Categories
discipleship leadership

Choosing Who to Mentor | Touchpoint

The more I read David Watson’s Blog, the more I am enjoying his insights.  He has some excellent words in a post about who to choose and mentorship/discipleship, and what he looks for before investing in someone.

His six points of evaluation are below:

  • Christ-like
  • Christ-centered
  • Character
  • Capability
  • Competency
  • Capacity
  • Chemistry

Read how he expands on these points here.

This is a great framework for leaders as they seek to reproduce themselves in ministry.  I continue to pray that God would use the men that I am investing in to advance His kingdom, and ultimately they would be faithful to reproducing reproducers (2 Timothy 2:2).

Categories
leadership personal

Reflections on the Ministry : Rick McKinley

This was a convicting message for me to hear from Rick McKinley of Imago Dei in Portland.

The art of unbusyness and unneccesariness is essential to the being available to God. There is disaster awaiting the one who gets bogged down with doing good, and not dwelling in the excellent. It is our job to pay attention to God and life and to help others to do the same, this is the heart of the work as pastor. I am not suggesting that this means that we don’t do our work or have work to do. We have a lot of work to do, but what I am saying is that many times we exchange important things for urgent things and the important things never get addressed.

via Reflections on the Ministry : Rick McKinley.

I am seemingly always in need of a breather, and have definitely struggled to place priority on “unbusyness”.  God will teach me the discipline over time, but I am definitely terrible at it now.

Categories
leadership

What Makes a Great Leadership Team? | Gallup Management Journal

Came across this at What’s Best Next from What Makes a Great Leadership Team? at Gallup Management Journal, and thought it was another helpful understanding of balanced leadership teams.

As we worked with these leadership teams, we began to see that while each member had his or her own unique strengths, the most cohesive and successful teams possessed broader groupings of strengths. So we went back and initiated our most thorough review of this research to date. From this dataset, four distinct domains of leadership strength emerged: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking.

There are so many models of leadership in the world, but many of them agree on the concept of plurality of leadership, and individuals within the team excelling in particular giftings and skills.

Categories
leadership missional

Fivefold Leadership | Dream Awakener

I’ve found this post and the whole series from JR Woodward particularly insightful in applying the APEPT/APEST model of leadership to a western, contemporary church context.  JR has a unique way of articulating these ideas into a framework that makes sense for me.

I first encountered this idea of missional leadership through the writing of Alan Hirsch in The Forgotten Ways, and I think I’ve been understanding more and more the necessity of having a well rounded ministerial team, and the synergy produced when people with different giftings are around the table.

These different personalities bring a healthy, multi-perspectival approach to strategy and ministry.  Alternatively, I think they promote some good fights in meetings, as Patrick Lencioni suggests in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

I’m hoping to work through some of this with our Campus Minister Network in the future…

Categories
austin stone church leadership

Top 3 Innovators @ Innovation3 | Catalyst

Matt Carter, our Senior Pastor, was named as one of the top 3 innovators at Innovation3 by CatalystSpace.  Good stuff!

Top 3 Innovators @ Innovation3

January 30, 2009

The Innovation3 conference was this week and it was cool. Did you go?

There were over 100 speakers, but here are my Top 3 picks for most interesting/innovative (no offense if you’re not on here!).

1) Dave Browning – leads Christ The King. It’s a church that focuses on simplicity and multiplication. They spread around the country and around the world by starting a small group in an area, and grow that group and multiply. Once they have enough small groups in an area, they start gathering together at a “worship center.” They’ve been doing this for almost 10 years, they now have thousands of groups, mainly in the NorthWest and foreign countries = tens of thousands of people saved and being discipled.

2) John Bishop – God’s doing cool things at John Bishop’s church up in Vancouver. 3,000 have been baptized in the last 5 years, I think. And he’s all about people, talking about the unbridled truth, and being real. I love his heart.

3) Matt Carter – Pastor of The Austin Stone. They’ve also grown really quickly and admit that that’s been a problem for them. While they were growing quickly they were struggling to get people assimilated and into community. They got people in groups and were hoping community would result, but they just got ingrown and selfish groups. But they’ve learned that when they give the groups a mission, community comes as a byproduct of the group members being on mission together. Just focusing on community, you get neither mission nor community. But focusing on mission, you get both mission and community – they propose.

via Top 3 Innovators @ Innovation3 | Catalyst.