Leadership

5 Ways Leaders Can Make Easter More Personal

Leadership
March 26, 2024 by Stan Ponz No Comments

Views: 1147

It’s easy to miss the heart of Easter personally because we’re so busy getting ready to tell everyone else about it. 

Don’t let your professionalism crowd out the personal from your Easter experience this year.

Too familiar are the stories of exhausted evangelists and pastors who worked so hard and taught like their preaching and personality carried the full weight of Easter. 

It’s great to carry a heartfelt responsibility for those you lead, but it’s also important to know where your influence stops and the power of the Holy Spirit takes over. 

The power of Easter has always been the resurrection, not the church service. 

It’s good to plan well and work hard to create a wonderful worship experience for those who will visit your church. However, don’t underestimate the importance of hospitality and kindness on Easter. 

Your Easter guests are more likely to return because you treated them with kindness rather than the sermon being eloquent.

Loving people is at the core of the gospel. It’s the epicenter of what God did for us through his Son Jesus. 

Don’t over complicate Easter. Tell the story, love the people, and create an experience of hospitality that inspires your guests to return. 

Celebrating Easter is appropriate.

Worshipping the person of Jesus is better. 

Focusing on those who are lost is probably what Jesus would do.

The good news is we can do all three! I know you care about those who will attend on Easter and you are already praying for them. My encouragement is to do all you can to emphasize that care and extend hospitality to the greatest extent possible. 

A great way to prepare your heart includes the following three personal expressions:

  1. Gratitude – for the truth that God loves you deeply and has chosen you to lead.
  2. Humility – that you get to be part of such a grand story of eternity.
  3. Compassion – for those that have not experienced the grace that you know so well.

Easter is powerful because it’s personal.

One of the best ways to make Easter come alive for your guests is to make sure it’s real and personal for you first. 

As a leader, you set the pace. Keeping the message of Easter alive in your heart and soul will transfer to those you serve on Easter. 

5 Ways to Keep Easter Personal:

1) Remember the gift Jesus gave you.

I don’t deserve God’s unconditional love, yet He freely gives it to me. I can’t earn it, but I can live my life in a way that honors that gift. 

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:8-9

There are no strings attached to God’s love. There are hopes, even expectations because He wants “life to the full” for you and me. But nothing can separate us from the love of God. It’s truly a free gift.

2) Reflect on the price Jesus paid for you.

Sometimes I think the gifts Carol and I purchase for our family are expensive. We talk about it and always realize that what motivates us is our love for them. Since they were little kids, we’ve loved their joy and grateful smiles at birthdays and other special celebrations.

When I reflect on the “expense” or cost that Jesus paid for me, it’s overwhelming. My joy is deep. I feel like a kid who has received the most incredible gift of a lifetime. How about you? When you think about the price Jesus paid, how would you describe your thoughts and emotions?

No sacrifice compares to the price Jesus paid for your salvation. His gift to you and I is invaluable. There is no price tag. No one else could give the gift Jesus gave. 

3) Express gratitude that Jesus has changed your life.

I’ve already mentioned gratitude but let me add to that thought. It’s one thing to receive a gift of significant cost or value, and it’s another thing to realize that gift has changed your life forever. You are actually a new person.

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here!. 2 Corinthians 5:17

This was the first scripture the Holy Spirit seared on my heart as a new Christian a long time ago. The power of this truth has never left me, and I am so grateful that I’m not the same person. 

Your life has been changed. 

Take time to express your gratitude to God. Not like a thing on your to-do list, but a moment that takes the bigger story all in. It can be overwhelming, in a good way, but gratitude is a very personal way to make the gospel real. 

4) Practice the truth that Jesus helps you see others differently.

You can see how this progression builds. It starts with recognition and remembrance of the gift you received and acknowledgment of the immeasurable cost. And gratitude is the appropriate heart response for a changed life.

Part of the change that takes place in us is that we see others differently. We begin to see others as Jesus does. The impact of the gospel causes us to love more, care deeper, and respond with generosity rather than selfishness. This makes Easter personal, and of course, this is not contained to the Easter season.

Practicing the power that the resurrection unleashes in our lives enables us to put others first, be more patient, seek understanding, and love authentically. 

5) Maximize the opportunity Jesus gives you within your calling. 

When the story of the gospel has been deeply internalized and is first personal, it then gives you more freedom to focus on the opportunity that comes with your calling as a leader in the church. 

This coming weekend and the weeks following Easter represent an amazing opportunity to reach people for Christ and see your church take new territory for God’s Kingdom.

We all get excited about that!

I pray that you sense God’s closeness and the favor of His power and that you experience your calling as an incredible privilege and blessing.   God is with you!

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Leadership

Seven Foundational Responsibilities of Your Leadership Team – Part Two

Leadership
March 25, 2024 by Stan Ponz No Comments

Views: 795

Effective leadership is essential for specialized ministries, churches, or businesses. And having a leadership team is critical if they adhere to foundational responsibilities.

What are the primary topics your Leadership Team is responsible for addressing? What issues should be given the most attention?

Last time I offered three of seven foundational responsibilities your Leadership Team should concentrate on that may best guide you. This edition will cover four more responsibilities.

Use this list, evaluate what you do, and then fine-tune it to serve your team effectively.

7 Foundational Responsibilities of your Lead Team:

Let’s review

1. Sensing the Leading of the Lord

The Leadership Team is responsible for discerning the heart and voice of God as churches relate to the best interest of its ministries, staff, and faith-family. The same goes for specialized ministries and businesses.

2. Vision-Thinking, Strategic Planning, and Vision-Casting

The Leadership Team is responsible for developing, positioning resources, communicating, and examining progress toward the vision and strategic plan.

3. Culture and Values for the Church, Specialized Ministry, or Business

The Leadership Team is responsible for confirming appropriate processes are in place to foster and monitor ministry culture, values, and spiritual health.

Let’s continue

4. Management of Resources

The Leadership Team is responsible for the vision, strategic plan, and conformance to regulatory standards and best practices while managing the resources accordingly.

I learned the following from the CFO at 12-Stone Church, Norwood Davis.

What I can share with you is the importance of how you handle financial resources.

The Lord has put you in trust with the wise management of financial resources given through faithful people. Don’t take this lightly; every dollar does matter. Our Make It Clear Ministries team treats each dollar donated as if an elderly person on Social Security gives to the ministry.

That doesn’t mean you should lead like gloomy scrooges, think with a poor mindset, or lack charity. It simply means being wise managers with the Lord’s money.

Strategic questions:

    • Are you regularly teaching biblical principles of generosity and giving?
    • Do you have in place sound financial systems with accountability?
    • Are you and your team doing everything you can to use every dollar wisely?

5. Culture and Effectiveness of Staff

The Leadership Team is responsible for the systems that ensure systems that appropriately cultivate and observe staff culture, health, and performance.

Let me suggest a five-point outline I picked up from Dan Reiland that will serve you as a guide on how to think about staffing. (NOTE: Even if your staff is smaller, don’t ignore this.)

    1. Culture
    2. Selection
    3. Development
    4. Teamwork
    5. Performance

Your Leadership Team may own more of this detail if your ministry and staff are smaller unless you may have other leaders on the team to help you with much of this. Either way, it’s essential to persistently think through all five areas to know you are developing and cultivating a healthy and productive staff.

Strategic questions:

    • How healthy is staff culture? How do you know?
    • How are you selecting the best possible staff?
    • How are you caring for and developing your team?
    • How well is your team functioning together?
    • Do you find your team creating the outcomes for which you hoped?

6. Problem-Solving

The Leadership Team is responsible for solving problems and, in optimum circumstances, being prepared for them before they happen and cause more significant issues and consequences.

It’s not the Leadership Team’s responsibility to solve all the problems, but it is their job to solve the significant ones.

Unfortunately, some Senior Leadership Teams avoid the more complex problems by dumping them on staff who aren’t equipped to deal with them or won’t make the tough choices.

What problems need to be solved that only the Leadership Team can solve? Those issues should always be an agenda item for your team.

Which are real problems to be solved, and which might cause tensions to manage?

Strategic questions:

    • List the problems facing you now that only you should and can solve.
    • List the issues critical to the mission that might hinder the vision and momentum.
    • What timeline is in place when solutions are required?

7. Innovation and Improvement

The Leadership Team is responsible for nurturing and embracing new approaches and improving existing systems and processes for your ministries or business can thrive.

Much like solving problems and perhaps more, all improvement and innovation should not come from the Leadership Team.

You are not receiving all the best viewpoints or ideas if they only come from your Leadership Team.

The first role of the Leadership Team regarding improvement and innovation is to foster an environment that is favorable to and allows for change.

The second is ensuring the improvement and innovation agree with the vision and mission.

And finally, to be sure that improvement and innovation are better, not merely different.

Strategic questions:

    • Is your ministry and staff team open to change?
    • List any ministries or departments that need improvement.
    • List the top three areas that need improvement and innovation in your church, ministry, or business.

These are seven responsibilities for your Leadership Team. I suggest you begin implementing them at your next meeting. You might select one each time you meet until you build all of them into the culture of your Leadership Team. Let me know how these foundational responsibilities are working for you and your team!

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Leadership

Seven Foundational Responsibilities of Your Leadership Team – Part One

Leadership
March 18, 2024 by Stan Ponz No Comments

Views: 934

If your Leadership Team tries to give attention to everything, they won’t effectively succeed at anything. 

It’s healthy that your Leadership Team has the freedom to talk about anything, to be truthful, and to discuss with authenticity as it happens, but what are the critical areas on which you should focus? 

We use the term Senior Leadership Team in our ministry.  However they are called, and whether they are paid or include volunteers, what should be on the agenda they create?

The “going around the table and giving updates” strategy is not typically highly effective.

While it is sometimes critical to communicate updates, that is not always helpful.  However, you will often have more substantial results when the entire team works on an issue together.

Even if your Leadership Team resolves a few difficulties with an open agenda, which is a good thing, perhaps others could have resolved those issues.  It would allow you to give more forward-focused thinking time.

What are the primary topics your Leadership Team is responsible for addressing?  What issues should be given the most attention? 

Of course, crises will make you adjust to issues. 

Military leaders focus on different things in wartime versus peacetime.  Life is no longer “business as usual” for them; typically, they must make more decisions faster. 

But without a boundary or yardstick of your lanes, it’s challenging to get the essential items done and make significant progress. 

Further, when the Leadership Team isn’t confident about what to give attention to, the rest of the team won’t be clear on their focus either. 

Every specialized ministry, church, or business is unique.  However, let me offer seven foundational responsibilities your Leadership Team should concentrate on that may best guide you.  

Use this list of the first three of seven foundational responsibilities of your leadership team, evaluate what you do, and then fine-tune it to serve your team effectively.

 7 Foundational Responsibilities of your Lead Team:

 1. Sensing the Leading of the Lord 

The Leadership Team is responsible for discerning the heart and voice of God as they relate to the best interest of its ministries, staff, and faith-family.  The same goes for specialized ministries and businesses.

Strategically thinking is essential, but spiritually discerning God’s heart and voice must always come before strategic planning. 

What is God saying to your ministry president, executive director, or team’s senior leader?  Also important is what God says to each person on the team.

Most important is how Scripture influences your ministry or business course and choices. 

Equally important is prayer as the indicator and institution for your ministry’s current initiatives and future dreams.

Strategic questions:

    • Does your team allow the Holy Spirit to interfere in your process and modify or even discontinue your plans? 
    • How do you discern when it’s your idea or the mind of the Lord? 
    • Does your team have a history or pattern of decelerating to discern what God wants? 

 

2. Vision-Thinking, Strategic Planning, and Vision-Casting 

The Leadership Team is responsible for developing, positioning resources, communicating, and examining progress toward the vision and strategic plan. 

This is heavy lifting and an arduous responsibility of the team. 

Vision-thinking and even vision-casting are often exciting.  It’s motivating, and it’s great to dream!  But the instant you get serious about effective strategic planning, the air at the table gets cold. 

The moment you move from discerning the vision to figuring out how to make the dream a reality, your team will face the actual load and experience of leadership.

Executing the strategy is the core of leadership.

What matters are after-effects and outcomes.  That’s why you’re in the room and at the table.

Strategic questions: 

    • Are you remaining steadfast about the direction God wants for your ministry? 
    • Are you constantly reviewing the strategy and holding yourself accountable for results?
    • Are you nurturing joy in the process? 

3. Culture and Values for the Church, Specialized Ministry, or Business

The Leadership Team is responsible for confirming appropriate processes are in place to foster and monitor ministry culture, values, and spiritual health. 

Separating your ministry’s culture, values, and spiritual health is impossible.

It’s challenging to increase spiritual health if the culture is toxic, inward-focused, or divisive,

Every ministry has a culture, just like your staff’s culture (the two are very similar).

The culture of your ministry is not what you write on the wall; it’s the attitudes you express, the beliefs you demonstrate, and how you live your lives.

The culture of your ministry or business will reveal your values and determine the probability of its spiritual health. 

Strategic questions:

    • In what way would you describe the culture of your ministry or business? Is it what you want? 
    • In what ways are your ministry in agreement with your values?
    • In what ways would you say the spiritual health of your ministry or business is vibrant and growing? 

Next, we will learn four more foundational responsibilities of your Leadership Team!

 

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Leadership

God’s Eagerness to Hear

Leadership
March 11, 2024 by Stan Ponz No Comments

Views: 1033

In Christian leadership, there must be open communication between the Lord and us.  We need to hear from Him, and He wants to hear from us.  And He is most eager to hear from us.  The best accurate way to hear from the Lord is to open His Word, the Bible, and listen to what He wants us to hear.  Prayer from a pure heart is the best way for Him to hear from us.

We live in a world full of situations and needs that require us to pray.  Prayer means we are building a relationship with the Lord by communicating with Him.  So, communication is the key.  And that means speaking and listening.  In this case, it means talking to God and Hi listening.  And Him speaking to us and us listening to Him.

It is debilitating to lose our hearing.  Our hearing is one of the primary gates that allow us to know and respond to everything.

The eyes, the nose, the sense of touch, and the mouth all aid us in communicating.  Hearing is foundational.

There are two different levels of hearing.  First, every day we hear thousands of sounds without responding.  Because our minds are conditioned, we tune much of this out.  It’s labeled “background noise.”

Because of selective hearing, “Please take out the trash” is hardly ever heard the first time when our kids or their dads hear that.  And yet, with the slightest whisper, they hear, “Let’s go get ice cream.”

God Hears

Our relationship with God is dependent on hearing.  We must hear Him and listen to Him.

Yet most Christian leaders pay attention to God.  We have permitted the world’s noise to so saturate us that our ears are rarely accustomed to the “still small voice” of God.  Spiritual indifference and rebellion clog our ears.

The Lord is speaking all the time, but we do not hear.  It can be our greatest tragedy.

But our relationship also depends on God’s willingness to hear us when we come to Him.

A one-sided relationship is not possible for a healthy relationship.  It is essential to hear God and to be confident He hears us.

A Prayer of Solomon

When Solomon completed the building of the first temple in Jerusalem, he dedicated it with a prayer pleading for God to hear (1 Kings 8).  The essence of his entire prayer was, “We need You now and will need You; so, God, please HEAR US when we pray!”

Then Solomon detailed when their prayers and God hearing them were most necessary.

“Oh Lord, please hear…”

  • My prayer at this very moment (v. 28)
  • When Your people pray (v. 30)
  • When a person sins against their neighbor and returns in prayer to You (v. 31)
  • When Your people are conquered before an enemy because they sinned against You, and they turn back to You confessing their sin and pray (v. 33)
  • When the heavens are locked up, and no rain comes because we sin; and in prayer, we confess this and return to You (v. 35)
  • When there are calamities like famine, pestilence, plague, or sickness, and we pray (vv. 37-39)
  • When the immigrant comes and prays (vv. 41-43)
  • When we go into battle against our enemies, and we pray (v. 44)
  • When Your people sin against You (for every person does sin) and you become angry delivering us to the enemy, and then we repent and pray (vv. 46-53)

Review through this prayer and notice that almost every human issue is covered.  Solomon simply asks, “Lord, will You hear if we pray?”

Notice that for God to hear each prayer request, they are conditioned on several things.  The people must see the awfulness of their sin, confess it, return to God, and pray.

He will not hear a proud, selfish, or prayer designed to further what a person wants for himself rather than what brings glory to the Lord.  The Lord turns a deaf ear to those who turn a deaf ear to what He says about their sin (Ps 66:18).

Also, the Lord will not hear what is not asked.  “You have not because you ask not,” James 4:2.  Many conditions for effective prayer are mentioned in Scripture.

But, if we will come in humility, forsaking our sin, with the willingness to obey the Lord and approach God in prayer, He has promised to hear us.  How amazing this is!

Our God who hears prayer has all the resources necessary at His disposal to meet our every need.  George Mueller declared how faithful our God is, “He is a prayer-hearing and prayer-answering God!”

Father, I never cease to be amazed by this truth.  That You would make a way for me to approach You is amazing, considering my sin.  I’m overcome with gratitude for Your Son, Jesus, who lived, died, and rose so that we can now enter and stand before Your throne of grace with peace.  Providing us a way to have an intimate relationship with You as a friend to friend; please forgive me for not praying more often.  Forgive me for not listening.  But thank You, Father, for Your ever-hearing ear!

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Leadership

Ways to Serve Our ONE

Leadership
March 4, 2024 by Stan Ponz No Comments

Views: 1267

As Christians and especially Christian leaders, we are wanting people to come to faith alone in Christ and going on to become fully obedient worshippers of God.  And we are wanting to help Christians to do the same…right?  Right!

But so many times wanting to and wanting others to do it doesn’t translate into actually doing it ourselves…right?   Right!

No one I know likes getting into a cold car in the dead of winter.  That’s why auto makers manufacture cars with seat warmers and now steering wheel warmers.  This makes taking a trip more comfortable.

So, today’s edition of Leadership Helps is to remind us to identify our ONE who we will lovingly serve for a gospel conversation.  Of course, the best way is to use prayer to warm them up.  While keeping our ONE in prayer, we could add the following ways to warm up our ONE to a gospel conversation.

  1. Take them out for a cup of coffee.
  2. Write a note of encouragement.
  3. Hand out notes of encouragement to those who serve you at grocery stores, restaurants, barbershop, hair salon, hardware store, etc., letting them know they are prayed for and loved by Jesus and you.
  4. Text how you can pray for them.
  5. Drop off a gift card for your ONE at their door and leave a hand-written note explaining why you did it.
  6. Type up a note saying you are offering to help your neighbors in any way they need.  Leave it on neighbors’ doors.  Offer to do yard work, run errands, etc.  Ask for prayer requests.  Put your contact information in the note.
  7. Anytime the Lord puts your ONE on your mind, stop to pray for them, then send a text or DM them to let them know you have prayed for them and ask how they are doing.
  8. What other ways can you serve your ONE?  Let me know so I can add to my list those ways to serve my ONE too!

No doubt we can all agree this form of friendship evangelism still needs an actual GOSPEL conversation.  Warming them up is just a vital first step.  So, let’s get busy and serve our ONE with the gospel!

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