As we wrap up the Orange Conference today, you’ll head home with your lots of intriguing, inspiring and innovative ideas. In fact, every time you mine a website, dig through a blog, read a book, connect with other leaders or attend a conference, that’s what happens.

And the challenge on coming home is this:  you will be tempted to try to implement a few good ideas.  And that’s the problem.

The activity in most churches is often a conglomeration of good ideas.  But in the sea of good ideas, nothing is truly great.  And good isn’t good enough.  One great idea…one great ministry…one great initiative will always beat out a hundred good ones.  The tablet computer market has been around a longer than the iPad.  But it was a handful of reasonable ideas, experiments and good (and not so good) products.  Then came one great product: the iPad.  And it changed everything.  According to most pros, all the competition that has since ensued is just good.

And that’s the problem with good.

What if going home the best thing you could do was to spend six months reconsidering everything you did?  Some of that will be easy.  It doesn’t take a leader to identify what is bad, dead or not working.  That might be easy to get rid of.  But chances are you have more than a few good things at your church.  Why not look at eliminating the merely good so you can do what is great?

At Connexus, where I serve, here are a few ways that plays out:

• We are committed to reaching your families, and we program everything in our weekend service around that – the music, the message and our entire service.  Lots of others attend, but we never apologize for a style of service that is targeted and specific in its objective.
• We don’t do a lot of ‘adult’ programmes (other than community groups) so we can focus on getting people into community groups and focus on building a first rate family ministry.  If you do less, you can accomplish more.
• We say no to almost every initiative that gets proposed for ministry because we don’t want to go off mission or off strategy.  It’s not that the way we do ministry is not the only way to do ministry, it’s just that it’s the way we’re committed to doing ministry.

So as you head home, don’t settle for good.  Do the hard work and get to great.  You won’t be sorry.

So it’s day two of the Orange Conference, and I can imagine your passion is running high.  But passion alone won’t win the day.  Passion needs something else: clarity.

Here’s a repost that might help us think through how to implement what we’re currently excited about.

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I love conference.  The Orange Conference starts today.  It’s simply phenomenal.  5000 leaders from around the world in one place to figure out how churches can help parents and the next generation win.  Last month our team was at Drive.  These are world class opportunities to learn and connect.  They are also, quite frankly, fun.

But they can be challenging too.  Here’s why.  Conferences are almost always run by people who started churches.  They are almost always run by leaders who have met with some considerable ‘success’ in ministry, often with stories of churches that start with 1000 people in attendance in the first year, first month, first minute…you know the story.

The tension is that conferences are attended mostly by people who are trying to transition an existing church or by leaders who are in a start up that attracted hundreds or dozens in it’s first year.   And the reality is the churches most of us go home to have some confusion about ministry approach, future direction, and may have teams that are not all on the same page.

You go to a conference and get completely fired up. You’re excited, inspired.  You dream.  You actually see what could be.

And then you go home.

And a month later you are discouraged, frustrated, angry and a bit heartbroken.  Because what could be is not yet.  And now it looks like it might never be.  It’s not that you don’t want it to be, it’s that you don’t know how.

Three qualities can help us tremendously as we think about what happens when we point the car home or hand the boarding pass to the gate agent:

Courage – What I’m perhaps being called to do is going to take time, resolve and strength that in all likelihood God himself is going to have to give me.

Humility – I came alone or only with a few team members.  I need to go home and humbly work with other people who weren’t in the room to create a shared vision, shared action plan and shared implementation plan.

Perseverance – The work I’m doing is hard.  I need to take a long view and realize I will over estimate what can happen in the course of a week or months, but I will likely underestimate what can happen over the course of a few years.

What helps you turn a vision into reality when you head home?  What’s your biggest struggle in implementing great ideas and new directions when you get home?

By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to the Orange Conference with my wife and some awesome crew from Connexus Church where I serve.

If you’ve ever been to Orange, you know you’re in for a treat. Orange is 5000 of the best leaders in the church today trying to help church leaders and families combine their influences to make a powerful impact on the lives of our sons and daughters.

While Orange is always a crazy busy week, I’ll be posting insights and learnings from the conference.  If you’re not going to be at Orange, you can still watch the main sessions live here.

I’ll be speaking at different times at the conference and would love to connect with you.  Make sure you say hi if you’re in the house.  You can leave questions here in the comments section of my blog or we can continue the conversation on twitter. Either way, I’m looking forward to learning, connecting and being inspired.

How about you?  You going to be there? Will you be watching online?  What do you love most about Orange?  What questions do you have?

I don’t know who said this (I’ve misplaced the source), but I thought it was brilliant:

I don’t mind meetings about the future.  I just don’t like meetings about the past.

I’d never thought about it that way.  Who would really plan their life intentionally around meetings that are about the past?  The more I thought about it…the more I realized the answer is ‘lots of us.”

You meet about the past every time you:

Evaluate without clear changes for the future

Audit a problem simply to assign blame

Focus on what could have been

Discuss lingering issues without moving toward resolution

Dream, but don’t plan to implement (today’s unexecuted dreams become tomorrow’s regrets)

If you were to be completely honest with yourself, how much of your time is spent meeting about the past, not the future?  I’m afraid in many organizations, the percentage is measurable.  In dying organizations, it’s almost every meeting.

I don’t want to meet about the past anymore.  We can discuss it, but only insofar as it leads to a new future.

What have you learned about this?

So we get ready to celebrate the greatest moment in human history (Easter), and I’m worked up about it. It’s not that I dislike Good Friday, Easter and Christmas themselves.  I love what they’re about.  But as a lead pastor, I find them to be the most difficult services of the year to plan for. That’s what’s got me worked up.

Here’s why:  Most people know the story.  And most don’t care.

It’s like this:  I live an hour north of Toronto but listen to Toronto radio.  I hear all the traffic reports, but I live far enough north of the city that they really don’t bother me.  So instead of hearing the traffic report I hear ‘blah blah blah blah’.  The weather? I tune in like a laser.  Because we pretty much have the same weather patterns as Toronto.  I’ve developed a relevance filter.  I care about what impacts me…not just what happens.  Not saying that’s good…I’m just saying that’s true.

I think every person who walks in our doors this weekend has a filter like that.  Most of us will think we’ve done our job when we tell people what happened (Jesus died…Jesus is alive) and mourn or celebrate appropriately.  Over the years I’ve watched thousands of unchurched people walk out of those services unchanged.  It’s like there saying “Yep, I know.  So what?”  They wanted the weather report.  The way we presented Easter feels to them like a traffic report for another city.

That’s why I get all worked up before Christmas and Easter.  To simply tell them isn’t enough for most unchurched people.  And you can go all spiritual on me and tell me that the word will not return empty (I get that and actually believe it), but the truth is 98% of them won’t be back…at least until the next major holiday or the next tragedy in their life or until someone invites them and helps explain why it’s relevant.

Here’s what I’m trying to focus on more and more as we head into major holidays. I think our job is tell them not only what happened, but why it matters.  I think our goal is to tell them why they can’t just leave and not respond.  When you answer why, you establish relevance. You help people bridge the gap between what they know about and what they care about.

We shot Easter Sunday’s message this year for Connexus in a graveyard and talked about how you can dismiss an idea, a fact or a concept, but it’s pretty hard to dismiss a dead man walking.  When a dead man is walking and making claims about life and God and you, you can’t just sit there.  You have the respond.  You have to react.   And we’re going to give people a chance to respond…we’re going to try to help people get to a decision point.  Everything from the opener in the service, the worship leader’s bridges, to song choice to the message itself and the way we pray can help people understand why what we’re celebrating is relevant.

I don’t think we’ve cracked the code by any stretch of the imagination.  But I think the church has to do better on major holidays.

What do you think?  What’s helped you?

….is deciding what you won’t do.

John Sculley was asked what was key to the genius of Steve Jobs.  Listen to what he said:   Jobs “always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do.”

And that’s hard.  Chances are your job is a constant series of demands, requests and opportunities.  The best thing you can do is decide ahead of time what you won’t do.  This will be difficult.

A year ago I decided to cut back on what I did.  I had to eliminate whole categories of things I used to do.  It took me a few months to develop that criteria working with our leadership team, my wife, my assistant, our elders and a leadership coach.  But it’s well worth it even 12 months later.

In the end, I set up two days for writing and working ‘on it’ (not in it) (Mondays and Wednesdays) where I don’t go into the office at all, and two days for meetings (Tuesdays and Thursdays).  Fridays is a float day for me…sometimes personal, sometimes catching up (especially in busy seasons)…sometimes doing things I just want to do.  Saturdays is almost always a day off.  I serve Sunday mornings and usually budget rest and family for the remainder of the day.

I narrowed my meetings to team meetings I needed to be involved in and direct report meetings.  We even cut more out of my schedule than this, and it left me feeling that I was not involved in 99% of what was happening at Connexus where I serve.  Which is exactly where I need to be as a leader – releasing and empowering staff and key volunteers and focusing on doing what only I can do within the organization.

Doing this is difficult.  Here’s what I still struggle with sometimes:

I actually liked some of the things I no longer do

I feel bad disappointing people when I say I can’t meet with them or speak at an event

I feel like what I do is intangible even if it does add value (I mostly write messages, lead the staff and elders, vision cast and plot future direction)

I feel like I should be doing more

Saying no still isn’t fun

That said, I wouldn’t trade it.  My workload and the number of opportunities has probably doubled in the last year, and having a clear sense of what I won’t do and what I will do has helped navigate that immensely.

Chances are you are feeling pulled in a million directions this week.  So before deciding what you will do today and this month, decide something even more important: what you won’t do.

What have you learned about this?  What have you stopped doing that you used to do?  How has that helped?  What do you miss?

As we wrap our week on the declining church and what it would take to transform the church, here’s some math to consider.

Anyone who is going to defy the odds and help lead a church that grows and makes a difference is going to need courage.  The math that has helped me involves thinking through the percentages around change.

Whenever you want change, people will oppose it.  Doesn’t matter what it is, people get upset.  The math of opposition looks roughly like this:

10% are deeply opposed

20% are opposed

40% are neutral

20% are open

10% are eager

As a leader, it’s critical you choose which groups you listen to most.  If you have 30% in favour and 30% opposed, doesn’t it make sense to run with the 30% who are in favour?  Additionally, who you run with will help determine who the neutral people side with.  If you side with the early adopters you could have 70% of your church on board. In fact, when the 70% begin to speak up, the 20% who are simply ‘opposed’ and not ‘deeply opposed’ often change their mind – even if it is belatedly.  By choosing who you focus on you can ultimately find 90% buy in.

This will take dedication and leadership because

The people deeply opposed are louder than those who are open and eager for change

The people deeply opposed are angry

The people deeply opposed are demanding

But seriously, are you really going build the future on people with that mindset?  Didn’t think so.  What’s worse, if you continually let the opposition have the floor, those eager for change and open to change will lose hope and likely leave.  They’ll find another leader ready to embrace change.

Now…one last point.  And this is so critical for change.  The math above covers the people inside your organization.  Not those outside.  Let’s say your church has 1,000 people in it, and the community has 100,000 people you are trying to reach.

Those deeply opposed to change represent 10% of your church, but only .001% of your community.

Are you seriously going to let .001% of your community hold the future hostage?  Are you going to sacrifice the 99.99% of people who will eventually embrace good change for the sake of the .001% who won’t?  Didn’t think so.

And there’s your courage.  Now go change.

So if you want your church to be around a decade or two from now, what do you need to do?

My suggestion would be to focus on strategy.  Focusing on strategy will provide the greatest disagreement point among your congregation and the great breakthrough potential.  It might also be the fight of your life.

Let me explain.  Churches for sure need a mission and vision.  And apart from churches undergoing a real theological drift (which we talked about yesterday), most people agree on mission and vision.  We rally around Jesus, God and reaching people.  Very few people inside the church disagree on those points.

What we disagree on is the strategy that will get us there.  Here are some ways strategy plays out in your church:

Choir versus band

Lame bands versus bands outsiders want to hear (sorry, it’s just true)

Insider focus versus outsider focus

Prioritizing ourselves rather than prioritizing others (like children, students and families)

Programs versus steps

Congregational control versus leader empowerment

Preservation versus innovation

Preaching information versus application

I hope you’ll add to this list, but you get the point.  These are among the flash points – the places where you will get serious disagreement.  Which is exactly why you need to go there.  Which is exactly why you need to have the conversation.

It might be the fight of your life, but it might also be the fight that brings life.

I know in my time in leadership, it has been tackling issues like these that have brought progress and helped us reach outsiders at a higher rate than ever before (last year 68% of the growth at Connexus came from people who didn’t regularly attend church).  We’re not there yet and we certainly don’t have it all figured out, but I think tackling these issues have helped us advance the mission significantly.

Tomorrow we’ll wrap up with a post on how to stay motivated through all this transformation. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you!  How about you?  What would you put on the list?