First Evangelicals Free Church of Fullerton, California, has a fresh, mission-driven vision that builds on our historic strengths while encouraging new kingdom initiatives. We're blessed with a great staff that is a healthy blend of the old and the new. Our challenge? Being a healthy church.
You see, healthy churches need change, too, but they often fail to feel the need for change. After all, "if ...
As everyone who has ever led a church will agree, bringing change to an organization isn't easy. So where do you start with the necessary changes?
John Kotter, an expert on leadership at the Harvard Business School, has studied how the best organizations institute significant change. He suggests that useful change tends to be a process, which creates power and motivation sufficient to overcome the ...
You don't have to be a visionary to lead well. We've found we can help people move forward as leaders when we say to them, "You can develop a vision even if you're not a visionary." Here are six ways that mortals like us can see where a group needs to go:
1. Tie in to a bigger vision that's already in place.
First, ask, "Do I even need to come up with a complete vision from scratch?" Chances are, you ...
Most of today's leadership literature focuses on the "visionary leader," the one who determines his church's calling and then communicates that vision to the church. The model is Moses' receiving the Ten Commandments: he went up the mountain, heard from God, and came back down the mountain to communicate the vision and challenge people to follow. It's the "Moses as CEO" model.
Reading the Resistance Resistance to change comes for a variety of reasons. Wayne Schmidt
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Change is the price of vision, and with change comes resistance. If there is no resistance, there has been no change; we've simply gotten around to doing what others were expecting to take place. In the words of one of my mentors, "People prefer the painful known to the uncertain better." Casting a vision involves that "uncertain better" that simultaneously stretches faith and invites resistance.
Making Vision Stick How to keep the church's passion for ministry from deflating. Andy Stanley
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You've repeated the vision for your church a hundred times. Then someone will ask a question that makes you think, What happened? Didn't they hear what we've said over and over? Don't they know what this church is all about?
Vision leaks. You can spot leakage by listening for three things:
Prayer requests. When you are in a leadership meeting, are the only prayer requests for sick people? When I'm in such a meeting, I say, "Whoa, is anybody in this group burdened for an unchurched or unsaved friend? Yes, let's pray for the sick people. Now, what else can we pray for?"
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