I was on a call a few months ago with a friend I track with regularly.

Darryn leads a growing church that has some pretty high capacity leaders around the table.

On the call he said “I need to have a vision big enough to make high capacity leaders afraid.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks.

I loved it.

Think about it. Is there a higher or more urgent calling than accomplishing the mission of the church?

And yet so many churches limp along satisfied with incremental progress and minimal commitment. Starbucks sometimes seems to have a more urgent mission than many churches do. That just shouldn’t be true.

Here’s what I think is true:

High capacity visions attract high capacity people.

High commitment environments attract highly committed people.

The lower your bar is, the lower your chance is to accomplish anything significant.

Big leaders are not stirred by small dreams.

Here are five things you can do that can help engage high capacity leaders:

1. Become passionate about an inexhaustible vision. One of the things I love about leading a church is that the mission is never ‘done’. Sure, it’s important to celebrate milestones along the way. But as long as there are unchurched people (we have about 200,000 within a 30 minute radius of our church) and as long as people need to grow in their faith (that’s never ‘done’ either), then we have work to do. High capacity leaders love visions that are much bigger than themselves. Reaching 200,000 people will keep almost any leader energized.

2. Ask big. If you are recruiting small group leaders, asking a leader to serve every week pulls in a more committed leader than asking someone to serve 1 in 5 weekends. Asking someone to join an inner circle and engage intellectually, spiritually and even financially calls out a different kind of leader than the call to simply handout programs and smile on a Sunday. High capacity people are drawn to high levels of challenge.

3. Be innovative. As the church moves into the future, I think experimentation and innovation are going to be hallmarks for churches that are effective in reaching the next generation. Being willing to do things in different ways will attract the best minds, hearts and intellects to the mission. If you launch ventures like, say, online campuses or multisite, you will engage people who would never come to the table under more traditional forms of ministry.

4. Continually point toward why you’re doing what you’re doing. High capacity leaders want to accomplish something bigger than themselves. There is no mission bigger than the mission of the church. Remind them regularly of giving their lives to a higher cause.

5. Value input. Leaders love to be heard. You do. I do. High capacity leaders don’t always need to be right, and they don’t even need to always get their way. But knowing that their input is valued is huge. Listen as you lead.

If you’re having trouble engaging high capacity leaders, your problem might not be that you’re asking too much. It might be that you’re asking too little.

What are you learning about attracting high capacity leaders?

Do you have a vision big enough to scare people?

I have been at the Orange Conference 2013 this week in Atlanta. If you’ve never been you’re missing out.

This is not an unbiased account, just so you know. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Reggie over a number of years. We have written together, traveled together and spoken together.

But more than that, he’s become one of my best friends and he’s been an incredibly positive influence on my leadership.  He also officiated at my son’s wedding last year. I so appreciate his friendship and leadership.

While Reggie Joiner is passionate about families, he’s also one of the very best leaders I’ve ever met – anywhere. He’s creatively brilliant and strategically laser focused. And he’s an incredible friend to many.  I think anyone who knows Reggie would agree.

But I thought you might like to learn from Reggie the way I’ve learned from him. So I thought I’d highlight 21 leadership lessons I’ve learned from Reggie over the years.

Let’s start with some lessons on life, family and relationships:

1. Your legacy is going to be most important to the people you’re with right now. Invest in the people closest to you. I have seen this modeled in Reggie’s life. His investment in time and care in the people who know him is second to none. Although he leads thousands of people, he leads the few around him with completely commitment and humility.

2. The environment you want to create is one where no matter how far people might stray they want to come back. When people ask me what Reggie’s like, I tell them “He’s a creative genius…one of the smartest people I’ve ever met…he’s deeply relational.”  All of that is true. But he also just loves people and knows how to value them in their worst moments. If I was ever ended up in the moral ditch, I would ask for Reggie to come help me get out. He creates the kind of environment where no matter how far people stray, they would want to come back.

3. Nobody has more influence in the life of a child than a parent. Fact. Which is why no parent can ignore the 3000 hours of influence God gives us each year.

4. A parent is not the only influence a child needs. God never designed parents to handle their kids all alone.

5. Two combined influences have a greater impact than just two influences. When you combine the influences of church and family, you get something more powerful, like when red and yellow combine to produce Orange.

6. 100 years from now, the only thing that will matter in the life of a child is their relationship with God. Bam. If that isn’t perspective, what is? I have a coaster in my home I use every day for my morning tea. That’s what it says on the coaster.

7. God doesn’t use perfect pictures. He uses broken people. The ideal family doesn’t exist. Just read your bibles and breathe a sigh of relief. Most biblical families were just as dysfunctional as yours.

8. God wants to tell the story of redemption and restoration in every family. God meets us where we are, not where we think we should have been.

9. God’s story of redemption in a parent’s life gives a child a front row seat to the grace of God. When God begins to work in a parent’s life, the kids get a front row seat to grace. So beautiful. And true.

10. Every child needs another voice saying the same thing a loving parent would say. This may have saved my sanity as my kids move through their teenager years. Even though they might not want to tell me anything, they had other adults in their life they could talk to. Powerful.

11. You need to pursue strategic relationship for your kids before you need them so that they’re there when they need them. When you prioritize small group friendships and adult leaders who serve as mentors early, you set kids up for success.

12. People will not believe they are significant until you give them something significant to do. That’s why in Orange ministry, we give teens and even pre-teens significant opportunities to serve.

13. The Church convinced me for years that I was supposed to love people who are different, but they never gave me permission to like people who are different. Bam. Reggie has one of the most progressive minds I know when it come to thinking about who the church needs to be, how we need to act and what we need to do to love and like the people who are different than us. (The future of the church probably lies in our response to that issue by the way).

14.  The most important fight you can have is the fight for the heart. Reggie taught me what it was like to fight for people, not with people. My life will never be the same as a result.

And let’s finish up with some leadership principles

15. Push others into the spotlight. I don’t think anyone I know does this better than Reggie. He loves raising up leaders, handing over the mic, standing to the side and helping other leaders succed.

16. Change isn’t an option. How you respond to it is. I love talking/writing about change. Reggie nails it in this quote.

17. Strategic steps beat random programs. Reggie taught me to think steps, not programs. Our church is so much healthier as a result.

18. The problem with needs based ministry is there’s no end to need. Every time someone says “I see a need we should respond to”, I think about this quote from Reggie. You could go there as a church, but just know you are never going to solve every need you see. So we just pick one or two and go deep.

19.  Your strategy ultimately determines the success of your ministry. Effective ministry is not just about great content, mission or vision it’s about having a great strategy. A poor strategy will frustrate the execution of a great mission.

20. Teach Less For More. To cut through the communication noise our culture suffers from, teach fewer things for greater impact. All information is not equally helpful, relevant or engaging.

21. Focus on who you want to reach, not who you want to keep. I always wanted to be about unchurched people, but this principle changed my focus more anything else.

Those are 21 leadership and life lessons I learned from Reggie Joiner.

What have you learned from Reggie?

He is my talk outline for my session at Orange Conference 2013 called Steak, Potatoes and Change – Creating an Appetite for Change in Your Church.

Change happens to be one of my favourite subjects, and one of the things that was fun about this talk is that some of the ideas are ones I’m looking to include in my next two books on change (the sequels to Leading Change Without Losing It). So I’d love your comments and thoughts.

Anyway, here are the notes. And please leave questions in the comments.

Every church needs to change. Even church plants face change once they are outside the launch window-sometimes even earlier. But how do you get people to change? We’ll look at why people don’t change and what you need to do to as a leader to create a desire in the hearts of people for key change

Shift One: Understand Why People Resist Change

1. People crave what they already like.

2. Our cravings form behavioral patterns:

a.  The people who attend your church are there because they like your church the way it is.

b.  The people who don’t attend your church aren’t there don’t.

5. People change when the pain associated with the status quo is greater than the pain associated with change.

6. Leaders have a greater appetite for change than those who follow.

Shift Two: Plot Trajectory to Determine What’s at Stake

1. Unimplemented change eventually becomes relief or regret.

2. The top 5 career regrets of business people (according to Daniel Gulati of the Harvard Business Review):

-       I wish I hadn’t taken the job for the money.

-       I wish I had quit earlier.

-       I wish I had the confidence to start my own business.

-       I wish I had used my time at school more productively.

-       I wish I had acted on my career hunches.

3. Incremental change ushers in incremental results.

4. Radical change has the potential to usher in radical results.

5.  Plot out where you will be if you don’t change.

6.  Plot out where you could be if you do change.

Shift Three: Raise the Level of Discontent

1. Create discontent out of:

i.     The potential of your mission
ii.    The progress of your mission
iii.   The gap in your mission between what is and what should be (which is what change fills…change fills the gap between what is and what should be.)
iv.   The urgency of your mission.

2. Transfer the tension that comes with the appetite for change from the leader to the community.

3. When you cast vision, focus on why twice as much as you do on what and how.  Why unites, while what and how divide.

4. Communicate the need for change in concentric circles.

i.     Dialogue with the core

ii.     Input from the committed

iii.     Information to the congregation

iv.     Vision to the crowd

v.     Invitation to the community

5. Don’t look for consensus. Consensus kills courage. Change rarely happens when everyone has a say.

6. Reserve the decisions exclusively for the body that must make the decisions.

Shift Four: Prepare for Drama

1. We are attracted to the drama in other people’s lives but resist it in our own.

2. Most Christians would forbid their children from participating in the Bible stories they read to them.

3. Most Christians pray for a changed outcome and then pray against any drama necessary to bring the outcome about

4. To lead change effectively introduces a level of drama into the church that’s necessary for the outcome to change.

Shift Five: Never Arrive

1. Focus on where you’re going, not when you’ll arrive.

2. Value experimentation.

3. Embrace failure as a step toward progress.

4. Celebrate the progress you make

Over time, appetites actually change.

When you truly embrace your mission, change becomes the by-product, not the goal, and that creates a lasting appetite for change.

So that’s the outline. What are you learning about creating an appetite for change?