Looking Ahead to 2013: What Should the Church Expect?

by: Sam Rainer III

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If you do not make assumptions about the future, then you are not leading. Good leaders constantly assess the cultural climate. In other words, they do research. Good leaders are also willing to change their assumptions. In other words, they are flexible.  Holding firm to assumptions from the Y2K era is about as relevant as giving a set of Pokemon cards to your kids this year for Christmas.

So at the end of every year, I pause to challenge my underlying assumptions of what I believe the future holds. Vision is a key to leadership, and the nature of vision requires an assumption of what will happen in the future. Therefore, you cannot lead unless you are thinking about the future.

In a recent article about Ford Motor Company, the head of their trends and futuring department revealed several assumptions about the coming year. Though Ford is trying to determine consumer demand for automobiles three years in advance, their research is valuable to the church because they are assessing global trends within sociology, economics, technology, and politics, among others.

So what trends should the church expect to help define the cultural climate of 2013? More specifically, what assumptions do people have about organizations right now? The Ford consumer environment report has a lot of commonalities with current church research. I’ve listed below a few general, qualitative assumptions for church leaders to consider.

Lack of organizational trust. The fiscal cliff, BP, News International, bank after bank, public sector or private sector—the list of examples is long. Brand trust, organizational trust, and institutional trust are all low.  We’re foolish to think this lack of trust in the culture does not apply to the church. The best way to combat a general lack of organizational trust is to build a specific reputation as a trustworthy church. You may not trust car mechanics—generally—but you probably put forth effort to find one you do trust. And the way you find the trustworthy mechanic is through word-of-mouth. It’s the same with doctors. I recently spent considerable time asking people about the best doctor in a particular field. People may not trust churches organizationally as a whole, but a specific reputation as a trustworthy church spreads rapidly through word-of-mouth.

Desire for accountability in leadership. The single most neglected leadership behavior among executives is… accountability. And it’s the most neglected leadership behavior from a global perspective. It should come as no surprise that people recognize the pervasive culture of unaccountability and desire leaders who not only hold others accountable but are also willing to be held accountable. A lack of leadership accountability precipitates almost every church scandal. People desire accountability. From a biblical perspective, the church should be well-positioned to fill this desire. Ironically, many church leaders avoid it.

Fickle commitment. Gone are the days of working for a company for 50 years. People were once loyal to a single employer. Those employers once went to great lengths to take care of their employees. It just doesn’t happen anymore. Over 90 percent of millennials expect to stay at a job for less than three years. Why would we expect anything different for the church? Many reasons exist as to why people church hop, but a large driving factor is the cultural force of fickleness. A church can build commitment levels by having a culture of high expectations. When these expectations are communicated clearly and upfront, the people that commit are more likely to stick.

Intimacy within the crowd. We are quickly becoming an urban society. Big cities are getting bigger. Big churches are getting bigger. People are leaving the countryside in favor of the concrete jungle. The gravitational pull of large cities and large churches will continue for a generation, at least. But the draw of the city and the large church does not mean people eschew intimacy. In fact, the crowds of megacities and megachurches mean people are more intentional about trying to find intimacy. Healthy churches will get bigger by getting smaller. In this era of urbanization, small group settings are arguably more important now than at any point in our history. Quite simply, you will not keep people in a large worship service for long without also connecting them to a small group.

Weariness of overwhelming amounts of information. Hyperlinks, RSS feeds, and Twitter—all are great until you just get overwhelmed. Access to information is no longer a problem. Everyone is talking, and it’s posted all over the Internet hinterland. Now people just want to know who to listen to. In the overwhelming, loud complexity of our culture, the church should be a solace of simplicity and clarity. Of course, most church leaders try to make their church simple for them. Making a church simple for the people, however, is tremendously difficult and entirely complex for the leadership. As church leaders, we’ve made simple about us. It’s time we make church simple for the people.

Projecting the cultural climate ten years out is about as exact as nailing the tenth day in a ten-day forecast. But there is great value in assessing your assumptions about the direction of the culture, especially within the next year or two. Our culture is constantly changing. What people think about organizations is changing. As a leader, you must become a student of the culture to recognize these changes, and you must be flexible enough to rework your assumptions when necessary.

Tags: Leadership Engine, Planning, Sam Rainer

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Reducing Communication Confusion

by: Sam Rainer III

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Leaders often confuse followers by communicating imperatives as declarative statements. An imperative is a command. An imperative sentence has a grammatical structure expressing a directive. A declarative sentence is quite different; it makes a statement. In an effort to sound less forceful, leaders will often make declarative statements and expect followers to recognize them as imperatives.

Sometimes this tactic works. For instance, the garbage stinks is a declarative statement that—when spoken by my wife—becomes an obvious imperative, take out the garbage! Most of the time, however, imperatives disguised as declarative statements simply generate confusion.

I understand why leaders use declarative statements when they really want to communicate imperatives. Imperatives can sound harsh. Declarative statements have a softer tone; they are also terribly confusing. Imperatives direct an individual to a specific action (fix the leak), but declarative statements make the problem the subject without any prescribed action (the faucet leaks).

When leaders communicate imperatives as declarative statements they make two critical errors. First, they communicate a problem without a prescribed solution.  Second, they do not assign a person (the subject) to the problem or project. So everyone now realizes the faucet leaks, but no one knows who should fix it and how it should be fixed.

The confusion caused by this communication error makes a leader appear unnecessarily weak. In an attempt to be considerate, leaders just come off as confusing. We already knew the faucet leaked. Who should fix it? Sentence structure may seem like an inconsequential part of leadership, but imperatives are important because they direct people to action.

If you want followers to act on a problem, then don’t use a declarative sentence. It’s confusing and a weak form of communication. Unless, of course, you are my wife. The garbage stinks. I get it.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Leadership Characteristics, Sam Rainer

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Serving the Second Chair

by: Sam Rainer III

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Whether it’s a paid or unpaid position, formal or informal, most churches have a strong leader serving under the lead pastor. In smaller churches, this person can be a prominent lay person. In larger churches, the position is often an executive pastor. Numerous titles describe this position, including associate and administrator. Other church leadership positions can be second chairs as well, such as a worship pastor. In this article, I refer to the position simply as the second chair.

The second chair position is paradoxical for two reasons. First, a second chair involves the tension of submitting as a subordinate to the first chair while at the same time leading with a high level of influence. Second chairs maintain a dependence on the first chair while at the same time managing the significant amounts of freedom found near the top of the chain of command. The second paradox involves being in an ever-changing role that is difficult to define while at the same time trying to add structure to the vision of the first chair. Second chairs often find themselves in the unenviable position of being the Jell-O others are trying to nail to the wall.

While I do not claim to represent all second chairs, I have served in both a first chair role (currently) and a second chair role (at a previous church). This post is about second chairs, but it is directed to first chairs. How can lead pastors serve those whose main job description is to serve them?

Serve first; lead second. All church leaders should take on the posture of serving first and leading second, but a personal example is not enough. First chairs cannot assume second chairs (and other staff members) will follow the example of servant leadership if it is simply lived out and never taught.

First chairs must do more than encourage others to serve; they must teach others how to be servant leaders. First chairs should direct second chairs and staff to be aware of more than just what they should do, but also who they are in Christ. Servant leadership is more than a list of positive and negative traits. Servant leadership is more than a list of helpful or unhelpful actions. Being a servant leader like Jesus is an identity. This identity has a biblical foundation, and it must be taught.

Create a partnership, not a dictatorship. Living servant leadership and teaching servant leadership are important to creating a culture of servant leadership. But this culture is unsustainable (as is just about everything else in the church) without a partnership. Treating second chairs and staff as partners rather than employees will help sustain a transformational environment of servant leadership. A first chair’s goal is to create a partnership and not give directives. This partnership of servant leadership can be fostered in with transparency.

A senior leader must be transparent about the inevitable consistency of being a first chair leader in the church. Senior pastors have two personas: one the church sees and one the staff sees. They will act differently around people they work with for hours each day as compared with the people they are tasked to shepherd. This dichotomy will be especially true of a second chair.

A first chair will likely spend more time with a second chair than anyone else in the church. This inconsistency is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership, but it becomes problematic if first chairs love on the people of the church while mistreating the second chair and staff. Such a scenario places the second chair in the awkward position of detesting the senior leader the church loves.

Balance authority and responsibility. The temptation for a first chair is to seize power and authority from the second chair. In the hierarchy of command, it is easier for a first chair to pull authority from a second chair than it is for a second chair to take it from a first chair. One of the ministry tensions of the second chair is leading and adding value to the church without the positional authority of the senior pastor. A subordinate leader can only influence upward if the senior leader gives him or her the corresponding authority to do so.

One of the first chair’s primary responsibilities is serving the second chair. Nothing invalidates leadership like abandoning a servant’s heart. A first chair’s relationship with a second chair is one of a partnership, not a dictatorship. In this partnership it is the first chair’s obligation to grant a second chair a high level of authority to accomplish the tasks of his or her responsibility.

Read more from Sam here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Sam Rainer, Structure

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