The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP Bonus 006: #AskCarey Part 5
[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal to help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. >> Well, hey everybody, and a happy 2016 to you. I hope that your new year is already off to a fantastic start. And welcome to another bonus episode of Ask Carrie. We just thought we'd start the new year strong and I'm so glad to be with you. And I just love your questions. So with these Ask Carrie's, we just take your questions and do our best to answer them and their leadership questions. There are questions about things I wrote or maybe previous podcast episodes or my latest book, Lasting Impact. And I know a lot of you have read it already. A lot of you have given it incredible feedback. And thank you so much for that. Anyway, here I just want to say, so our little deal, our little partnership is, I just want to help you lead and I want to help you lead better. And if there's some small way a podcast like this can help you lead better than ever before, I'm super grateful for that. And one of the best ways I know that we're connecting is when I hear from you. So if this episode has helped you, you can leave a comment in the show notes. One of the other ways you can do it is just shout out on social media. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram, although that's pictures, it's not really easy for communication. Of course, I'm on Facebook. And I've got my blog. It's just carrynewhoff.com. So anytime I hear from you, it's awesome. And I just want to say thank you so much. And I hope this is an incredible year for you. If you're like me, you run into a new year with all kinds of hopes and expectations and a desire to change and a desire to grow and get better. And I spent the holidays sort of writing some new goals for 2016 for me, for our ministry and even for this show. So hey, I'm really super excited to be starting off on a good foot. And if you are a subscriber and if not, you can do it for free. That's one good habit. You can put it into place if you want, if this stuff is helpful. But if you're a subscriber, you know that last time I didn't ask Carrie, I was picking up questions from a webisode I did. I did a webisode? Wait a minute, what am I an actor? No, no, no, webinar. That's what I meant to say. A webinar that I did back in December. And on that webinar, there were just so many great questions and so many great leadership questions. And I thought, you know what, they deserve a couple of episodes of themselves. And we'll be doing a few ask carries in the next few months. So if you've got a question, you can leave me, you can, you know, shout out on social media or one of the easiest ways we'll get back to speak pipe soon is to leave a voicemail on speak pipe. And I have a lot accumulating. And the way to do that is just go to my blog, karaenuoff.com. And when you go to my blog, you will see a little thing that says got a question. And if you have a question, you just ask it. And then away we go. So we're going to get into people's questions right now. So this again, these are questions from the webinar. Some of them are general leadership questions. Some of them are from my latest book, Lasting Impact, which you can learn more about at lastingimpactbook.com. But we're going to start with Janet's question. Janet says, how do you implement ideas in a committee led church? Oh my. Thank you for this question. Where the pastor, she says, to complete the question, a committee led church where the pastor has little authority and the congregants are aged and resistant to change. Oh man, I have, I have this expression that I've used for years. It's not the best expression. But you know, there are just some issues you got to drive a truck through. I think that's an issue. You got to drive a truck through. I think you have to sit down with members and say, you know, and as long as you feel comfortable and you've got like some rationale behind it, I would and just say, hey, committee led really doesn't help us much. You see, because when your committee led, what you're trying to find is consensus. And here's what I believe. I believe that consensus kills courage by the time you try to get 12 people around an idea or eight people around an idea who sometimes because it's a committee based system are not even the best people to have in the room brainstorming an idea. You're just going to get diluted, lukewarm thinking as a general rule. Now, it doesn't mean it should be you, you know, as the leader who just goes away and comes off the mountaintop and says, here's the way it is, but you get to get a handful of the right people around the table. And so committee led is almost always disastrous. And usually if it's committee led, there are layers. So the committee doesn't have authority. It reports to somebody else. And I just think that's a problem. I mean, I've been in organizations that are committee led and frankly, very rarely does anything good come out of that. So I prefer team led. I prefer very few standing teams and a lot of ad hoc teams. And basically, when I set up a team, I just try to find the best and the brightest people for that issue. And we set it up and we tackle the issue and then the team's done. So I give you that background just to say, there's some ideas to stimulate your thinking, but that is an issue I would drive a trek through. And I would say as politely as I possibly could. Hey, for the following three reasons, I would love for us to rethink what being a committee led group looks like. And let's be honest about where we're at. We're all a little bit older. Maybe you aren't Janet, but the church is. And I wonder if sometimes we're resistant to change. I wrote a post called seven signs your church will never change recently. We'll link to it in the show notes. And you can go through that and say, hey, do you recognize yourself? Do you recognize us in these seven signs? And then just talk about it. And if they fire you, well, they fire you. I don't know. I just think this stuff is so important. You should go for broke, but I don't want to make you unemployed. That's not a great way to start off a brand new year either. But I just have always driven trucks through issues like that. And usually we get unstuck when you do that. So that's this. So Janet, thank you so much for question one. Question two comes from Sherry. She says, love, love, love the book lasting impact. Thank you, Sherry. I appreciate it. First vision so that getting volunteers is easier. That's conversation four in the book chapter four. I want to be able to bring alongside me those high capacity leaders. And I need help getting them to see the vision. Okay. Thanks for that honesty, Sherry. You know what I love. I love it when leaders say, hey, I need help in this area because that just shows self-awareness and it shows that sometimes the problem isn't with the volunteer. Sometimes the problem is with the leader. So I think that's fantastic. So a couple of thoughts. First of all, are you clear on what your vision is? Because if you can't articulate it, they won't be able to articulate it. And Stanley always says, you know, missed in the pulpit fog in the pew. That's just so true. So do you know what the vision is? Can you state it? A lot of entrepreneurs start up people talk about the elevator pitch. Like if you're stuck in an elevator for 30 seconds with somebody, can you say what the vision is? Can you make a compelling case about the problem you're trying to solve and how you're trying to solve it? You know, in our case, Connects as Church, I would say, hey, what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a church that unchurch people love to attend. And the goal of that is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus. We live in a community where 95% of the people won't be in church on a given weekend and we're out to solve that problem. Boom. You know, something like that. That's my elevator pitch. Be crystal clear about that. The other thing I say in the chapter is be crystal clear, not just on the what and the how because they're divisive, but very, very clear on the why. So you want to be able to say why? You know, there are lots of other churches in our community, but, you know, what we are trying to do is unique because what we're trying to do is create an experience, not just that reaches church people, but unchurch people. So I think clarity is really helpful. And then the other thing I talk about in that chapter is like time limits. And you know, if you're trying to get high capacity leaders, I would, I would say, hey, I know you're really busy. I know you got a thousand things you could do and a thousand demands on your time. But can I borrow you for six months? Can I get you to lean in on this project for, you know, X amount of time and just see how that goes? So there's a few tips. I hope that helps Sherry. But you've got to be clear and you got to be clear on the why, not just the what. John, John says this. John says next question, how can you strike a balance between having experienced people on a church board and wanting to get younger people in leadership positions? That's a great question. That's exactly what I saw when I moved into leadership two decades ago and three very small, traditional plateau declining. I mean, gosh, when you have six people, like, what are you plateau to declining? No, you're just small. So when I, when I started in leadership, that's what I face. So yeah, you can't walk in on day, well, I guess you could, but I didn't walk in on day one and went, okay, all of you gone. You have to work with what you've got. You inherit a set of leaders. But what I did very quickly was I set up parallel teams. So we already talked about committees, but what I did and what I've done in a situation where I really am not a fan of the board and I haven't honestly been in that situation in the last decade. But if you're ever in that spot, what I would do and what I have done is you kind of work with that board as best as you can. And then you get permission to set up these sideboards and you look for the best and the brightest and some younger and, you know, you pull those people in. And then eventually when it comes time to replace somebody on the board, you pull from that new group that you've actually set up. So that's what I've done. Just set up a parallel team. So I hope that helps, John. Scott asks, what are the best practices for delegating the volunteers and having them own that area? If a church has been hitting a ceiling of 400 for 20 years and never breaking it, what areas should they look to assess where the issue is? That's a great question. And it sort of feels like two questions, but I think they're related. So you ask about, you know, volunteers and delegation and then our church has been stuck at 400 for 20 years. So here's my quick checklist that I would run through to see how to break the 400 barrier. Number one, Scott, I don't know whether you're a senior pastor, whether you're on staff, whether you're an elder, I don't know what, but if you are the senior pastor, you need to ask yourself, what are you trying to personally control? Because the church will only grow to the, you know, or I should say the church will get stunted based on what you're personally trying to control. If every decision has to go through you, there's a limit to decision making in your organization. If every pastoral care element has to be touched by you because you're the pastor. That is the number one way churches stunt their growth permanently because a pastor does too much. Pastors try to, you know, get to every hospital visit, every family function, every wedding, every funeral. It's just impossible. You've got to learn how to scale that. You know, when I started 20 years ago, we had 45 people attending between all three churches. It was really easy to do the pastoral care. Now we have a, well, 1,100 and 2,300 people who call our church home. It's like, okay, I cannot pastoral care for people. Like, honestly, this sounds horrible, but like people die and I don't even hear about it. And you're like, ah, you can't even be a pastor. I understand that. I get that. And you've got to learn to live with that criticism, but the reality is we have a scalable system. It's called groups and we have hundreds of adults in groups, all of our kids and teens in groups. And that's where the care happens. And frankly, I did a funeral recently and the whole small group was there. This was a guy who had terminal cancer. He had been sick for a year. His small group came in. They did communion with them. I visited once to sort of set up the funeral and to say goodbye. And that was it. And that was two funerals I did all year. But the small group really did the primary care and they, you know, the family was so grateful for the small group. See, that's the church in action. So I think that's often a problem. And then the last thing Scott would be, you know, there's a lot you can look at, but the last thing would be when you're structuring bigger to grow bigger, you're bored. Now, you know, if you're bored, your board will probably tend to be micromanaging because you're going to get some leaders and particularly if you've got entrepreneurial types or startup types or people who are not used to being in on large corporations. And listen, I live outside of a major city in our north of Toronto. We do not have a lot of people in our area who are used to sitting on boards of directors of large corporations, you know, you got a few hospital board members in that. Like if you're sitting on a board of a $40 million company, you know, you can't micromanage. But chances are the people that are on your board probably are used to small business. And if they're used to small business, they're used to knowing where every dollar comes from and so on. And that that works for you to a certain extent, but it mostly works against you in a board setting. So, you know, we have entrepreneurial elders and they're great. But like half of our meetings, I'm raining them in going, okay, guys, that's a staff's job. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. But, you know, let's try to take the 30,000 foot view here. Do you see any errors? Do you see any mistakes? Do you see? Are we going to hit the ditch on this one? And if the answer is no, then we proceed. If it's consistent with the mission and vision, we proceed. And so you want leaders who are passionate about the details, but also who have to lead at the top level. And I know as our church has grown, I just know less and less about it all the time, right? It's like, I give tours and people ask, how did you get this? And I'm like, I have no idea. But if I knew all of that stuff, we'd be a real small church. And if our elders knew every detail, we'd be a really small church. So trust has to be high. They have to stop micromanaging and they have to start looking at the big issues. And that's how you scale. So I hope that helps, Scott. Okay, next question comes from Robert. And Robert asks, how do you lead your church to have these powerful conversations? And those would be the ones I write about and lasting impact the book. When there is not an immediate or obvious need, good attendance, giving, et cetera, to do so. Oh, Robert, thank you for asking that question. So I'm going to assume because your attendance is good, your giving is good, that your church is doing okay. You know, not every church is in crisis and I get that, but here's the reality. I think one of the principal jobs of a leader is to create a sense of urgency, right? Okay. So giving is good. Attendance is good. Maybe you came off your best year yet. That's awesome. We actually at Canexas Church came off our best year yet. But my urgency is strong. We're launching an online campus. We want to launch a third location. We have big ambition for 2016 and we want to reach more people. We want to tell everyone we know and invite everyone we don't. That's what we want to do for 2016. So we are fired up and one of my jobs as a leader in the church is to make sure that I've got a discontent with the status quo, a gratitude. Hey, I'm incredibly thankful for where we've come, but we're not there yet. And why are we not there yet? Well, Robert, I don't know where you live, but if your community is like my community, chances are not everybody has been reached yet. And so your job as a leader, I think, is to create that sense of discontent, like, guys, this is awesome. Look at, look at what God has done, but look at what there's left to be done. Look at the community we need to read. Think about the people that you saw at Christmas that you wish had a relationship with Jesus. Why don't we just go out there and reach them? So I would say what you need to do is create a sense of discontent. Years ago, Bill Heibels gave a talk and wrote a book called Holy Discontent. That's what you got to look at. You know, the mission's got to break your heart and the mission has to break the heart of the people in the church. And I remember in the early days, you know, three years into my leadership at three small churches that actually had stained glass windows. I remember standing there one day preaching to this small church and thinking, you know, God cares more about the people outside of these stained glass windows than He does inside the stained glass windows. Now, I know some of you will go, no, He doesn't. He loves us all equally. But the reality is if you have four kids and one of your kids is missing, who are you thinking about? You're not thinking about the three kids that you're sitting around having dinner with going, you know, how is your day at school and whatever you're thinking about your missing kid? And you don't do the math and go, you know, I got 75% of my kids alive, well and safe. You know that those are good odds. You don't, you don't do that. You go out and you look for that lost kid and you don't rest until he or she comes home safe. And that's what you do as a leader. That's what you do as a parent and that's what we should do as leaders for the church. So I would say in a good way, raise the level of discontent in your church because the greatest enemy of your future success is your current success because you're tempted to ride on your laurels and you don't want to do that. So that's what I do. Robert, Ethan asks, how do you determine the next best step in navigating conversations with your board? Again, lasting impact is all about, you know, conversations that I think you need to have with your church board. How do you wake up your fellow leaders to conversations that are coming down the pike in two or three years? And that's a great question. Well, I would say, you know, the way I wrote the book, it's seven standalone conversations that are interrelated, but you can have one or you can have seven. I want to take this to a broader issue that applies to everybody whether you've read the book or not. And that is simply when you're, when you're navigating with your board or with your leadership team or whoever you, you know, you're go to people are in ministry. I think you need to have work in it conversations and work on it conversations. Now that's language that I borrowed from Reggie Joyner and Andy Stanley and Lane Jones book, seven practices of effective ministry. One of the practices is to work on it, not in it and working in it is like just getting you to the next month. It's just like, okay, here's a budget we need to approve. Here's this. Here's that. Here are these things. Okay. Meeting over done work on it is more like, okay, I want to pull the camera lens back a little bit. We want to look at the future. We want to talk about expansion. We want to talk about growth. We want to talk about direction. And it is so important, so important that as a leader, you don't just work in it because what happens is you end up managing. If you only work in it, you manage what you've already built and you end up not building anything new and that'll get you by for a year or two. But if you don't build anything you knew, if you don't set out in a new direction as a leader, you're going to be in plateau and decline very, very quickly. So the idea of these conversations is to try to diagnose problems that you're facing. And again, you can use the conversations and lasting impact or you can design your own conversations. And the bottom line is you need to be working on the tough issues, the stuff that should keep you up at night. I even divide my time so that I have one or two days a week where I work on it and one or two days a week where I work in it. If I'm in meetings, chances are, unless there are long-range planning meetings, I'm working in it. I'm not working on it. And so often I'll have personal retreat days even once a week where I'll work out of my house and I'll try to work on it. I'll try to think about the future. I'll try to work through the big issues. I'll try to think bigger thoughts than just what am I going to do on Sunday. So that's really, really important for you to do. What order doesn't matter? You just need to have the conversations that are most pressing and you need to make time for your senior leaders to think through the issues that they all should be thinking about. Okay, Susan asks, "Any tips for a conversation about our mainline denominational church?" And moving forward into the future when we have a stodgy traditional service, we're not going to be contemporary but would like to be more modern to reflect the current expectations. Susan's so glad you asked that question. I think a lot of listeners can relate to that. It's like, "Hey, our church is never going to be cutting edge, lights, fog, haze, all that stuff." Or whatever cutting edge is for you, you're saying, "We will never be that." Years ago, I went to a conference and heard James Emery White who gave me a phrase that has never left my mind and he said, "The thing you have to be careful of is that if you're making change, like you're talking about, okay, we want to modernize a little bit. We don't want to be stuck in like 1960 or 1860 or whatever. We don't want to be stuck there. But if you're making change like that, he says, "The problem a lot of people get into is they end up in no man's land. They're too modern to please the traditionalists and they're too traditional to please people who like things modern or contemporary." And he's right, that's no man's land. I know I won't say specific things, but I've been in so many churches where they're like, "Look at how contemporary we are." And I'm like, "I don't see it. You sound like a pale version of somebody that you're trying to be and that's not good." So what you end up doing is you end up changing, but it's not effective change. What we want to do, we don't want to create services to please ourselves. We want to create services that help us accomplish our mission. And our mission is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus and to be a church that un-church people love to attend. So we want to pick music. We want to angle our messages in a way that make it easy for un-church people not only to love it, but to want to come back. And so change for the sake of change is not helpful. Just to say, "Okay, we're going to get rid of the organist, we're going to get rid of the choir, we're going to introduce a band." Yeah, but if you put in a lame band that the drummer's always got to use brushes because no, is that music that people would actually listen to? Would somebody buy that on iTunes? I doubt it. I doubt it. And a lot of churches get stuck there. So what you really want to do is you want to think, "Okay, don't think in terms of traditional contemporary, think in terms of effective." And there are some churches, I think it's a real small group, but there are some people who really, even un-church people who would go to a really well-run traditional service. And maybe your job is to become fantastically traditional, not because you love tradition, but because you can do it well and you can make an impact with it and it can reach out into your community. Or maybe you can do acoustic really well. You don't have keyboards or whatever, but just do acoustic fantastically in a way that is going to reach out to the next generation. Or if you're going to get a full-on band, get a full-on band, but make them great, don't make them stink. That's what I would say. So a lot of churches, they get caught up in this, "Well, we're going to be a little more contemporary." They're not really contemporary, they're just bad. And so that's, I think, the trap you have to avoid. So I don't know your church, Susan, and I didn't mean to insult anybody in that, but I just think sometimes when we have honest conversations, that's the way it goes. So Lavon wants to know, Lavon is in Oklahoma. He says, "I am the pastor of two very small congregational churches in a rural area in Western Oklahoma. The population is finite, the economy is not particularly robust. While we'd like the numbers to grow, we really want to reach younger people. How? Thank you for asking that question, Lavon. You speak for so many church pastors who are just, you know, you're never going to be in New York City or LA or, you know, Atlanta or the Bible Belt, Oklahoma, I guess, is sort of the Bible Belt, but you've got a small, finite community. And I would, I would just say, get really passionate about your mission, like a white hot passion, and reach everybody you can reach. And if that's a hundred people, that's a hundred people, you know? It's really the parable of the talents, you know, where Jesus said, "Okay. Some get five, some get two, some get one." And the goal is not that you got one. The goal is that you didn't bury it. I mean, you know, when you study that parable, you'll see that Jesus says to the person who had five and produced 10, "Well done, good and faithful servant. You know, you'll be entrusted with more things. Come enter into my joy, arrest," depending on how you translate that. He says the exact same phrasing to the person who had two talents and comes back with four. There's no like, "Oh, only four, eh? This guy got 10, you know, why didn't you produce 12? You could have." It's just like, "Hey, awesome, well done." And the exact same phrasing as what he said to the person with five who produced 10. So that tells us that with a guy with one talent, when he came to Jesus, if he produced two, Jesus would have had the biggest smile on his face and said, "Amazing. Thank you so much. I am so thrilled. I gave you one and you produced two, that's incredible. Maybe that's your story. You can't produce 10. You're not in a city with five. You're in a city with one or a region with one, not even a city, a community with one. So produce two. That's all. Get right, passionate, reach out to people personally and relationally. You know, there's evidence that a younger generation likes a smaller venue and they like the personal touch. You've got an opportunity to do that in a way that mega churches don't. So that's what I'd say, Levon, great question. Robbie asks, "What's the best way to navigate cultural change from a small church mindset to a large church way of thinking?" Well, you know, that is a big question and we've focused a lot on that, Robbie. But let me just add one or two thoughts that maybe we haven't got to yet. So cultural change, you do have a culture. And in the book, "The Advantage" by Patrick Lencioni, we'll link to it in the show notes, "The Advantage" by Patrick Lencioni. Lencioni talks about creating a culture. And it's really important for you to define your culture and your cultural values can be aspirational and descriptive. So aspirational in the sense of this is who we want to be, but this is who we are. That's more descriptive. So we went through cultural values, exercise at Ken Exis Church two years ago, and we kind of created cultural values that were both aspirational. They motivated us, but descriptive. It's not like, you know, we are the best in the world at X. Well, we might be best in our region in something, but I'm not sure we're best on the planet yet at anything. But we create a values like make it happen because we've been a portable church for seven years, eight years. And, you know, man, when it snows in your country and you're trying to get to the theaters used by five AM to set up for an 830 service, like you are scrambling. And our teams just made it happen. So we, we said one of our values is like make it happen. Another one is choose trust that we think it's far better when leaders choose trust rather than suspicion. Another value is battle mediocrity. Am I allowing what is good to stand in the way of what could be great? So we define those cultural values. And if you kind of sat down with a trusted group of leaders, whether that's your elder board or whatever, and you look really seriously at your cultural values, you'll realize there's probably some dysfunction in the culture and there's probably some things you don't want to replicate. So what you want to do is, is, you know, in addition to your mission, vision and strategy is find some cultural values, articulate them, articulate them, and then say, okay, this is who we're going to be. This is who we're going to be. We're going to be a group that makes it happen that battles mediocrity that chooses health that, you know, chooses trust rather and pursues health and, you know, whatever your values happen to be, and then go for it, then go for it. So in the culture, in addition to everything we talked about in this and other episodes, I would say really try to look at the culture you're trying to create and be specific. I think we waited too long to define our cultural values. You know, we were six years in as a church before we defined them. And I'm not sure you can define your cultural values at the outset. I guess you can, because then they're all aspirational, but I would go sooner rather than later on that. And that might be a helpful exercise in addition to some of the other things that we've seen. Steve asks us this question. He says, how do you balance wanting to see people engage in their journey with Christ, specifically showing up on Sundays and realizing that the culture we live in is the one that has people feeling not okay going to services three out of four Sundays a month and that this is the new norm? Yeah. Huge, huge, huge. So I'm recording this weeks before it airs, but if you go to my blog, kerrynuhoff.com, early in 2016, you're going to see a post about attendance and engagement. And my thinking will be further on that by the time this episode airs. But I think just to give you the bird's eye view that, yeah, we are definitely in a culture where there are problems with people just going, I don't want to go to church anymore. I mean, a hundred years ago, it was just normal. And frankly, it was the only show in town. I mean, that's just what you did on Sunday. You didn't have a lot of options. You weren't hyper connected. I mean, two of the things that make church attendance more optional for a lot of people is that now the main thing that we do, music and message are portable and affordable. So you know, you can almost every church has a podcast or some way to access the message online. And that's not so bad. So I can listen to them in my car on my way to work and I don't have to go to church. So is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I don't know. That's a good thing or a bad thing. It is just a thing. We live in 2016. We woke up in this generation. That's how the world operates. Deal with it. So we have to deal with that. People also have more options. There's travel sports. There's a disappearance of collective guilt. So you know, the idea that, hey, it's Sunday morning, we're all going to magically drift into a box to worship God, probably it's not a thing of the past. It's just less of a thing than it was even a decade ago and we have to acknowledge that. So, you know, I've written a lot on my blog about that at karaenuhuff.com and you can see some of the top posts and some of the previous podcast episodes, episode 23 with Will Mancini, David Kinnaman, episode 24 are all about that. So you can go back into the archives and dig around as well as some new stuff I wrote on my blog that will be live by the time this goes live. But the big thing I'm thinking about these days is attendance and engagement. So we used to try to, you know, get people to attend and then hopefully a number of people who attended would engage. I think we got to flip that in the new paradigm. I think in the future, engaged people will attend and disengaged people won't. Because I mean, if you look at, you look at most churches like 10, 20 years ago, yet a lot of people who attended but only a minority were engaged. I think the people who are not engaged but attending have stopped attending and they're just like, eh, you know, it's like there's people who go to the gym every week and then people who just, you know, like me go less frequently. I'll get on my bike, but I just won't go to the gym as often. And it's easy for the guys who go to the gym every day and they're doing iron to go, ah, you know, you lazy, you know, middle class people, that sort of thing. But, you know, if they made it more inviting, I might come back a little more often. But you know, the reality is once you decide, okay, I'm going to work out and I'm going to be there, you engage and then you attend. So engagement precedes attendance. I think, I think in the new paradigm. So, you know, instead of saying how do we get people to attend, maybe flip the question go, how do we get people to engage? How do we get people to engage in their faith? How do we get them to serve? How do we get them to give? How do we get them to invite their friends? You know, Sunday morning makes a lot more sense when you've got a friend on your arm and you've got an experience that you're inviting them into. So we're just going to poor fuel at Kinexis Church where I serve all over invitation, personal invitation this year because I just think that's one of the things I should be doing as a follower of Jesus is not letting the faith stop with me. So that's an awful lot to say. Those are some thoughts going on in my mind. Honestly, Steve, if you can crack that code, you've just, you know, you win the lottery. Good for you. A couple more questions. Okay. We're just going to do a couple more than we're going to wrap up. Chris asks, how do you make decisions with your staff? For example, adding a worship experience. I think, I think you kind of answered the question in the question, Chris. You make decisions within the staff. So, you know, sometimes I'll make a decision. It's like, hey, this is what I think we need to do, but I will always discuss it with the team first or sometimes your team comes to you and says, hey, we need to add a service. So usually what happens is the pastor thinks, hey, we need to add a service. And the kids, men, people says, do you know how, or say, do you know how short we aren't volunteers right now that you don't even understand? That's a conversation you need to have because before you add a service or that sort of thing, then you got to look at, okay, there's three things we need to do. We need more guest services people. We need more parking team. We need more kids, men, people, maybe you need more production people. And then you create a plan and then when that plan is executed, you can add your service. So I think conversation with is really important and it's a bit of attention because we talked about it a few times already. You can have leaders who come in and they're like, okay, my way or the highway, here's what we do and this starts, you know, February 1st and the whole team shutters and fears and their weekends are shattered and they don't know how they're going to get to it. That's not great leadership. On the other hand, you can have the paralysis of analysis and have a discussion forever and ever. It's kind of a ping pong match between the leader and the team to go, okay, we got to drive this decision. Yeah, but we got these issues, okay, yeah, but we really could reach more people if we added a service. Okay, yeah, well, how do we solve these issues and you just work on it like that and then eventually you get to it. At least that's how we've done it. It's been very helpful. Okay, Micah wants to know, coming on staff is an associate campus pastor. How do you establish clarity for the staff on leadership roles? Any question, Micah, the way we've done it and we've gone through several incarnations of it, but we've gone to what I call push down decision making because when we had team decision making, there was no clarity for the leadership role for staff. So for example, if you're the student pastor, well, actually you said you're going to come on as an associate, like what is your job description? Probably says some things, you know, responsible for discipleship, teaching 15 times a year. Let's just pick those two examples. Okay. What's your job? In too many churches, you need permission to do your job beyond like, hey, we want you to do this job. In other words, okay, these are the series I want to do. Who do I need to see to get these approved? Or, you know, we want to do this discipleship thing and I want to appoint 10 new leaders. Who do I see to get this approved? Like we need approval at every stage and we got away from that. Like we just said, hey, if this is within three conditions, number one, if it's already budgeted for, you know, you got the money, you got $10,000, $100,000 to spend or whatever it happens to be or $1,000 to spend, as long as it's not over that $1,000, you can just go spend it. You don't need any more permission. You know, if you had $500 for conferences and $500 for internal leadership development, but you just decide to spend it all on internal leadership development at our church, you don't need permission to rethink how you spend that money. Why? Because we just trust you to do the job. And you know, as long as it's not more than $1,000, it's okay. You have authority to make that decision. So number one, is it in the budget? Number two, is it on strategy? So, you know, is this consistent with our mission vision and strategy? Now, again, if you don't have a clear mission vision and strategy, you're not going to be able to answer that question. But if you do have clarity, then you can answer that, Micah. So, you know, we do have clarity. So we can say, yeah, that's consistent with our mission vision strategy. And you don't need permission from a team or your superior or anybody, just go do your job because we hired you to fulfill the mission and do your job. And then the third thing, and this is just sort of a, you know, I got to think this through, but you know, does my decision have an impact on someone else? So for example, if you decided at this retreat you want to do now inside, you don't want to spend any outside money, you want the band to play, it's a good idea to talk to the music director and say, hey, I've got this, you know, event that's coming up and can we get the band in to play the weekend for this crew? You know, it's, yeah, obviously you're going to have talked to the guy who leads the music to see if that's a possibility, but you don't really need permission. It's more collaboration. He's like, yeah, we're in. We'll do that. We'll do that. Okay. But you don't need to go to your boss. You can tell your boss, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is a direction. Do you see anything? But that clears the bottleneck of decision-making. It really, really helps. So I hope that helps you, Micah. That's clarity for us on the staff in leadership roles. And then if it's still fuzzy, just talk about it and say, hey, is that my call or is that your call or is that somebody else's call and just ask that. So listen, this has been super helpful. We will have some more bonus episodes of Ask Carry early in 2016. And the best way to make sure you don't miss these random episodes is to subscribe and you can do that for free on iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio. And as usual, every Tuesday, we've got fantastic guests lined up. This is going to be, I hope, the strongest year yet for the podcast. And if this has really encouraged you, number one, subscribe, number two. Could you leave a rating and review really helps get the message out to other people and then share it with a friend. Just hit the share button on your podcast app and say, hey, give this a listen. There was some practical advice and hopefully it helps you. Thank you so much for being so awesome. By the way, if you want more information on my latest book, you can get it at lastingimpactbook.com. And it's now available in audio. I actually narrated it myself. It's available in paperback and also on Kindle and the Kindle delivery is global. The others are in the U.S. but hopefully that's super helpful for you. And here's to a fantastic 2016. We'll be back next Tuesday with our regular episode and subscribe to make sure you don't miss these random bonus episodes and we'll be back with your questions for one of them real soon. Thanks for listening. Hope this helps you lead like never before. You've been listening to the Carey Newhof Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]