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?

 

The following is my talk outline for my Casting the Vision Daily To Keep Your Team Aligned talk given at the 2013 Orange Conference.

If you have questions feel free to leave a comment. In the meantime, here’s my talk outline.

Alignment is such a key issue for leaders. More than almost anything else, misalignment can derail even the clearest and most compelling vision. We’ll look at how leaders get misaligned and what you can do to keep your team on the same page.

1. In a perfect world, alignment would be automatic.

2. A leader never has to work at getting a team unaligned – it happens all by itself.

3. Organizations naturally grow toward complexity, (inner) competition and confusion.

4. Over time, minor misalignments become major gaps and, as a result, the common mission is lost.

5.  Just because you start in the same place doesn’t mean you end up in the same place.

So how does misalignment happen?

1. Misalignment rarely happens in a church on the mission and vision level

2. Misalignment almost always happens on a strategy level.

3. In particular, strategically unaligned programs become divisive because what you’re involved in becomes the mission

4. Leaders forget to talk about why we do what we do.

Why unites

What and how divide

Five Ways to Build and Keep Alignment

1. Take personal ownership of the strategy as leaders by:

1. Creating clarity around strategy.

2. Eliminating all competing programming (less is more).

3. Creating a common language.

4. This greatly reduces personal agendas.

2. Empower people who are already onboard.

a. Some of them are on your team…some are not.

b. Look for like minded leaders…with a proven track record.

c. Focus on strategic alignment, not just missional alignment.

d. Use financial records if necessary…giving is evidence of where the heart truly is.

e. Prioritizing the “who” of team will reduce friction and speed alignment as you discuss the “what” of ministry.

3. Build trust.

a. Trust is easiest relationally when people are aligned missionally.

b. Trust impacts speed:

i. Where trust is low, speed goes down and costs go up.
ii. Where trust is high, speed goes up and costs go down. (see Stephen M.R. Covey…Speed of Trust)

4. Eliminate alignment killers:

a. Unclear wins.

b. Ministry clutter.

c. Infrequent communication (your mission vision and strategy should never be ‘old news’ to anyone)

d. Infrequent relational deposits.

e. Infrequent follow through.

5. Stick to your strategy long enough to see if it works.

a. People aren’t used to alignment.

b. People aren’t used to clarity.

c. People are used to getting ‘their own way’

Ultimately, people gravitate toward a clear and compelling mission, vision and strategy.

And eventually, they even align themselves around it.

Those are my breakout notes. For more information on aligning a team, you can read this post that outlines 5 things I learned from North Point about team alignment.

What questions do you have about keeping a team aligned?

 

Almost every church I know says they want to reach unchurched people. But few are actually doing it.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that many churches don’t really understand unchurched people (here’s a post on 15 characteristics of today’s unchurched person).

And part of the problem is that our model of church is designed to reach and help churched people, not unchurched people. Churches haven’t embraced change deeply enough.

So you can say you want to reach people all day long. You can teach about it every week. But if you haven’t designed your church around ministering to people who don’t go to church, you might as well be preaching that you want to lose weight while eating a triple cheeseburger.

Your model simply doesn’t match your mission.

So how do you know that your church is actually ready to reach unchurched people?

Here are 9 signs your church is ready to embrace unchurched people:

1. Your main services engage teenagers. I’ve talked with many church leaders who want to reach unchurched people who can’t understand why unchurched people don’t like their church. They would be stumped until I asked them one last question: do the teens in your church love your services and want to invite their friends? As soon as I asked that question, the leader’s expression would inevitably change. He or she would look down at the floor and say ‘no’. Here’s what I believe: if teens find your main services (yes, the ones you run on Sunday mornings) boring, irrelevant, and disengaging, so will unchurched people. As a rule, if you can design services that engage teenagers, you’ve designed a church service that engages unchurched people.

2. People who attend your church actually know unchurched people. Many Christians say they want to reach unchurched people, but they don’t actually know any unchurched people well enough to invite them. One of the reasons we run almost no church programs at Connexus where I serve (other than small groups and few other steps toward discipleship) is that we want our families to get to know unchurched people. We want them to play community sports, get involved at their kids school and have time for dinner parties and more. You can’t do that if you’re at church 6 nights a week. We don’t do many ministries because our people are our ministry.

3. Your attenders are prepared to be non-judgmental. Unchurched people do not come ‘pre-converted’. They will have lifestyle issues that might take years to change (and let’s be honest, don’t you?). Cleaning up your behaviour is not a pre-condition for salvation, at least not in Christianity. What God has done for us in Jesus saves us; not what we have done for God. Is your congregation really ready to love unchurched people, not just judge them? (I wrote about why Christians should let non-Christians off the moral hook here.) One of Jesus’ genius approaches was to love people into life change. If your people can do that, you’re ready to reach unchurched people.

4. You’re good with questions. This one’s still hard for me. I like to think that every question has an answer. I think one of the reasons unchurched people flee churches is they feel shut down when every question they ask has a snappy or even quick answer. They will find answers, but you need to give them time. Embracing the questions of unchurched people is a form of embracing them.

5. You’re honest about your struggles. Unchurched people get suspicious when church leaders and Christians want to appear to have it ‘all together’. Let’s face it, you don’t. And they know it. When you are honest about your struggles, it draws unchurched people closer. I make it a point to tell unchurched people all the time that our church isn’t perfect, that we will probably let them down, but that one of the marks of a Christian community is that we can deal with our problems face to face and honestly, and that I hope we will be able to work it through. There is a strange attraction in that.

6. You have easy, obvious, strategic and helpful steps for new people. I am still such a fan of thinking steps, not programs (Here’s an older but awesome (free) Andy Stanley podcast of all Seven Practices of Effective Ministry). One sure sign that you are ready to handle an influx of unchurched people is that your church has a clear, easily accessible path way to move someone from their first visit right through to integration with existing Christians in small groups or other core ministries. Most churches simply have randomly assembled programs that lead nowhere in particular.

7. You’ve dumped all assumptions. It’s so easy to assume that unchurched people ‘must know’ at least the basics of the Christian faith. Lose that thinking. How much do you (really ) know about Hinduism or Taoism? That’s about how much many unchurched people (really) know about Christianity. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Make it easy for everyone to access what you are talking about whenever you are talking about it.

8. Your ‘outreach’ isn’t just a program. Many Christians think having a ‘service’ for unchurched people or a program designed for unchurched people is enough. It’s not. When you behave like reaching unchurched people can be done through a program or an alternate service, you’re building a giant brick wall for unchurched people to walk into. You might as well tell them “This program is for you, but our church is for us. Sorry.”

9. You are flexible and adaptable. In the future, you will not ‘arrive’. I think the approach to unchurched people and the strategy behind the mission of the church needs to be flexible and adaptable. Don’t design a ‘now we are done’ model to reaching unchurched people. You might never be done. Churches that are adaptable and flexible in their strategy (not in their mission or vision) will have the best chance of continually reaching unchurched people. “How quickly can your church change?” will become a defining characteristic of future churches. (If you want to read more about change, I wrote Leading Change Without Losing It last year. Additionally, John Kotter’s Leading Change is a must-read classic.)

Those are 9 signs I see that your church is ready to reach unchurched people.

What do you see?