the armies of Pharaoh thundering toward them. In the midst of the people’s panic, Moses stood before them and delivered this timeless leadership truth:

scott and amy“The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Ex 14:14)

Every Kingdom-building leader knows this to be true, at some level. The key is knowing when to embrace it.

That moment arrived for me earlier in the day as I spoke with my daughter Amy via Skype.

Amy is spending a year with Youth With a Mission (YWAM) in Townsville, Australia, which was directly in the path of Cyclone Yasi. This category 5 storm was packing winds of 300 kilometres per hour, described by Queensland’s Premier Anna Bligh as bringing  “…scenes of devastation and heartbreak on an unprecedented scale. This cyclone is like nothing else we’ve dealt with before as a nation.”

As a father there was nothing more I wanted to do than to somehow ensure my daughter’s safety. But there was nothing I could do, other than to commit her to God’s care.

I needed to embrace this leadership truth. “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

I’ve learned there are three indicators that it’s time to let the Lord do the fighting:

  • When the situation seems hopeless.
  • When your resources seem useless.
  • When your leadership seems powerless.

Allowing God to fight for you while you, as a leader, are “still” before him is not the same as giving up, throwing in the towel, or passively succumbing to overwhelming circumstances.

Indeed, being still before God is an active leadership stance, and can be your most potent strategic weapon.

How do you know when it’s time to “be still”?

Filed Under: Action, Leadership, Tension Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Guest post by Carey Nieuhof – Are You Actually Attracting Unchurched People?

December 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

Today’s guest post comes from Carey Nieuhof, lead pastor at Connexus Church, with campuses in Barrie and Orillia, Ontario. Carey is one of Canada’s sharpest Kingdom leaders, and in today’s post he poses a question that I believe every church leader in Canada needs to wrestle with; ‘Are we REALLY attracting unchurched people to our faith communities?’ But Carey takes it one step further, by outlining the steps that they took at Connexus to come to terms with this vital question.

Read, and be challenged.

Click here to visit Carey’s blog

Most church leaders says they want to reach unchurched people. So did we when  we started Connexus three years ago.

Saying it is one thing.  Living it is another. From the start, we adopted an “invest and invite” strategy.  We encouraged followers of Christ need to build authentic friendships with people in their community, family and workplace.  We see our job as creating the kind of environment they can invite their friends into.  We tell the people who attend Connexus all the time that we designed the church with their friends in mind and to please bring their unchurched friends to church.

But we realized when we launched we created a dual system.  While telling people to invite their friends we also had a ‘safety net” – we advertised, inviting people with no relational connection to come to our church as well (that’s what traditional advertising is – selling a product to people with whom you have no relational connection).

In 2009, we stopped the double talk.  We cut all forms of external advertising:

  • We canceled a very well listened to radio show featuring our messages.
  • We stopped all flyer distribution to homes in neighbourhoods
  • We decided to spend nothing on any form of external advertising.

We made it almost impossible for our church to grow unless the people who attended Connexus invited their friends.

But how do you measure that?  The church could still be growing but it might all be transfer growth.

So early in 2010, we completely redesigned our welcome card.  We designed it to measure whether people had attended church before coming to Connexus, asking them if they never attended church, rarely attended church (1 or 2 times a year), attended monthly or weekly.  We also asked them how they got to Connexus, giving three options: invited by a friend, invited by a family member, and ‘other’.  (We didn’t know what other would be, but we put it in anyway).

People have to go to the Welcome Desk in our foyer to fill out a card, and we in turn give them a gift basket with CDs, orientation material and (yum) chocolate in it.

We have had 285 families fill out a card to the end of October.  Here’s what we learned:

  • 85% of the people at our Barrie campus were invited by friend or family
  • 70% of the people at our Orillia campus were invited by friend or family. (Orillia is a smaller city, so we wonder if word of mouth might be the 30%)
  • 68% of our first time guests were not regular church goers (didn’t attend or attended less than once or twice a month)
  • 26% of people who were not weekly church attenders have become weekly attenders this year

We’re still learning tons about how to figure this out, and we can probably get a lot better at this, but here are some quick thoughts on why the trends are encouraging:

  • Cut the safety nets – make it hard for your church to grow unless people invite your friends.
  • Give your regular attenders space to build a life.  We have almost no mid-week programming.  We like families to build into each other and into their neighbours, not be at church six nights a week.
  • Program to your target.  That means potentially offending Christians.  We play songs some churches wouldn’t play.  We even tatooed people once on stage.  Christians left.  That wasn’t the goal, but it can happen.  While a few Christians have left,  unchurched people came.
  • Commit yourself to seeing life-change.  If you don’t see people being baptized and moving into a growing relationship with Christ, you’re missing the point.  It’s not attracting a crowd that’s the mission – it’s leading people into actual life change.

If you want to see a cross section of some Connexus stories, check out the comments on the Connexus blog from November – December 2010.

Otherwise…what do you think?  What have you seen as effective in helping a church reach its mission?  What’s the potential downside you see?

Filed Under: Church, Community, Leadership, Missional, Tension Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What Does Kingdom-First Leadership Look Like?

October 29, 2010 By 2 Comments

Harry Truman is credited with the powerful leadership axiom, “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.”

Today I saw this lived out again with Todd Petkau and the team at Riverwood Church Community in Winnipeg.

Riverwood has been our Global Leadership Summit partner for two years, and each year their facility sells out weeks in advance. Winnipeg as a host city has been a sell-out seven years in a row. Even though Riverwood has managed to squeeze in close to 500 guests for this event, they know that in a larger venue the attendance could be far more.

I met with Todd and his team, to both debrief the 2010 Summit and to look forward to the 2011 event.

For lunch he suggested we include Victor Neufeld, senior pastor of the nearby North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church. And it was here over lunch that these two leaders brought me in on a plan that has “Kingdom win” written all over it.

“What would you think,” Todd began, “if the Summit in Winnipeg were to be driven by one church, but held in a different church?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Well,” Todd continued, “our church appreciates being able to drive the Summit in Winnipeg. But we know our facility isn’t large enough to handle the growth potential we see. So we wondered if we could work with our friends up at North Kildonan Church…”

Victor broke into the conversation. “Our facility is perfect, I think. We seat about 800, we have a lot more space, and we’d love to make this available for the Summit. We’ll serve anyway you’d like us to, but we’d like our friends at Riverwood to take the lead on the event.”

Todd chimed in again. “So, could this work?”

All I could think was, “With leaders like this, with such genuine humble hearts, how could it not work?” Clearly, these two leaders, and their churches, simply want to throw a serving towel over their arms and see to it that as many leaders as possible in southern Manitoba have a great Summit experience.

I’m writing these thoughts as I fly from Winnipeg on to Halifax to meet with more leaders. And as I travel I’m reflecting on my own leadership, reminding myself to keep relentlessly focused on Kingdom-outcomes, not on whether or not my name happens to be attached to any particular accomplishments.

Because after all; it’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.

How do you maintain your “Kingdom focus” in your leadership?

Filed Under: Action, Canadian, Community, Joy, Leadership, Leadership Summit Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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