The Other Side of Leadership: Understanding the Forgotten, Lesser-Known Side of Leading a Ministry

By Rob Curry

Get ready to embark on an expedition with a fresh approach to leadership. You will discover contributing factors that may be slowing, stopping, or even reversing progress in your church, ministry, or organization.

The Other Side of Leadership takes you beyond the standard concepts to lesser-understood approaches to enhance effectiveness and avoid pitfalls.

You will learn about the three aspects of the Other Side of Leadership that will equip you with:

Strategies for highly effective thinking, both individually and corporately, to gain and handle truth accurately and holistically.

Skills to understand and connect with people to unite leaders and followers toward a common cause.

A course of action to successfully follow through on plans with maturity and tenacity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512724509

Rob Curry

Rob Curry is the Executive Pastor at Cypress Bible Church in Houston, Texas. He has been a pastor since 1991, previously serving in churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He has experienced many facets of leadership as a pastor, consultant, and seminar speaker, and offers insights from his twenty-five years of ministry experience. www.clearleadership.net.

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Copyright © 2016 Robert D Curry.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-2449-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-2450-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920866

WestBow Press rev. date: 1/27/2016

CONTENTS

Introduction

Looking Ahead

The Ministry Mountain

Book Format

CHAPTER 1 Thinking

Corporate IQ

Leaders as Truth-seekers

Do Your Homework

The Discipline of Listening

Handling Truth

Increase Your Learning Disabilities

Winning or Losing by Dribs and Drabs

Key Takeaways

Five Important Questions

CHAPTER 2 People

An Epic Failure

The People Factor

Who Are These People?

Beyond Facts and Logic

The What/How Principle

How About Followership?

Team

The Right People

An Assessment Tool

Congregation

Communication

Results

Managing Change

Key Takeaways

Five Important Questions

CHAPTER 3 Follow-Through

God Follows Through

A Law of Nature

Hey, This Is Hard Work!

A Comfort/Effectiveness Tension

A Strong Start (or Restart)

The Peak: Where Do We Want to Be?

Two Aspects of an Effective Plan

Simplifying

Start Counting

Translate into the Tangible

Faith & Action

Pathway: How Do We Get There?

Advancing Opportunities

The Who of Follow-Through

Fluid Leadership

Catalysts

Passion and Pain

Active Awareness

Situational Leadership

Gut Check

Repetition

The Four Rs

Key Takeaways

Five Important Questions

CHAPTER 4 Classic Leadership

Which Way Is Up?

The Mountain

Vision – The Mountain Peak

Church Vision Examples

Hiking - Programs/Activities

Base Camp – Resources

Visionary Leadership

Vision Casting

Other Visionary Languages

Key Takeaways

Five Important Questions

CHAPTER 5 Sorting Through Complexity

The Spaghetti of Complexity

Getting to Objectivity

Sorting It Out

Decide How to Decide

Key Takeaways

A Good Group Exercise

CHAPTER 6 4 Important Words

1: Biblical

2: Intentional

3: Personal

4: Repeated

Key Takeaways

Five Important Questions

INTRODUCTION

It was 1993 and I was staring at a screen, my hands limp on my keyboard. I didn’t know if I had the desire to type anything. Hired as youth pastor at a mid-sized church in New Jersey earlier that year, I quickly discovered that the student ministry was ingrown, stagnant, and very much centered on one adult volunteer. I was discouraged. I couldn’t see a couple of years into the future when the ministry would turn around in exciting ways.

Two years later, I began working with the younger classes, who became the new student leadership as they got older. Under their tenure, many new faces would come through that student ministry and many salvation decisions would be made.

But I didn’t know that, staring my screen in 1993. All I knew was that I was questioning a lot of things, including my calling to that ministry at that time.

I am thankful to the many mentors and peers who offered me words of emotional encouragement during that time in my life. Those words were helpful and welcome. Twenty-two years later, if I could offer the 1993 youth pastor version of me anything, however, it would not be kind words. It would be what has come to me from 25 years of vocational ministry experience and the wisdom of others through conferences, training, and advice: a framework.

In 1993, I began to work out a tangible day-by-day plan. A few years later, I read George Barna’s book, The Power of Vision, and I added many of its insights to my ministry approach. Through the school of hard knocks, I learned and refined it, pitching out the peripherals and embracing the core.

Arriving to that point, when I no longer had the inspiration to outline a lesson plan, it looked more like a slow slide than a sudden drop. For those of you who have reached this point before, you know that a myriad of things can lead you to despair and ineffectiveness in ministry. We can slide to convention and predictability, somewhere along the way making the unconscious choice that stability is more important than effectiveness. Maybe your internal or external environment changed, and you fell behind the curve. It could be that you simply experienced the typical lifecycle of an organization where, over time, programs and methods became ends unto themselves and you institutionalized. Lastly, maybe over time you made attempts, got tripped up and then became cynical about your ministry’s ability to ever see the colors and excitement of momentum. I encourage you to read on. Please consider that hammering harder is not the key. You need new tools in your tool belt. In fact, maybe you need a new tool belt!

LOOKING AHEAD

Ministry life is dynamic and it calls for an adaptable approach, in place of a static one that assumes that one size fits every situation. It takes a great deal more wisdom to see a problem and know what tool and what approach would be best for it, than it does to arrive at every problem with the same hammer in hand. To a man who only has a hammer, every challenge looks a lot like a nail.

My desire is to help you with how to think versus telling you what to think. More specifically, I’ll raise questions that require understanding how below-the-surface dynamics impact your effectiveness. We will look beyond familiar leadership approaches in order to utilize those dynamics in a healthy way to advance ministry.

THE MINISTRY MOUNTAIN

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From a distance, a mountain can be overwhelmingly beautiful, with its ridged skyline and white caps. Scaling it can appear to be as simple as hiking on a smooth slope from base to peak. Only when you are up close do the details of the terrain show themselves and the challenges with them. The proverbial distance between observing and experiencing mirrors the gap that lies between unawareness and understanding.

There is a similar gap between attending church and participating in the church body. It is only when one participates in day-to-day ministry that one can fully appreciate the complexity of getting from here to there.

On a climb, inclines change to steep ascents in a few steps. Grassy fields transform into jagged rocks and jagged rocks become ice-covered rock faces. Weather changes and equipment fails, and physical and psychological health become variables when they may have once been static. As in any situation, the same capacity a team has to help one another, is the capacity they have to inhibit one another.

Both the mountain and the ministry environment require wise navigation around obstacles, through limitations, and onward toward the destination.

Classic Leadership

There are two sides of the ministry mountain. The side that typically comes to mind and receives the most attention involves vision, programs, and resources. I call that side classic leadership. It is classic leadership and it is an important part of leadership. We need compelling vision and a clear strategy to move toward fulfilling the vision. We need the right people in place, and that includes passionate leaders who inflame the hearts and minds of their congregations for a God-sized vision that is greater than any one person. While the focus of this book is on the other side of leadership, it is undoable to seek to grow and build an organization or church without classic leadership.

To climb a mountain with a limited understanding of the considerations can prove to be inhibiting and even disastrous - and so it is with leadership. Convincing people to agree on a destination with facts and logic is just the beginning. You can be absolutely right and pointed in the right direction, and still get tripped up. Organizational learning disabilities, amnesia, corporate dumbness, passive aggressive behavior, and active aggressive behavior are just a few of the more common traps that keep groups from reaching their destination.

For some churches, a classic leadership approach on its own is working, at least for the time being. They are riding a wave of momentum, often around a charismatic and/or driven leader. Attendance is up, finances are solid, and other indicators of success (as they define it) are mostly positive. Problems for them may come when they take next steps while navigating a changing environment, or when they address the issues that arise in any ministry, whether the ministry is vibrant or struggling. An oversimplified thought process might go something like this: We are experiencing challenges. Let’s push harder or seek to be more convincing. Let’s have an event or sermon series on our challenges.

This approach assumes that the answer to the problem is found in the church’s vision, programs, or resources. This may make a difference for a time, and it may not. As leaders, we have to consider that the way that we solve problems may be the problem. We become stuck in a challenge because of our black and white, right and wrong, yes and no thinking. Navigation that takes into account the lesser-known dynamics of leadership is much more fluid than the stock answers. Consequently, it can provide new ways to look at challenges and address them that are accurate and effective.

It would be wonderful if ministry life was always simple with straightforward clarity. It would be much easier if a leader could just cast vision in such a way that everyone would understand it, agree with it, work together for it, talk about it, live it out in their personal lives, and then look to it to drive the ministry for years to come.

Maybe classic leadership is going well for you. You have charisma, inspiration, vision, and the right people in the right places. You focus on living into certain values and having good programming – often centered on Sunday morning. While these things are certainly vital, they are only a part of the ministry mountain, and with them, you can only get so far. Challenges will come that require more than pushing hard and leaning on programs. You will need to understand and implement an adaptable style of leading people through change and complexity at some point, or you will never move past the steepest parts of ministry. You will need to know the other side of leadership. Leadership is not an either-or proposition. Both sides of the mountain must be in view for effectiveness.

The Other Side of Leadership

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While giving credence to the important classic leadership side, we’ll look primarily at the lesser-known side of leadership that involves how we think, how we interact with people, and how we follow through. When operating ideally, these three unseen virtues can be described in the following way:

Ministry leadership requires wisdom in navigating the interwoven complexity of these three parts. There is more to ministry than the basics of what can be seen, and we can shut down progress without even knowing it. Whether we do so wisely or carelessly, the handling of thinking, people, and follow-through greatly impact our efforts. These three dynamics make up our