Great Church Staff Meeting...

Every Tuesday, we have our church staff meeting. Today was like every other week, with the exception that our staff meeting was considerably more productive than most. As I have written about previously, my church has be in a state of flux for the past 3 or so years. The church sent a Sr. Pastor packing because they didn't trust where he was leading/whether he was the one who could lead them, removed a youth pastor for enormous moral failure, had two worship team leaders have an affair with each other, which led to the ending of the contemporary service as things imploded in the leadership of that service, cut a worship pastor to half time, then eliminated the position entirely, and added and eliminated a position of Minister of Adult Care. I'm sure there is more, but you get the idea of how all that in a three year period added on top of the standard church issues has been a significant challenge.

Slowly the boat has been turning, and today was a good day in that effort. We talked about what we do as a church and how it is/is not welcoming to new people, especially people not like us. We are at the moment a lilly white congregation, not at all reflecting the diverse ethnic mix of the Northern Suburbs of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Sure, we are a Swedish Baptist congregation (Baptist General Conference) but that does not excuse our not reaching out to others in our surrounding community. We spent a good bit of time examining what is new user unfriendly. I brought up our need to have staff and council and board members (yeah, our church has resisted calling them Elders and Deacons to the staff's bewilderment) parking in the far portion of our parking lot to leave up front spaces for newcomers. We're all able bodied. Then came my favorite part of the day - our secretary stated "well then I'll put a message in our next church wide email and newsletter telling those people to park there". Now was my chance to lead. I explained to the rest of the staff, and not just to the secretary, the need to cast vision. If we simply tell people to park elsewhere, they will mostly comply begrudingly. If we cast the vision, we explain this is a tool for us to reach out to our community and do Kingdom work, and then after casting the vision we invite them to participate, we have completely changed the mindset and achieved the same results. We cast the vision, invite others to join, and they rightly feel that they are contributing instead of jumping through inane hoops the staff have invented for them. Over and over again in the next hour I was able to add to this, about why, when and how to cast our vision. I was able to coach the new youth pastor on it, I was able to make suggestions to our staff musician, and to our children's minster. The whole time I could see our Sr. pastor taking notes as well. I love to teach about leadership, I love equiping others to lead well.

Now of course the difficult tasks lie ahead, the praxis. Can we move from talking about it, to making it happen. I think we can. I think some fires were lit today, fires that will burn brightly of Kingdom things.


It was almost a dissappointment to end our staff meeting, as it was so productive, I say almost because we followed up with lunch at the highly esteemed Chipotle. Barbacoa with lots of cheese for me please. And pass the Chipotle Tabasco too while you are at it.