Your Followers Are Waiting On You To Go First

A few weeks ago, I took my 15-year-old to a Billie Eilish movie concert.

What I experienced, outside of a pretty good concert experience, was a memorable leadership lesson.

Read this NEW POST if you’re a leader. Your team is watching and waiting on you to go first.

Making the Most of Your Church Database

You have access to so much attendee and guest data. The question is, are you using it well?

This is a longer post than usual, but I want to help you understand HOW your church data can make a massive difference in discipleship growth.

Click the link to access the full post. This may be something to bookmark for future reference, as well.

When Should a Small Church Hire an Executive Pastor?

Hiring an executive pastor for a small church can be daunting. For that matter, hiring for any position in a small church can be daunting.

There are several reasons to consider hiring an executive pastor:

1. When Your Church is Growing.
When your congregation reaches a certain size, an executive pastor can help take care of day-to-day operations and provide additional counsel to the pastors, church staff, and volunteer teams. Growing churches add complexity for pastors and church staff. Growth is a great thing, but even good problems are still problems.

More people means more leadership decisions, pastoral care needs, budgetary management, and discipleship oversight. When a church cannot keep up with the demands of a growing congregation, the growth is capped. In most cases, the only way to lift the growth lid is to hire more leadership. Specifically, executive leadership.

2. When There’s a Growing Need for Strategic Planning and Directional Leadership.
An executive pastor can provide valuable strategic direction, helping the church think through important decisions to ensure it is headed in the best direction for its mission and ministry. They can offer counsel on community outreach and help make decisions about what changes need to be made. Having an executive pastor on board takes some of this burden off of the existing pastors and leadership team.

3. When the Senior Pastor Isn’t Skilled in Strategic Leadership
Continuing from the above, the majority of senior pastors are more visionary than practical. This is not a knock on senior pastors. It takes vision and invention to plant or lead a church forward. Yet, equally important are systems, strategy, and intentionality. It’s rare to find a visionary leader who also possesses these more strategic skills.

When a church is led by a senior pastor who lives in vision and ideation, an executive pastor role may be necessary to help the vision come to fruition.

Final Consideration
If you’re a senior pastor, take an honest look at yourself, your skillset, and your current team. It could be possible your lack of growth is due to a lack of systems, strategy, and intentionality. This is exactly what an executive pastor can bring to your team.

My 2 Hot Takes on The Asbury “Revival”

My oldest son is 21. He’s a drummer, often playing worship on Sunday mornings.

He and I recently were at lunch and I asked him about the Asbury “revival.”

His response stopped me in my tracks. And I think he was right.

From the heart of my kid, here’s my new take on the “revival.”

4 Responsibilities of a Weekend Experience Director

Churches of the future will staff differently. In this post, we look at one new position every church needs: The Weekend Experience Director. 

5 New Staff Positions Your Church Needs

For a long time, church staffing conversations revolved around how many staff members a church needs.

Today, churches are struggling to answer a new and more complex staffing question:

What staff positions do churches need?

The days of senior pastor, executive pastor, education pastor, worship pastor, etc., are going away in part. Successful churches have realized they also function as media and data companies. Leading churches to recognize the need for new and different church staff positions.

In this NEW ARTICLE, we discuss 5 new positions every church should consider.

5 Leadership Labeling Tips to Better Lead Your Team

How have you labeled the people around you? 

And before you suggest to yourself, “I don’t label people,” we all do it. Our brains are wired to label.

I’ve been labeled by others my life. And I’ve labeled others my entire life.

I recently was labeled in a Twitter reply. But the label isn’t really accurate.

So why did the person feel the need to label me? More, what happens when we, as leaders, label others?

In this NEW POST, we’ll look at labeling from a leadership position. Why we do it, and what we should consider.

4 Relevant Strategies to Reclaim Church Relevance

Does your church or ministry have the “right” kind of relevance?

I wasn’t in church leadership when “relevant” became a buzzword. I assume it entered our church leader vocabulary with the invention of the “seeker sensitive” model. I grew up attending church, and I can confidently tell you that relevance and sensitivity were NOT the goals of my childhood church.

Most new models are reactions to current and perceived antiquated approaches.  That’s what launched the “relevant church.”

Now, what was once the church buzzword has become what we want to avoid. But if we aren’t careful, we’ll swing out of balance and become irrelevant. Which may be even worse.

In this NEW POST, I offer a better way to see relevance and offer 4 strategies to reclaim the right kind of church relevance.

8 Strategies To Better Balance Managing and Leading — Breaking Free in 2023

A critical difference exists between managing and leading. If you don’t know the difference, management will take over.

It’s not your fault, though. That’s what organizations do best.

Here’s the difference:

MANAGEMENT is the process of orchestrating what exists. Managers are particularly adept at ensuring what exists functions effectively and efficiently. For example, managers set and monitor budgets, implement HR processes, and generally ensure all the organizational systems run well. Managers are mandatory for organizational success.

While managers orchestrate what currently exists, leaders create what will exist.

LEADERS innovate and ideate, envision, and move things forward. Of course, leaders create what will eventually be managed.

Creation and orchestration. Both are necessary, but they are different.

This NEW POST offers you 8 Strategies To Better Balance Managing and Leading.
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If leadership is important to you, check out this new course: YOUR LEADERSHIP TOOLBOX: https://gavinadams.com/product/course-leadership-toolbox/

Creating and Sustaining The Big Mo — Breaking Free in 2023

I LOVE talking about gaining and sustaining momentum.

Before we get to that, just one quick note.

My friend and client Bryant Golden at Centerpoint Church just told me they recently experienced a:
— 206% Increase in NEW GIVERS,
— 62% Increase in TOTAL GIVERS,
— 26% Growth in TOTAL GIVING, and
— 112% Increase in RECURRING GIVERS!

That’s crazy. But it’s not complicated.

They used my Funding Funnel to understand generosity movement. You can, too.

The FUNDING FUNNEL MASTERCLASS starts TODAY. There’s still time to get your spot: https://gavinadams.com/product/masterclass-the-funding-funnel-that-funds-your-church/
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We’ve arrived at post number three to break free in 2023. 

In this conversation, let’s talk about gaining and sustaining momentum.

Let’s begin with a question: When it comes to momentum, do you have “it?” Or perhaps a better question is, “What is “it?” 

Momentum is one of the best things to have, most challenging things to keep, and complicated things to create.

At least, that’s what we’ve always thought. Momentum isn’t all that elusive. The word itself gives us all the information we need to create what we so desperately want.