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WESTErn rEgiOn
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Creating Multiethnic Communities of Faith
When:November 18 & 19
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UPCOMING EVENTS
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volume 9 number 2 autumn 2005 :: the vineyar usa
MANAGING TIME, MANAGING CHANGE
XII I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI THE EFFECTIVE PASTOR
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ge 2 from the editor
Churches go through different seasons of life, just
as pastors do. Sometimes such change in seasonsis expected; often it is not. How to deal with that
changeon both micro and macro levelsis a
massive challenge facing all leaders.
Few people have gone through as much
significantand publicchange as Rick Warren.
A few years ago he was known mostly to his
(sizeable) congregation at Saddleback Church,
and to (thousands of) pastors he had trained in
his Purpose-Driven Church conferences. But with
the attention brought about by his best-selling
book, The Purpose-Driven Life, Rick found himself
navigating change on a level few encounter. He
spoke with Cutting Edge(One of my favorite
magazinesIve read every single issue since itscome out, he told us) at length about these and
other challenges facing the church today.
We also spoke with a number of other insightful
leaders about change management. Vineyard
megachurch pastors Tri Robinson and Rich Nathan
talk about it from the vantage point of church
growth, while Steve Nicholson discusses the same
issues in relation to church planters. The man Fast
Companymagazine calls one of the worlds mostinfluential thinkers on productivity, author and
consultant David Allen talks to us about manag-
ing our time amidst increasing commitments;
and we also replay one of John Wimbers classic
talks about moving a church through the cycles
of change. This issue also includes an update
on a (happily) ongoing change in the Vineyard,
as wellmore than 85 new churches have been
planted over the past two years.
Including all of this insight meant we had to
manage a slight change in the size of this issue
of Cutting Edge, as well! We hope you enjoy this
special, double issue.
Jeff Baey, Edto
P.S. Watch for our next issue, in which Matt
Redman and others talk to us about worship,
church planting, and the future of the church.
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ge 4 a secon reformation?
>Rick Warren needs little introduction these
days. His book, The Purpose-Driven Life,
has sold over 25 million copies, making
it the best-selling (nonfiction) hardback book in
American history. In 2004 he was named by Timemagazine as one of Americas most important
people, and he has received coverage in
Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and
Christianity Today(which calls Warren the most
influential pastor in America). In recent months
Rick has been seen on CNNs Larry King Live,
spoken to Harvards Kennedy School of
Government, and been a featured speaker to
American cultural leaders who gather annually
at the Aspen Institute.
Warren started Saddleback Church with his wife
Kay in 1980; the church now has an average
weekend attendance of 22,000 and has planted
34 daughter churches. Many church leaders know
of Warren through his book The Purpose-DrivenChurch(the best book on entrepreneurship
according toForbesmagazine) and his Purpose-
Driven Church seminars, which have trained over
400,000 pastors in 162 countries in the principles
of church health.
Something many people dont know, however, is
the significant shift in focus Ricks ministry has
taken over the past three years. In response to
key events in his personal life, Rick is now spend-
ing the majority of his time, energy, and money
in Africa and other parts of the developing world,
focusing in particular on AIDS, hunger, disease,
and literacy. Over 5,000 members of Saddleback
Church have now traveled overseas, and hun-
dreds of Saddelbacks 2,600 housegroups have
adopted villages around the world to learn about
and help with problems such as disease and illit-
eracy. Saddleback Church has, in essence, been
an experimental incubator for a Global PEACE
Plan which is being launched among thousands of
churches across America this autumn.
While originally planning to talk to Cutting Edge
by phone, it turned out that Rick would be travel-
ing through Cambridge, England to speak at sever
al events held at Cambridge University. He arrived
straight from Rwanda, having been traveling for
the entire previous month. But as he sat down
with Jeff Bailey at a caf just yards from the old
Senate House and Kings College Chapel, Warren
was energetic and engaged, speaking about the
significant changes that have come about over
these past few years, and the surprising focus his
ministry is taking in the days ahead.
Youve ot a eat stoy about Saddebacks
coecto wt te Veyad te eay days
Yes, it is a great story. Back in the late 70s, I was
graduating from a little Baptist school in Riverside
California, and I felt like God was calling me to
plant a church. So I went into Anaheim Hills, which
was a new community just springing up, and
rented Canyon Hills High School, reserving it to
start services there. I had it locked up for about 3
months, and then a week before I was to start ser-
vices, I was praying up on the hill nearby, and the
Lord said, If you dont go to seminary now, youre
A SECONd REFORMATION?Rick Warrens Vision for an Activist Church that Takes on the Biggest Problems in the World
Jeff Bailey interviews Rick Warren
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ge 6 a secon reformation?
never going to go. So Kay and I left for seminary,
and I canceled the contract on Canyon Hills High
School. The very next week, Vineyard moved in.
So John Wimber and I used to talk about that a
lot, how in the plan of God He wanted thatchurch
there, not the one I was supposed to plant. Then,
later, when I was getting my doctorate at Fuller
Seminary, John was one of the professors and
taught one of my classes.
We you ea peope tak about tat ea
we Saddeback ad te Veyad wee just
ett o, t souds ke tey wee petty
eady days.
Oh, it was revival. Although, of course, revival is
a kind of ecstasyand you cant stay in ecstasy
permanently. At some point revival has to turn
into a movement if its going to last. Ive talked to
Pete Drucker, my mentor, about this a lot. He talks
about how eventually you have to institutionalize
certain elements. I used tell him, I dont want to
start an institutionI want to stay a movement.
And he would say, Yes, but movements die. The
things that last are institutions. Now, of course,
institutions then need to be renewed. Ive been
asked a lot about successorship. People ask,
Whos your successor? But I believe that a suc-
cessor is not a personality; its asystem that you
leave. Who followed Luther? Nobody. He left a
system called the Lutheran church. Who followed
Calvin? Nobody. But Calvin left a systemthe
Presbyterian church. The same thing with Wesley.
Now, those church systems need renewal again
today; there needs to be restructuring. But I have
often wondered, How long can you go before you
need renewal and restructuring?
Wat do you tk?
Well, I think that there are four kinds of renewal.
Saddleback has now trained over 400,000 pastors
in 162 countries over the last twenty-plus years.
So, I have talked to a lot of pastors, and renewal
alwaysstarts at the personal level. It happens in
your own heart. You can call it being filled with the
Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, making Jesus Lord,
the deeper life, renewal, I dont care. The bottom
line is that Jesus becomes the real deal; your heart
warms up to the Lord. Once you have the personal
renewal, then comes what I call communal renew-
al. That happens at the fellowship level of the
church. There are a couple of ways you can know
when you have had renewal or revival at a congre-
gational leveland one is that the singing gets
better! Another thing is that people hang around
longer. They like to be together. But those two are
not enough; you cant just have personal renewal
and communal renewal. Historically, in Baptist and
Methodist traditions for instance, those things
would happen through the annual revival. You
bring an outside speaker in, he speaks for two
weeks, everybody confesses their sins, gets right
with each other, and then things are good again.
You see these churches grow to 200-250 people,and then they bump back down, over and over.
They never get above that and its because they
never get to the other two levels of renewal.
A third kind of renewal is at the level of purpose,
or mission. Thats what The Purpose-Driven
Churchwas all about. We are here for a purpose;
we are not just here for fellowship. Fellowship is
a legitimate purpose, but its just one of the five:
worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism
and ministry. These five purposes are modeled
in Acts 2, they are prayed for by Jesus in John 17,
they are explained by Paul in Ephesians 4, butthe best expression is the Great Commandment
and the Great Commission two from the Great
Commandment, three from the Great Commission.
Our phrase is A great commitment to the great
commandment and the great commission will grow
a great church. So when you get to that third level
of purpose renewal, or mission, things really start
taking off. All of a sudden weve got a mission big-
ger than yourselves.
Inevitably, when a church starts growing in this
way, you come to structural renewal, which is that
as you grow, your structure needs to change. Ahuman being needs to get a new bone structure
about every seven years; thats why bone marrow
is constantly sloughing off. The problem is that a
lot of churches and a lot of pastors want to start at
the wrong endthey want tostartwith structure.
They want to come into a church that is dying or
dead, maybe an old denominational church, and
the first thing they want to do is to change the
structure. I say, Whoafirst lets start with you.
Lets get your life revived and your life renewed.
Then well work on relational renewal, then on pur
pose renewal, and thenwell get to the structure.
Movemets ke te Veyad ae av to ask
questos about mov to moe sttutoa
capactes; ad yet t wats to od oto ts
caactestcs as a movemet, too. Tak of
sttutos o stuctues ca eve fee ke
a kd of betaya of tat detty as a move-
met. Wat does t ook ke to move fom a
movemet to a sttuto wsey?
I think you can take institutional elements into
your movement without becoming institutional-
ized. There is a big difference. You dont want to
become institutionalized. One of the things that
made Vineyard take off was the decentralization
of it. It was the spontaneous expansion of the
church. There were a lot of new church plants.
Of course, there was transfer growth, toothat
always happens when you have a strong charis-
matic leader; folks say, That guys got a vision, Im
going with him. But once that leader is no longer
around, what holds that group together? Vision
and values, nothing else. Actually, I remember talk
ing with John a long time ago. He brought a bunch
of the guys together to try and add some structure
and there was general rebellion! I would say that
what you want is a confederation. A confedera-
tion is different from a federation. It is made up of
totally autonomous groups thatfunction together.
Wat sots of ts do you fucto toete fo?
The only purpose of a larger group, as I see it, is
three things. The first is identity. What do we stand
for? What is unique about us? What is the aspect
of the Gospel that we need to hold up, that we
feel the rest of the Church is ignoring? What part
are we supposed to speak up for? It can be a wor-
ship, signs and wonders, evangelism, postmodern
ministry, or whatever. God has different segments
of the Body speaking up about different areas that
we need.
Think about what has happened in the past:
every para-church organization in the last fifty
years got started because the Church was ignor-
ing an important part of ministry. The Church
was ignoring students, so God raised up Campus
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a secon reformation?
image graciously supplied by Johhn McCollum John McCollum / elem
Crusade, Young Life and Youth for Christ. It was
ignoring men and women in the military, so he
raised up the Navigators. Now the thing about
para-church organizations is that they have the
right to specializebut the Church does not have
that right. The Church has to do it all. Because the
Church is the Body of Christ, it has to do worship,
fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism.
And we have to give them equal emphasis. I
started saying fifteen years ago that the primary
issue of the twenty-first century would be church
health, not churchgrowth. I still believe that. You
dont have to focus on growth; we have never done
that at Saddleback. Weve focused on health. Ifmy kids are healthy, they will grow. I dont have to
command my kids to grow. All living things grow.
If my children dont grow, something is terribly
wrong. The answer is balance. Just as our bodies
are made up of nine different systemsyou have
a skeletal system, respiratory system, central ner-
vous system, digestive system, and so onwhen
all of those systems are in balance, thats called
health. If any of them get out of balance, thats
called dis-ease or disease. The doctors job is to
bring it back to health.
In the Body of Christ, we are a body, not a busi-ness. Im totally against the corporate model of
organization. We are an organism, not an organi-
zation. We are a family, and families arent based
on policies, but on relationships, and the greater
the relationship, the greater the trust. When I first
got married to Kay, we had all these rules about
how you fold the towels, how you squeeze the
toothpaste. Ive been married thirty years now, and
we dont have all those rules now. The only rule is
Always tell the truth. The greater the relation-
ship, the fewer rules you need.
So, as I look at Vineyard and I look at a movementthat God has blessed, I would say that you try
to create elements that preserve the vision and
values without creating the rules. The moment
you get into rules, you become a bureaucracy, and
thats the kiss of death. You start perpetuating the
survival of the organization itself. In a confedera-
tion, which is loosely knit with lots of different
elements, the primary purpose for associating
together is training, not control. Control kills an
organization, and when you start trying to qualify
and quantify and credential, you get into all kinds
of controls. I would encourage all the leaders to
go back and read Roland Allens book from over
100 years ago, The Spontaneous Expansion of the
Church.That has been one of the fundamental
texts of my life. It helped me found Saddleback.
it was ceta fo Wmbe too.
Really? I didnt know that. It certainly had a pro-
found effect on me, back in the early 70s. Going
back to this thing about music, its interesting that
wherever God seems to be working, there comes
a plethora of new music. In the heady days of the
80s, almost all of the good music was coming out
of the Vineyard. Before that it was all coming out
of Calvary Chapel. Now it seems a lot of new music
coming out of Hillsong, or Soul Survivor, or places
like that.
Do you tk te mpetus fo te ew musc
moves o because tee s somet ew
god wats to do? i ote wods, maybe te
aot fo wosp tat oce exsted abates
because god s wat to b a ceta
dyamsm to newaspects of be te cuc?
I think thats right. I think you have to say, Whatwas God doing then that was so unique, that he
still wants to do now? Actually, back in the early
days of the Vineyard I dont think it was so much
the emphasis on signs and wonders per se that
was so important as it was the openness to what-
ever the Spirit wants to do! That kind of openness
is even more important. Andif Im open to what
the Spirit wants to do, He might want to empha-
size something else in the twenty-first century!
That whole issue is a real key to me.
And, of course, being concerned with evangelism
as I am, I note that one of the primary principlesof signs and wonders is that they attract people to
the Gospel. When you see God moving in an obvi-
ous power encounter, people watching say, Yay,
God! That is still true all around the world. I dont
know if its true so much in post-Christian areas
like England and Europe and even in America.
There I dont see people seeking the miraculous
so much as they are asking, Are Christians going
to care about the things we expect them to care
about: justice, poverty, illness, the worksof Jesus.
One of the things we talk about at Saddleback is
this: A lot of people want to study the steps of
Jesus. I say lets study thestops of Jesus. What
did Jesus stop to do? What kinds of things did He
allow to interrupt His agenda? We need to have a
kind of openness to Lord, what do you want to
do next?
For example, we changed in significant ways
through the years at Saddleback. We have learned
an enormous amount about small groups from the
Chinese. They have taught us more than anybody
else. A real danger for places like Saddleback or
Willow Creek or Vineyard or Calvary Chapel is a
Not Invented Here mentalitythe presumption
that, if it didnt come out of here, it isnt any good.
That is something I fight constantly. I want to learn
from anybody. There has to be a willingness to say,
God loves to bless people I dont understand, tha
I dont even agree with, and maybe I need to learn
from them. Its just being humble. Its like eating
fish; you take the meat and throw away the bones.
I tell that to pastors who come to our conferences:
You arent going to agree with everything we do.
Idont agree with everything we do! Wherever I
find people who are reaching people and growing
people and helping people get into ministry, help-ing people get into mission, living for the glory of
God, I say Amen, now teach me how to do it, too.
Youve beu to sft muc of you focus to
teatoa msty ecet yeas. how dd
tat come about?
Thats true. The first ten years of Saddleback in
the 80s, I did almost no outside speaking. In the
90s things became more national, and we trained
about a quarter of a million pastors in America.
The church was still growingit tripled in size in
the 90s. But now in the 21stcentury, almost all my
time is spent in developing countries. God really
changed my heart about two years ago through
some personal things I went through.
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Much like we all go through tough
transitional times on an individual basis,
churches experience periods of transition,
as well. For many people in the church, change is
overwhelming and uncomfortable. Knowing how
to navigate a church through various transitions is
paramount for pastors, especially if they want to
maintain growth and health.
Cutting Edgeasked a couple of pastorsRich
Nathan, senior pastor of the Columbus Vineyard
in Ohio, and Tri Robinson, senior pastor of the
Vineyard Boise in Idahowho have planted
churches and grown them to significant size,
about their secrets when it comes to making
successful transitions.
We you ecoze a b cae eeds to be
made you cuc, wat acto steps do you
be to take?
Rich: I love living in reality, therefore I try at all
costs to get the facts. I read and listen to suc-
cessful practitioners outside my church. I never
listen to theoreticians, or those who dont love
the church. I also listen to the counsel of key staff
and lay leaders. But for me, I generally cant move
forward without a deep personal conviction that
the Lord is calling for this change. I need to expe-
rience something of the cloud and the pillar of
fire. This, of course, is not necessary for all deci-
sions or for all changes. But big changes, such as
the decision to build a new sanctuary, or rework
the churchs DNA, or a major theological shift (all
of them exceedingly rare) require a deep sense of
divine leading.
After our leadership team determines that a
change needs to occur, I have found the approach
in the book Leading Changeby John Kotter (from
the Harvard Business School) to be extremely
helpful. Kotter describes how to build a guiding
coalition, how to develop a strategy, how to com-
municate the vision, how to empower for broad-
based action, how to generate short-term wins,
consolidate gains, and anchor new approaches in
the culture. I spend a lot of time thinking through
how to build a case for the change and the way
that Im going to communicate this case to various
groups of people.
Tri:The problem for most pastors in dealing with
the need for transition is that they dont recognize
it. You have to train yourself to recognize it.
I remember watching the movie, The Right Stuff.
There was a scene that personifies what its like for
a pastor to lead his church through change. Chuck
Yeager goes up in his high speed test plane, but
he hasnt yet kicked in the afterburners. As hes
jetting along, suddenly everything starts shaking
and shattering and the instruments are flipping out
of control. It seems like everything is falling apart.
But actually, he is moving toward mach 1.
There is this invisible barrier that you cant see as
you approach the speed of sound. You cant see it,
but the symptoms are there. In the scene, Yeager
had a choice to make: throttle back and not go
through it or power forward and blast through it.
He decides to push through it and when he throt-
tles forward, the ground crew hears this explosion.
They thought he blew up, but what they actually
heard was the sound barrier breaking for the first
time. And then they show Yeager, who is now flying
smoothly toward mach 2.
When you feel the thing shaking and it seems like
it would be a lot easier to throttle back as a leader,
this can be a sign that you are about to break
through the barrier.
For me, the most important thing is recognizing
what that stress is. Its always something like,
Nobody knows my name any more or This
church is getting way too big. Many pastors dont
understand it, so they dont break through. They
dont want to make waves. The most difficult part
of change is identifying that youre actually up
against a barrier. And most of the time, the
changes are generally structural changes.
In order for pastors to throttle through it, youve
got to make shifts in the culture, such as how you
spend your time, or who you invest in. You have to
create better management systems to handle the
problems. Those are all cultural shifts and struc-
tural changes that we all experience.
Wat as bee te most dffcut tasto you
ave ad to avate te fe of you cuc?
how dd you et tou t?
Rich:One of the most significant changes for our
congregation was being adopted into the Vineyard
We were an independent non-denominational
church loosely affiliated with a small coalition
of other churches. We held a series of congrega-
tional meetings for nearly two years as we walked
through the change. We also had many of our
leaders attend John Wimber conferences over
the course of two years. And most helpfully, we
invited Lance Pittluck to come in to introduce our
congregation to the theology and practices of the
kingdom.
Tri:I just went through a difficult change, where I
had to create a whole new management team to
respond to problems that quickly flared up in the
church in order to prevent it from getting out of
control. I first of all analyzed it by myself and tried
to get a rational look at it, otherwise youre just
listening to complaints and hearing people say
hurtful things as opposed to understanding the
real issue. You have to get above that and get a
bigger view.
You have to go to the Lord in prayer and say,
Lord, what is the bigger issue and whats holding
it back? Many times, its a management issue.
Oftentimes, you arent able to change quickly
enoughand thats the problem.
In developing this management team, I got a
diverse group of people who think differently,
NAVIGATING CHANGEIN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCHHow Two Vineyard Pastors Have Taken their Congregations Through Change By Jason Chatraw
>
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especially about solving problems. In the bookGood to Great, one of the important points of the
book I think is so crucial to pastoral leadership is
that you have to embrace conflict and chaos as
your friend. People dont like change because it
changes relationship structures on your team, and
thats never fun. It always takes confrontation, but
you have to think outside the box.
how do you se te vso fo a b cae
you cuc wt te eades? how does
t dffe we you se t to te est of te
coeato?
Rich:As a general rule, I try to leak big changes
to influencers (in other words, I send up trial bal-
loons to sharpen my thinking and to field test my
message). I deeply appreciate Malcolm Gladwells
book, The Tipping Point,concerning how massive
change takes place in various social settings. I
also hold a series of meetings for leaders in which
very frank discussion and a robust exchange of
ideas can occur. For large changes, I personally
lead those leaders meetings. It is important that
leaders hear directly from the senior pastor what
we are doing and why we are doing it. Concerning
people in the congregation, I believe in over-com-municating change using a variety of communica-
tion devices including Sunday morning messages,
emails, coffees, vision meetings, brochures, bulle-
tin inserts, and celebration meetings. I also like to
give congregation members an opportunity to ask
questions to trusted and trained leadership team
members who understand how to communicate
the vision.
Tri:I talk with my advisors and elders first
about the problem that the change is addressing.
Sometimes, Im not quite sure what to do, so we
discuss it first. And then, I resolve the vision withinmyself. Once we formulate a plan, I take it to my
first line of pastors and leaders and then I go to the
rest of the staff before I go to the congregation.
When I go to the people, I always present the
problem. I say, Heres the situation. Its usually
a good problem, but its still a problem. And then
I say, This is what were doing about it. I dont
ask for their advice. Ive already figured out what
were going to do and just explain how were going
to get it done. People appreciate strong leadershipin that way.
how do you fee about cae eea? Do
you ke t? Does t pa you to make caes?
Rich:Some people are wired to like change for
changes sake. They just get tired of the same old
thing. Thats not me. I love change. I think most
large church pastors do. But I love change for a
purpose; change that will link more disconnected
people with Christ; change that will result in more
people understanding Gods Word or discovering
Gods calling for their lives. Im not particularly
interested in change in order to be novel or cutting
edge (no offense to this wonderful periodical!).
Tri:I know change is a necessary thing for a leader,
and I also know its necessary to help a church
grow and move ahead. Part of it is funfiguring
out a more effective way to do things. But I also
hate part of it. Sometimes, Ill call other pastors
who have gone through it before me and find out
how they made it. I always try to ask lots of practi-
cal questions about budget, schedules, service
times, facilities, staff, etc.
Wat advce woud you ve to cuc pates
wo ae tastoa pases ad eed to
make b caes te cuces?
Rich:Use the Lord told me rarely. You have only
so many bullets in that gun and you dont want to
waste them. Nothing will shred your credibility or
deplete your equity more than being consistently
wrong when you speak in the Lords name.
Get lots of advice; talk with others. Remember
we have the mind of Christ. This is a plural,
community verse. In other words, we need other
peoples input.
Also, remember that peoples willingness to follow
a leader is based upon the three Cs of leadership:
character, competence, and care. People will follow
someone who has a reputation for honesty and
transparency in decision-making. That is charac-
ter. People also want to know that your decisions
generally turn out well. That is competence. And
people will follow someone who has personally
ministered to them or their family. That is care.
When all three are working together: character,competence, and care, change is pretty easy to
bring about in a church.
Tri:Dont be above asking people for help who
have been where you are. Dont be afraid of
changeand lead through it with confidence.
END
ADDiTiOnAl rESOUrCES
Revolutionary Leadership: Howthe Synergy of Vision, Culture,
and Structure Can Transform Your
Church
by Tri Robinson
Good to Great
by Jim Collins
The Tipping Point: How Little
Things Can Make a Big Differenceby Malcolm Gladwell
Leading Change
by John Kotter
00:14:54:04
navigating transitional aters
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Tri Robinson is the pastor of the Vineyard Boise in Idaho, a growing church
with over 3,000 regular Sunday attendees. The following is an excerpt that
talks about change from Tri Robinsons book, Revolutionary Leadership.
TRANSITIONING TO A CULTURE OF LOVE
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII I II III
e 12 transitioning to a culture of love
0:14:54:04
As our church began to grow, many exciting
things began to emerge out of the church
culture, such as a homeless ministry. But
I also began to notice that our culture was not
entirely healthy. (While we had bumper stickers
that stated, Come as you are! Youll be loved!
But, somehow, it didnt always seem like we were
reaching out in love to each other as well as new-
comers. So, I challenged our people to remove
those stickers until they actually lived those
words.) I began to feel ineffective as a leader,
which emerged out of what I saw as a deficit in our
ability to fulfill our God-given vision. That vision
for us is developing authentic followers of Christ.
The burning question in my heart was this: Are
peoples lives really being transformed? I wasnt
sure that I was seeing the fruit of this and it dis-
turbed me.
If you want to build a community of love, you
really have to be a community of trust. People
who truly love each other are people who trust
each other, who are faithful, who understand the
vision and purpose, working together with one
heart and one mind.
One of the things Ive observed in churches is
that so many of them experience leadership
explosions. Every time there is a blow up or
hiccup in the leadership team, it sets the church
back, sometimes a year or two. The church never
has the opportunity to build momentum and move
into a place of great productivity and fruitfulness.
From the very beginning of our church, I recog-
nized the need to build leaders from the ground
up, to home grow our people so that they not
only trusted and understood me, but also trusted
>
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and understood my passion for building a church
that disciples people into Christian maturity.
Early in our church planting adventure, I discov-
ered another mistake many pastors make. In their
rush to assemble a leadership team, they select
elders too early. One Christian leader suggested
to me in the beginning stages of our church that
I wait to appoint elders in our church for at least
seven years. He said I would not even know who
was going to stick around until I gave the church
some time to develop. I took that advice and
began building councils, but not eldership boards.
There was accountability, but in the first phases
they were transitory leaders.
As I looked to the Bible for a model that would
work in building our church, I found it in Luke 6.
Up to that point in Jesus ministry, He had been
doing the entire ministry Himself. He had done
all the teaching, performed all the healings and
miracles. He had yet to select His 12 disciples. But
He was preparing His followers for what was next,
and this particular passage deals with the day that
Jesus finally selected them. (Luke 6:12-19)
Two facets surrounding this passage jumped out at
me. First, I noticed there were four reasons people
gathered around Jesus. They came because they
wanted to be taught and learn truth. They came
because they wanted to be healed from whatever
it was that was afflicting them emotional, physi-
cal or spiritual diseases. They came to be set
free from the bondage in their lives. They came
because they wanted to be close and touch Him
because power was coming from Him. Essentially,
these are the four reasons anybody comes to
church. They come to be taught, to be healed, to
be set free, and to be close to the Lord.
The second thing I noticed was that there were
three designations of groups of people. First, there
were the throngs (or multitudes or crowds). There
was the mass of people who were coming from
all over to see Jesus. But of that mass, there was
another group that was designated as the multi-
tude of disciples, possibly the 70 or the 120 that are
talked about later in the Gospels. I see a difference
in these people when compared to the throngs.
These people had already committed to following
Jesus. They did not show up just for this event;
they traveled with Him, following Him from town to
town. It was out of the multitudes of disciples that
Jesus chose 12 and named them disciples. And we
know of those twelve, there were three Peter,
James, and John who spent extra time with Jesus.
They were with Him at the transfiguration. They
were with him on a hillside over Jerusalem when
He was talking about the last days. They were the
ones He sent ahead to prepare for the Passover.
They ultimately became the high profile leaders of
the church of Jerusalem in its early stages.
Each person from all three of these groups came
for the same reasons at one point in their journey.
However, there had to be a transition between
a throng mentality and a multitude of disciples
mentality. And there was also a transition between
the multitudes of disciples to one of the 12 dis-
ciples. My heart has always been to make disciples
authentic, mature, spirit-filled, reproducible
Christians. So, I asked myself, what is the differ-
ence in these groups?
I realized that the throngs are consumers. They
come to get. They come because they have needs
and they want to get those needs met. They come
because they want to be healed, they want to be
delivered, they want to be close to God. They want
for themselves and they have great needs. All of us
who are authentic Christians were members of the
throngs at one point. We all had needs to be met,
because until we received, we really had nothing
to give. It can cause a church a lot of strife when
empty people are trying to give what they do not
possess. I wanted to set up a system by which I
could help people develop into mature Christians.
When people truly experience the love of God and
therefore have that love to give, then a true com-
munity of love, care, and outreach can exist. I knew
I couldnt do it by myself and Jesus didnt do it by
Himself either. He trained and deployed this group
of people to carry out the work of the Kingdom.
As a result of these principles from Luke 6,
I believed the Lord gave me a process and a
plan to usher people from the throng mentality
into discipleship.
The multitudes of disciples were the ones who
made the shift from a throng mentality to a dis-
cipleship mentality, which was this: I want to
be taught so I can teach. I want to be healed so I
could be an instrument to heal others. I want to be
set free so I might lend a hand to help others be
set free from their bondage and addiction. I want
to be close to the Lord so I can usher others into
the Lords presence. I want to get in order to give,
not just get to get. This is how I define someone
who has made this transition. I also recognized
that in order to have a multitude of disciples, you
have to have people in place who have already
made the choice to disciple others.
In my mind, the 12 disciples are these people who
are discipling. In the case of the local church, this
is the lay leadership of the church, people leading
the small groups, the nursery, the mens ministry,
etc. They are people who are stepping into this
second arena and saying, I get to give. Out of
this group of disciplers there are some that begin
to emerge as the three. The people who fit into
this category become the eldership, or leaders of
leaders, of the church.
In processing this information, we developed a
system at Vineyard Boise where people could
progress from crowd mentality into discipleship.
It also provided opportunity for the Lord to reveal
to us those who were leading so we could pull
them into the leadership arena. I had no interest
in guessing who my elders might be by measuring
whether they were charismatic people, or had a
good business background, or seemed to under-
stand organization. John Wimber always said, You
know your elders because they eld, meaning you
know who your elders are because they are doing
the work of the ministry more than the others.
END
VI VII VIII IX X XI XII I II III IV V VI VII VIII
transitioning to a culture of love
00:20:34:06
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e 14 getting lift off
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getting lift off
Wat s te typca cuc pate wo
s maed ad as cde upepaed
fo tems of s tme?
I think the biggest thing, for almost all church
planters Ive met, is that they are not realistic
about how much time and energy has to go into
gathering. They do a little bit, they meet a few
people, and they think really aggressive work is
contacting ten people a week or soand thats not
enough. To give you an example of what I mean, I
recently met a guy in England who planted a new
church in a new area of London, England. This was
not a Vineyard. He had a small team. In 18 months
he built the church to over 150 people. And heres
how he did it: he walked and prayed through
every single street and over every single house in
that whole area that he was trying to reach, and
then he gave a really nice little invitation to the
church to every single house. That means that
over the course of 18 months he hand-delivered
over 200,000 invitations100,000 of which
he delivered himself. His team did the second
100,000. Now what that works out to, if you figure
going out every single day for eighteen months
with no breaks, no days off, no
holidaysis close to 500 invitations
every single day.
Now Im not saying thats the right
strategy for everybody; what I am
saying is that thats the right amount
of effort and focus on gathering
that has to happen in order to get a
church off the ground.
So ate s wee we eay
udeestmate te tme equed?
More than anything else, because
churches need to gather a good num-
ber of people quickly on the front
end. Your pioneers who come with
you only have a limited amount of
patience, and if you are not over the
hump by a certain amount of time,
they start bailing and then you have
to start all over again.
So tme s ot o you sde ts.
I tell planters that they need to think of the first
12 to 18 months as being absolutely nuts, so that
you can back off after that, and not be constantly
in danger of thinking Are we going to survive? I
think what I am saying is that you need to gather
in such a way that the survival of the church
question is settled within about 18 months.
You kow t te ad tee tat you ae
o to make t? Youve put te tme ad
eey , youve payed t tou, youve
caeed you passo fo ts t to
ate, ad eou peope ave bout
to t to make t o.
There is no question that it is really hard. Doing it
is going to be just grueling. But, heres the thing:
I dont think that its ultimately as difficult as a
five year span of never being sure you are going to
survive, going up, going down, never quite getting
there, always wondering, people getting demoral-
ized and leaving, never getting enough momen-
tum. I think its better to suffer for a very short
time on the front end, going full-out on gathering,
and then you can live a regular life after that. I
think that in some ways, the first 18 months you
have to decide you are not going to live a sustain-
able lifestyle. That its a sprint.
i ead a Veyad cuc pate say oce
tat ed tak to 100 peope a week. im ot
sue i evesee100 peope a week. how do
you ft ts to you stye, wo you ae, te
demoapcs aoud you?
No matter how you do it, who you are, or what
your style is, you have to understand from thebeginning that a church plant is in some ways
playing a numbers game, in that not everybody is
going to be called to your church. Not everybody
is going to fit with your church. Not everybody is
going to respond. So if you are going to get and
keep something survivable, which is probably
over 100 people, you really do have to think that
you are going to want to contactin one way or
anotherthousands, in order to get 100. Your per-
centages are not going to be high.
it seems ke fo most cuc pates, you o
to t tk, Ts s o to wok. Teeso Veyad ee, tees a eed fo oe, i
kow gods caed me to ts pace, weve ot
wat we eed to make ts appe. You ave
maybe a ove-fated sese of yousef ad
wat you ca accomps, ad you dot eay
ackowede tat may peope, maybe most
peope, ae ot o to be to wat you ae
do.
I think thats true. There arent that many churched
people these days who are ready to just jump into
a Vineyard church. Most of the people who wanted
to be in something like a Vineyard found it and
joined it a couple of decades ago! In the mean-
time, a lot of other churches have moved toward
the Vineyard in the way that they do things, so we
are not as unique as we were then. Thinking there
is going to be a flood of people from other church-
es is not realistic, nor desirable. That means that
you are looking to reach unchurched people. Some
of them might be Christians but have dropped
out of church attendance. Some might not be
Christians at all.
gve tat, ow woud you tk about you
tme at te dffeet staes of be b-voca-
toa ad te fu-tme wt te cuc?
I think that in the beginning, if you are bi-voca-
tional, you need to think of the way you live as the
same way people live who hold two secular jobs.
In a sense, both jobs are full-time in the way you
must work at them. Its not sustainable long-term,
but for a good purpose many people do it all the
time. If you go into it thinking, Ive got half a job
that brings in our income, and half
a job doing the church plant, I sus-
pect thats not going to be enough.
Does t wok to tk, i o at a
sowe pace because i ave ess
tme?
It has to be more compressed than
that, because of the expectations
that average people have about
churches. At least in North America,
most people will not think that a
church of 40 or even 50 is an accept-
able size of church in terms of what
it can offer and do, the security of
its future and so forth. Theyll put up
with a church that size if they think
its on the way up. But they wont
think of that size as acceptable. You
can find some small niche groups,
highly creative people who thrive on
churches that are small, for example. But thats
not mainstream people. So youve got to have
more than 100 people for the community to think,
This is a real church that is going to be around for
me to count on. The thing is, if you are not there
within three or four years of starting, they start
eptembe
r
00:26:52:01
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e 16 getting lift off
panicking and thinking, This is never going to
get there. They start asking questions about the
leadership. They start looking around and jumping
off. They start thinking, Maybe this is the Titanic,
not the Queen Mary. At that point, you start going
backwards.
how te do you appoac tme ad ate
so tat you ae ot just ts maket peso,
so tat t s st sptuay dve? how do you
stay motvated by te Spt, ot by umbes
ad maket?
I think it starts from your planning right from the
get-go. You develop a strategy that is based on
what youve received from God in prayer and what
fits you as a person. But you pursue it with the
degree of aggressiveness and time-focus that Im
talking about.
Second, I think there has to be a realization that
marketing alone wont do it. There has to be sub-
stance to it. You can contact 200,000 people, but if
they dont find anything when they get there, if you
are not willing to spend time with them, if theres
no compelling vision, if the spiritual atmosphere is
not positive when they get there, its not going to
help. In a sense what you are doing really is not so
much marketing as looking for the people whose
hearts God has prepared, and who he is calling to
be a part of this community that you are building.
But you dont know who they are or where they
are, and what you are doing is presenting your
vision from God to as many people as you possibly
can, just so you can find out who those people are.
I think its significant, and not to be overlooked,
that the guy in London I talked about was not just
going door to door handing out invitations. He was
praying over every single house, and over every
single street, the whole time. So in a sense he is
not just handing out 200,000 invitations; he is
praying over 200,000 houses, which is an awful lot
of prayer.
Another thing that church planters often dont real-
ize when they start is how important the informal
part of their life is compared with the formal part.
The get-togethers over coffee, the movie nights,
the parties or neighborhood round-robin dinners
are all far, far more important in the early stages
than the formal meetings. One of the reasons that
is the case is because people are making their
decision on whether to join you and be part of this
community on a very personal basis do I want to
follow thisperson? That is going to be based on
how they relate to you in informal ways, so there
has to be lots of opportunity for those. You reach
out aggressively to everyone, and then as you find
the ones whose hearts you think might be ready,
you spend lots of informal time with them.
Tey wat to see wat you ae ke we o
oes ook.
Very seldom are they making decisions to join at
this point on the basis of your great preaching or
your fancy programs. Even great preachers dont
usually start there as planters. Your music isnt
slick. Its all just very personal.
What I say to church planters in the early stage,
when they ask about sermon preparation, is totry and get about 18 months of sermon outlines
done before you plant. Do all the prep work ahead
of time. Or use the outlines from other people
that you can adapt and make your own. In the
early years, you have to do a lot of preaching with
almost no effort, because you cant usually afford
to put the kind of time into your sermons while
you are in the gathering phase that you will later
on, unless you start with a really big team that
includes a lot of gatherers. You have to find short
cuts, in the short term.
As you are gathering people, you gather mate-rial for your sermons, and the content is more
connected to your heart. You make up for the
prep time lost with people-time gained. You lose
exegesis time but gain time in the lives of people,
and you gain passion for seeing this thing lift off
the ground.
So ow muc tme soud you sped semo
pep as a cuc pate?
Per week, in the first 18 months? About an hour
a week. Seriously. Of course, you cannot do that
unless you have done a chunk of it ahead of time,or you are using outlines from something like the
Vineyard Resource CD or other respected sources.
Wat about we you ae at 50 attedace?
You ave 50, ad you ae ty to et te ext
50, ad you ae at te stae wee wat you
Suday sevces ae ke mattes a ot.
Then you might move to a couple afternoons a
week doing sermon prep, but no more. Of course,
I always tell planters, Look, dont do all the
preaching yourself. If you are close to some other
Vineyard churches, you should make stronger use
of guest preachers. Invite people from some of
the other churches to come and preach for you.
They will bring the best things theyve ever done,
and itll free up your time. That way, when you are
preaching, you can be better, because youve two
or three weeks to work on it. The difficulty is that
it is too easy to spend too much time in the office
with the books, and not enough time gathering.
My expeece s tat tats bee te defaut
t wt tme. Amo a te ts you eed
to et doe o ve yousef to, te peac
cateoy fates to f te tme. You ca ed
up sped a ot of tme wt tat ad fee
ke you ae st wok.
You can spend a lot of time on that just because
it something you can control. The difficulty with
gathering is that you are going out there and
presenting yourself and your vision, but you dont
have much control over the outcome. You are get-
ting bigger percentages of No, I dont think so
than you are Yes, I think I want to be with you.
Its very tempting to polish your preaching instead
i stated to fd tat peope eceved my
peac bette we i was sped ess
tme o t. now i ty to medtate o a passae,
et t to me du te week, ad te et t
fy. i dot eve type out my otes. i just ceate
a oute.
Right. Now, I hasten to say that there does come
a point where you have to get good at preaching.
Its a significant issue! But I think that before you
worry too much about how good of a preacher you
are, youve got to get some people to preach to.
Wat about tme wt peope? Wo do you ve
you tme to te be?
You give the vast majority of your time to peoplewho are not in the church yet or who are just com-
ing into the church. I think newcomer follow-up
should be very personal on the front end, doing
it mostly yourself. The little bit that is left over
you give to your key leaders primarily, and those
leading teams. Your focus with them is on encour-
aging them, helping them stay together and stay
focused, and drawing them into the gathering
activity, and not too much else. This means that
one of the things you have to do on the front end
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getting lift off
is to keep things simple. Do a few things well. Be
very careful about other activities and events that
will take time, energy and money but will not help
you gather, even things that you ultimately want to
do. You just have to say, Later.
Otewse you ae pos bass o te
Ttac?
Exactly. This is interesting: Its in your two year
plan, your strategic planning done before you even
start the church, that some of your key decisions
are made that are going to determine the answers
to the time question. Its also in the putting
together of your team. Of the church plants Ive
coached in the last five to ten years, the biggest
nonfunctional use of their time in almost every
case has been resolving conflicts with team mem-
bers who should never have come with them in the
first place. Almost every single church planter has
spent an enormous amount of time and energy on
one or two people who came from the beginning,
who they knew from the beginning somewhere
inside themselves should not have been part of
the plant.
A ot of tme s spet wt peope wo wat to
pocess wt you because tey ae dsuted
o dssatsfed. Tat takes tme ad emotoa
eey.
Right. So you have to be very careful in select-
ing your team on the front end. Generally what
happens if you take the wrong person is that
they make trouble for other people or with other
people, and then you are spending time dealing
with the other people too. It ripples out and eats
time like crazy. When it comes to putting your team
together on the front end, if you have any doubts
about somebody, dont take them. So many church
planters struggle with too much time and energy
going into something that doesnt even help them
accomplish the task.
You ae o to ave stue o matte wo
you ave o you team ayway.
Yes. Thats just part of being human. It does help if
you have a good plan on the front end, and you get
everybodys expectations clear at the beginning, so
they know what you are going to do and not do. It
does help to have a good coach who can tell you,
Dont do that, its going to be a mistake before
you do it! You do not want to spend a huge amount
of time resolving conflict. When you do have to do
so, you want to do it quickly and in a way that is
going to increasepeoples trust. If that means you
have to apologize quickly and say, Sorry; I messed
up, then do it. You cannot afford to spend weeks
and weeks and weeks resolving conflict. Conflicts
need to be resolved in a day or two.
how muc tme do you wat to sped wt
you eades?
I would say that you want to meet with them as a
group at least once a month for a couple of hours.
Then presuming that you have a dozen or less
leaders at the start, I would rotate it around so
that you meet with each one individually about
once every three months. Everyone is working in
the meantime. Anybody who has to be met with
every three days is too high-maintenance; you can-
not afford them as a leader. You need to have as
leaders people who will feel like a chance to meet
with you one-on-one once a quarter and be all
together once a month is plenty. When you meet
with them you give them direction for their life and
ministry assignments enough to keep them busy
for the next three months! You are not holding
their hand the whole time in between.
Wat about a moe team appoac? Does
tat cae te pctue tems of tme?
My feeling is that the once-a-month group meeting
isthe team meeting. At that meeting you discuss
whats going on, any problems, how are we doing?
Whats next? I dont know why youd need to meet
more often; anything you decide in that once a
month meeting ought to be big enough and chal-
lenging enough to keep everybody busy for the
next month.
Wat f you ae aso feds wt tese peope?
You can spend friendship time with them, if youve
got it. But Im talking about Heres what you haveto do. This is the work side of life. Though I would
add that one of the reasons that Im saying to keep
that kind of a pace for these meetings is to keep
the business meeting time low so you have more
time for informal meetings and parties and get-
togethers. You might actually see these leaders at
parties, events, retreats, etc. a lot, lot more than
the two formal contacts every three months that
Im describing. The point is that the official meet-
ings are kept real lean and mean so you have a lot
of room for the unofficial, social stuff.
You put t o te caeda? Tese aet fo-
ma lets just et toete ad a toete
ad tak about wats o o?
Right. As a small church, you want to have social,
informal stuff going on all the time. Youll have
small group meetings and social events and par-
ties. That needs to be happening multiple times a
month. So you are crossing paths with your lead-
ers at all sorts of other things. If your strategy is
to hand out invitations at the local baseball game,
youll be together at the front end and maybe at
the end to go out for ice cream and story-telling.
So relationships grow as you are working together
on somethinghanding out balloons at a down-
town festival, or whatever it is.
how does famy ft to a ts? how do you
do ts so tat you famy doest et te
sot ed of te stck?
I think that if you are church planting, you and
your spouse and older kids need to understand
up front that for a short period of time, you are
not going to live a normal life. You are going to
be living on a shoestring relationally. Again, thats
another good argument for going at it full tilt for 18
months and then being able to ease back, instead
of stringing it out for five years! I do think thatyou have to realize that this is not going to be a
no pressure on the family situation. It isgoing
to be pressurized, especially on the front end.
Everybodys going to have to invest, in the hopes
of getting the church to the place where the pres-
sure can be off. Once the church is established and
growing and youve got 300 or so people, you can
actually put together a schedule where you are no
working the majority of the nights, where youve
got your full days off, where vacations are set and
predictable. Then you become more like everyone
else who has a regular job. You are not bi-voca-
tional any more. However, you cant live like that a
the beginning, starting from scratch. You are going
to be working a lot of hours.
One thing that means is that planters might want
to think about when is a good time to do this, in
terms of family. I generally encourage people with
teenagers not to think about planting a church
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e 18 ett ft off
while their kids are in those years. Teenagers
are less flexible and more needy than just about
any other stage. They need, by and large, bigger
churches with youth groups rather than church
plants. They generally have a hard time changing
locations, changing schools, changing friends.
Unless you have a special situation and unless
your teenagers have truly agreed, I think thats a
span of years to stay put. In general, with children,
you want your family to be at a point in time where
they can maintain healthy relationships with not a
lot of energy. So its not that you cannot plant
with kids. But you just have to be aware of the
stress levels.
gve tat you ae do te ad pus fo 18
mots to two yeas, ow ca you stetc you
tme best, especay wt you kds?
If you have young kids who are not in school yet,
one of the best things you can do is to think in
terms of spending time with your family in the
mornings. Most people think of spending time with
family in the evenings, but you want to switch it
around. Mornings are better for kids anyway, and
most of the people you want to contact are work-
ing at that time anyway, or in classes. Thats a
good time to be available for your kids. So flip the
schedule around.
how may ts, te fst 18 mots,
woud you tk of be out of te ouse?
Five or six.
So f you ae b-vocatoa, wat do you do?
You o to wok a day, you ab a sadwc,
ad te you ae oe.
Well, I think its pretty impossible to do a full-time,
9-5 job and then do a church plant. I think you
need a job thats more part-time on the front end
if possible, 30-35 hours a week rather than 40+,
so that you have some hours to play with. Thatsanother good reason not to go into a church plant
with debt. Debt starts forcing you to work longer
hours, and then somethings got to give.
You ae o to wat to eveae you tme
towads be wt peope, wc w take
out eves ad maybe uces. So t coud
be a smpe as say o to beakfasts
wt peope.
Depending on your house and situation, you can
have a lot of the get-togethers at your house. For
the first six months with a first baby, they are
very mobile and you can be with them and still
be out and about. After that, you have to find
other options.
Oe of te ts i was fd was tat cuc
pat ad famy ca oveap. Ou bay
as a stoy ou fo kds o Satuday mo.
i woud take te kds, ad we i was tee i
was meet peope.
Yes. And it works even better when they get to
be school age, because then there are other adults
around the activities the kids are involved in
sports, music, dance, etc. So that part gets easier,
but juggling all their activities and your own needs
gets harder. I do think planters need to be realistic
and realize that just doing those things that one
can do with children in tow wont be enough, in
terms of gathering. The numbers of people you are
meeting are just not high enough.
Wat about we you ae wok fom ome
ad dot ave a cuc offce?
One of the biggest difficulties is the whole bound-
ary between when you are at home and available
and when you are at home and not available. I
think that in general it is better not to work fromhome except when you are having people over.
If you dont have an office, you find the nearest
coffee shop and bring your cell phone and laptop
and make that your office. You dont want to be
home with your kids and have to say, Im sorry, I
cant respond to you now, Im trying to work. That
doesnt work; its better to just not be there. That
way, when you are home, you are fully engaged
with the family.
Tats bee te best ad t fo us, av-
eveyt oed up toete, so ts ad
to dstus wats famy ad wats cuc.its ad fo te kds to fue out.
Little kids cant figure it out, and older kids dont
want to, so you really have to create those demar-
cations yourself. That way when they ask, Wheres
Dad tonight? or Wheres Mom tonight? the
answer can be, Out working, and everybody
understands what that means. And you were there
that morning with them, so its all right.
Wat ae some pactca toos of te tade you
ca ve us to maae ou tme we we dot
ave to cock , dot ave a boss to evauate
us. how do we keep fom pocastat ad
do te t ts?
Number one, understand what you really need
to do and make sure those things get done first.
Number two, anything you find yourself want-
ing to procrastinate about, do right away, first
thing. Procrastination takes up energy and time;
you are better off just getting it over with. Third,
never do anything alone if you can help it. Always
bring someone else along. That way you are doing
double-duty. You are training a leader, but you are
also meeting with this newcomer, talking with this
person who is thinking about giving their life to
Jesus, etc. Fourth, make long term plans and stick
to them. Make a plan for the month and a plan for
the week, so you know what you are going to do.
Having to decide every day, What am I going to
do today? is deadly. It should already be decided
When you wake up in the morning, you should
already know whats going to happen. On the
other hand, dont plan things too tightly, because
you want to have flexibility for the spontaneous
and the unplanned things.
When people from church call or contact you, you
want to respond quickly. A lot of times, people wil
call and say, I want to have a meeting with you.
The first thing you do is to try and have the meet-
ing right then. If someone calls me or talks to me
at church and says, Id like to talk to you some
time; can we have a meeting? my strategy is to
have it right then if at all possible. If you talk on
the phone right then, or you sit down after church,
nine times out of ten you handle the whole thing
in ten or fifteen minutes. It also gives people the
impression of responsiveness, which they like.
You are available to them right away. If you set up
meetings with them, no meeting lasts less than an
hour. They spend twenty minutes getting down tobusiness, twenty minutes doing business, and you
are going to spend the last twenty minutes trying
to get things wrapped up. Occasionally you know
its not going to be this way, but try. When I do
schedule meetings with people, I decide how long
I want them to be, and I schedule another meeting
afterwards, unless its a meeting I really want to
have open-ended. Schedule it, even if its a meet-
ing with yourself. Then you can say, Im sorry, I
have another meeting now.
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getting lift off
One of the things you have to keep in mind,
though, at the end of all this, is that the
business you are in ispeople. If people are
trying to get hold of you and they are finding that
its difficult or that they are not getting responded
to, their frustration level will rise veryquickly. So
if people call and leave a voice mail or write an
email, our rule around here is that they should be
responded to within 24 hours. At the very least,
they need to get a message that says, Im on
vacation, but I will respond to you by such-and-
such. Thats important.
If you give yourself focus, and you dont get too
wordy or perfectionist about it, youd be surprised
at what you can do. I came back from vacation
a couple of weeks ago and I had something like
150 emails waiting for me, not counting the junk.
I knew there were going to be a lot waiting, so the
day I came back I set aside a couple of hours for
emails. I had dealt with every single one of those
emails, one way or the other, by noon. So dont
procrastinate.
lets say you ae a sow eae ad a
pocastato, ave bee do a sow bud,
ave made some mstakes ove tme, ad you
ae ty to ave a famy ad fe tact at te
ed of te day. is tee ope?
Sure theres hope, just like there is for someone
who falls down and bruises himself. Is there hope
for walking? Sure. You get up, dust yourself off, fig-
ure out what you did wrong, and you go at it again.
END
00:43:46:05
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AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR AND CONSULTANT DAVID ALLEN
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII I II III THE ART OF GETTING THINGS dONE
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We live in a world full of stress, commitments,
massive amounts of information, to-do lists
that are always growing, and emails multiplying in
our in-box. All of these things and more are true
among church leaders, especially those who
are engaged in new church start-ups.
In order to help us think through these
challanges, we talked with David Allen,
who Fast Companymagazine calls a personal
productivity guru and one of the worlds most
influential thinkers on productivity. He has
written the best-selling book Getting Things
Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
(Viking, 2001), as well as a more recent follow-up,
Ready For Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for
Work and Life(Viking, 2003). Articles about Allen
have appeared in Fortunemagazine, the Wall
Street Journal, Wiredmagazine, NPR, and the
BBC. Allen has coached top executives at
Microsoft, the World Bank, the U.S. Navy, and
scores of Fortune 500 companies. He now travels
throughout the world consulting, coaching, and
teaching public seminars on organizational work-
flow and personal productivity.
We spoke with him from his home in
Ojai, California.
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e 22 te at of ett ts doe
Wat ae te key cocepts tat you
woud wat someoe wo s com to
you matea fo te fst tme to asp?
I think the key concept is capturing, clarifying and
managing the massive number of commitments a
person makes at multiple horizonswith them-
selves and everybody else. Most people simply
dont realize how many commitments they have
made, and the level of stress and distraction they
live with when they are not responsible to them.
Theyre trying to sit on top of this horse, but they
find themselves being driven by the horse instead
of guiding it.
So tey ave a sots of ts sp
aoud te eads as a esut of tese
vaous commtmets, ad eed a way of
captu tem.
Not only do you need to capture them, but you
also need to clarify what exactly they mean to you.
So, for example, you go outside and say, The yard
needs mowing. Now, a yard that needs mowing
lets you know very easily what you need to do.
But if you walk out and say, I think I might need
a gardener, now you have just stepped into a
whole different world. Now you actually have to
think. Now you have a project called research
gardeners to see if you actually want to get one,
and if so, how. Now, every time you walk out into
your yard, you feel a certain pressure. Thats the
difference between mow your yard and do I get
a gardener? Most people dont realize that this
involves knowledge-work, and it takes real effort.
Its the concrete moves of actually having to think.
You have to actually sit down and think about what
done means for this project, and you also have
to decide what doing looks like. Thats how you
get things done: you define what done means
and you decide what doing looks like. Neither
one of those conclusions show up already pre-
pared for you.
A ot of peope, im uess, ade tese
decsos by pus tem off to te sde ad
ty to oe tem.
Most people finally decide what doing looks like
and what done means in crisis. In fact, produc-
tive behaviors actually show up in crisis. In a crisis
you have focus, lack of distractions, youre highly
engaged toward the desired outcomethats
high performance behavior. The problem is that
its coming out of fight/flight, your forebrain has
shut down and youre not living with any kind of
relaxed intelligence. Now you are living your life in
a highly reactive, knee-jerking way. Most people,
for example, make decisions about what to do with
elder care for their parents when the heat forces
them to, not when they first become aware that
this is going to be an issue. So, the big paradigm
shift required is this: learning to make decisions
about capturing and clarifying stuff when it first
comes to your attention as opposed to when the
heat forces you to.
is oe of te ts uque about modety
tat weve made so may moe commtmets
ta eeatos past?
Most people reading Cutting Edgehave, in the last
72 hours, taken in more change-producing, project
creating and priority-shifting information than
their parents got in a month, some of them even
in a year. The truth is that when things change,
that impacts all of your projects and priorities.
Most people havent trained themselves to look
around and ask, Which priorities are now more
important, and which projects do I now need to
get rid of? If they dont do that, its a formula for
blow-up. People simply have a limited capacity
to manage a certain number of commitments. So
whats different about modernity is that, first, a lot
more input is coming at us that generates more
potential commitments and, second, a great deal
more of intense thinking is required to clarify how
we want to respond to those commitments.
A ot of tme maaemet systems say tat
te key s ett a bette b pctue, o ca-
fy you vaues, ad tat te appopate
esposes w foow.
You do need to do those things. But those are not
the only horizons. My purpose is to serve God
is not going to help you with deciding which of
the 2,000 emails youve got backed up should be
answered first. It will help a little bit. It will help
you define the vision you want to be fulfilling out
there, which will help you define some objectives
and goals you set to make sure you are express-
ing your work for God, which is going to help you
define the thirty to a hundred projects you actually
have in the real world to make that happen, and
thats going to help you a lot in finding the 160-
200 next action steps youve got for any of those
projects. But, by the way, hows your health? And
how are your family relationships? And, by the
way, how isthe yard? And, oh, by the way.So,
yes, knowing that you are serving God is at least
going to give you the motivation to sit down and
say, Gee, Im burning the toast and Im yelling at
my spouse, which doesnt seem like a Christian
thing to do, which may turn you back around to
say, How then do I deal with this practically?
with some internal standards about quality of life.
The most spiritual people I know are some of the
most grounded, practical, get-it-done people on
the planet.
Fo te peso wo s say, Wat youe
tak about s exacty wat i eed to do,
wat ae te basc toos e o se eeds to
stat wok wt?
You need an in-basket and a pen and paper, so
you can first of all capture all the stuff you commit
to when you make the commitments. You need
capture-buckets where you can capture these
commitments in retrievable ways. Thats because
the most irretrievable place for filing something is
in your brain. The mind retrieves things based on
how recent it was and how much emotional con-
tent you have tied to it, and thats a crappy way to
run a filing system. Your head is for having ideas,
not for holding them.
Everybody has felt themselves up against the wall
where they have so many things in their head
that they feel forced to sit down and make a list.
If they actually understood why that helps, theyd
never keep anything in their heads again! If you
use your brain for filing, you end up not finishing
things when you think of them. And the older you
get, the ideas you have for what to do with your
church arent going to come to you at church; they
are going to leak out at the beach, on the bus, and
in other strange places. You need to have tools to
capture ideas, commitments, things to do, things
you then need to think about and decide what
they mean.
You need to then train yourselfonce youve
learned to capture things in an in-basket or a
listto go down each one of these things and
decide much more discreetly what exactly each
one of those things means to you and what your
commitments are about them. Is this item a crazy
idea that you mightwant to do someday? Or is it
something you are committed to move on right
now? Is it trash? Is it reference material? This is
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the point where you sit down and get more
discreet about what things mean to you.
Ad you ave to set asde bocks of tme to
do tat.
For the typical professional these days, it takes
somewhere between 30 to 90 minutes a day just
to do that. It takes on average about half a minute
per item to decide and organize. Then, once youve
decided what to do with it, if you arent going to
act on it right then, you need to keep track of it
somewhere. If Ive decided I now need to make a
call about my new gardener, but not right now, I
need to have an organizing tool for keeping track
of things like calls that have to wait until I am near
a phone or have time.
The process of picking the thing up, deciding that
the next step is to make a phone call, and then
putting it into some list of phone calls to make
whether you type it into a category in Outlook, or
write it on a page in a planner, or throw it into a
file folder called Calls to Makethat takes about
half a minute per item, if you average it all out.
But some ways, you ae st tak about
somet dffeet ta te peso wo as
ted potz ts te Daytme.
Nearly every to-do list Ive ever seen is usuallynothing more than an incomplete list of still-
unclear stuff. Its either attracting or repulsing you
every time you look at it. The problem with most
to-do lists is that you did not finish the thinking
so every time you look at it, you are reminded
subliminally that youve got thinking to do that you
havent done yet. And all that does is stress you
out even more! And the list is incomplete to begin
with. So your head ends up being the only system
you trust, and now youve got this extra thing out
there that you trying to keep up but you are not
really keeping it up, so its out of date. And all its
doing is creating guilt and beating you up everytime you look at it.
Thats the problem. The problem is not the tool.
The problem is that people are populating these
tools with information thats incomplete, inconsis-
tent, and only half thought-through. Therefore its
not a system. A system is complete, current and
consistent. Every phone call you need to make in
your life needs to be listed someplace you can see
when you are at phone and have time. If you dont
have that, you dont have a system.
Most people dont worry about where they need
to be and when because they trust that they can
look at their calendar. The problem is that 95% of
their life is not calendared! If they understood the
principle they use with their calendar, theyd real-
ize they could get everything else out of their head
just like they got the stuff for their calendar out of
their head, and put that information in a place they
trust the same way they trust their calendar.
You metoed te book tat oe of te
ts youve doe wt some executves s
just take tem out ad buy tem a ood f
cabet.
Yes. One of the first people I coached 25 yearsago didnt even have a desk. He was one of these
people who had such a low egohe was a chiro-
practor running an alternative health clinicthat
he didnt want to have an office because he didnt
want people to think he had a Big Office. So he
didnt have anyplace to even plop a piece of paper
down. The first thing we did was buy him a desk,
put some stakes in the ground and give him a
place to sit down.
Do you fd tat we you cosut wt
peope, te suface eve ssues mea tat
you actuay ave to wok wt tem at deepeeves tems of wat tey wat to be about,
wat tey wat to be do?
Well, it all rolls downhill. Ultimately, if you dont
care about what you are doing or you dont know
why you are doing it, you will find every excuse in
the world to avoid doing these things. If actually
attempting to proactively manage your time and
commitments is going to force you to deal with
things that are closer to your soul, you may avoid
it like the plague as well. Getting organized would
force you to step up to that thing you need to do!
The truth is that I am very behavioral, as a consul-tant. I say, Hey, we dont have to deal with that if
you dont want to. We work with work flow.
Why a
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