Sticky Teams
by Larry Osborne
Rating: 8 of 10

Larry Osborn suggests that unity of the leadership team is the most fundamental leadership task that a pastor has to accomplish.  To this end he gives the church leader a very practical resource for how to develop a unified and thriving church leadership team.

There are many practical suggestions I found helpful in this book, but one that really “stuck” to me was the difference between lobbying and continuing education.  Osborn points out that if there is not an ongoing continuing education program for a leadership team, then any educational pieces given in the moment of decision-making will come across as lobbying and are likely to be received with skepticism.  To accomplish this kind of continuing education, he suggests that a leadership team needs to meet more often, perhaps twice a month, with one meeting being devoted entirely to continuing education.

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Direct Hit
By Paul Borden
Rating: 7 of 10

Direct Hit is the second book in a series of books that pastors and laity are reading together in the Vital Church Initiative of the West Michigan Conference and Lansing District.  Borden outlines what he sees as the essentials for turning churches around from dying to thriving.  Borden, an American Baptist, is the original architect of the system that is being put in place for the Vital Church Initiative although it is being adapted to fit the United Methodist Church.

There are many ideas in this book that jumped out at me.  First, Borden highlights just how much visioning time is given to the pastor.  He points out that pastors are given twenty to thirty minutes every week to speak vision into the life of a community.  People come expecting to hear it.  Even beyond this time there are board meetings, staff meetings, and one-on-one meetings.  He asks pastors to consider how effective and strategic they’re being at using that time wisely.  I’ve begun to notice how there is a time before worship every week when my morning volunteers gather to walk through the morning and how ripe this time is for casting vision.  I have begun to use it as such.

Second, Borden points out the importance of the pastor creating a healthy sense of urgency.  My own personality and worldview tends away from alarmism, but Borden has convicted me to insert a little more alarm into my visioning time.  At the same time, Borden uses so much militaristic language in this book that I wouldn’t mind if he turned down a bit his own urgency dial.

Third, Borden introduces George Bullard’s lifecycles of a church. It begins with birth where vision is high and ends with death where maintenance is all that is left.  In between are varying times of emphasizing relationships and programs.  A healthy community needs to cycle back to the beginning and be reborn every five to seven years.  I’ve been using this idea lately during my pre-worship team meetings to help insert a sense of urgency in our church’s culture.  People may disagree with where we are at in this cycle, but everyone understands that for us to remain thriving as we head into the future, we must recreate ourselves with new vision.

Fourth, Borden outlines the process that is being used for the Vital Church Initiative.  This process has been most effectively adapted and used in the Missouri Conference of The United Methodist Church.  The West Michigan Conference is learning it from Missouri.  It includes a year of reading books together, a time of evaluation by an outside consultant, the creation of a prescription for vitality, a vote by the church, and the assignment of a coach if the church votes to adopt the prescription for vitality.  This process may be the most effective I have seen at making a significant amount of change in a relatively short period of time.

Currently Reading/Listening
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Shaped By God’s Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches by Milfred Minatrea

Recreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age
By Richard L. Hamm
Library
Rating: 8 of 10

Recreating the Church is the first book assigned for the West Michigan Conference’s Vital Church Initiative (VCI) pilot project.  VCI is an attempt to adapt what has been successful in the Missouri conference at stopping decline in church attendance.  The basic structure of VCI includes two phases each lasting about one year.  Phase one includes a group of pastors and another group of laity (non-pastors) from the same church reading a series of books and meeting for training and mutual accountability.  Phase two begins with a church-wide consultation resulting in a prescription for change and vitality.  The prescription is either adopted or rejected by the church.  If it is adopted the church is assigned a coach to help implement the changes.  It’s a pretty simple design, and I am excited at the potential for it in our conference and also in our church.  Hamm provides the pastors and laity involved in VCI a very helpful and broad overview of why and how things must change in this postmodern age.

Hamm offers 1968 as the pivotal year where things start going downhill for most mainline denominations.  Hamm is not a United Methodist, but it is worth noting that 1968 was the year that the United Methodist Church was born in the merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren.  Perhaps that year we were busy rearranging chairs on the sinking titanic.  Hamm points out that today mainline denominations have “lost even the appearance of success.”  We are too busy trying to survive by maintaining a dying system.  We must seek not just technical change to the system (replacing one leader or structure with another), but adaptive change of the entire system itself (rethinking our method completely).

There is too much in the book to summarize it all, so I will focus on one point that Hamm makes that I found particularly helpful.  I often hear an argument that goes something like this: our call in life is to be faithful and let God deal with the growth or decline.  This argument is persuasive because it has a kernel of truth in it.  But Hamm points out the problem in this argument over the past fifty years.  The entire paragraph is worth quoting:

A fourth reason [that mainline leaders did not notice the shift from modern leadership to postmodern leadership], found among some mainline church leaders, was an attitude that viewed the decreases as a sign that the denominations were paying the “price of faithfulness.”  That is, some mainline church leaders and governing bodies (especially in national settings) had taken unpopular stands in regard to such issues as racism and the Vietnam War, and so some concluded that a lot of contributing members just couldn’t take the “heat” of the “truth.”  This was a self-serving, but understandable interpretation.  If we had done statistical analyses of who was still attending, however, we would have found that the losses were primarily among the young, not the old (who were the primary contributors and would have been more likely to leave than would the young when traditional values were challenged).

Ouch!  I hear the same argument today around issues like homosexuality and politics and religion.  Hamm’s insightful analysis of what has taken place in the past fifty years suggests that today something bigger is going on with the continued decline of mainline denominations than just “taking the heat” for progressive stances on divisive issues.  (This is not to suggest that mainline denominations ought not to take “progressive” stances on these issues, but that we ought not to use those stances as an excuse or justification for decline.)

One solution Hamm suggests is that leadership teams must become smaller and less “representative.”  He doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be diverse, but that they shouldn’t necessarily be made up of a representative from every ministry in the denomination or church.  That approach tends to lead to territorialism rather than broad dynamic leadership of the church as a whole.  I’m glad to say that our Annual Conference passed legislation last year that accomplished just that.  We are beginning to see the fruit of that smaller leadership team as our Annual Conference begins to focus its strategy around ministries like the Vital Church Initiative.  Hamm helps us to continue to see the way forward.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Original Sin:  A Sally Sin Adventure by Beth McMullen
Pompeii (A Novel) by Robert Harris
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris