Today my family and I are heading out for a weekend trip to the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, Kansas.If you’ve never heard about Church of the Resurrection, here’s some info from their website.

The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection has grown from four people in 1990 to over 12,000 adult members with an average weekly worship attendance of over 7,500 in 2008.  The church was listed as the most influential mainline church in America in a 2005 survey of American pastors.  The Church of the Resurrection has a three-fold focus:  1. Reaching non-religious and nominally religious people and helping them become committed followers of Jesus Christ;  2. Equipping and inspiring members to live their faith in mission to the community and world; and 3. Acting as a catalyst for renewing the mainline church.

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in the Leadership Institute sponsored by COR each year. In this past year, I’ve also been a part of the Young Pastors Network which Adam Hamilton, COR’s Senior Pastor, co-leads with Mike Slaughter, Senior Pastor of Ginghamsburg UMC in Ohio, but I’ve never had the opportunity to experience the weekend at Church of the Resurrection. We’ll be attending four of their weekend worship services including their Saturday Night service, their 9:00 a.m. Traditional service, a new service they’ve started called Vibe, and their Sunday afternoon service at 5:00 p.m. So we’re going to get some church this weekend!

We’ll be looking specifically at their welcoming ministry, children’s programming offered during their services, how they are handling a concurrent service [two at one time on Sunday morning at 11:00 with Vibe] and how they have grown their 5:00 p.m. Sunday afternoon service into one of their largest services. This will be my first “research excursion” as we continue to make plans to add additional worship opportunities at First UMC Mansfield.

On the way, we’ll also be stopping in Oklahoma City on Friday night and catch a Redhawks minor league game as well. I’ll try to post some pictures over the weekend and a wrapup of the trip on Tuesday!

Our final session at the Young Pastors Network gathering was led by Rev. Adam Hamilton and was titled, “Strategic Planning.” These are the notes I took from this final session.

Mike Slaughter, Brian McLaren, and Adam Hamilton each gave one of these three ideals in response to the question, what are the most important ideals needed in staff?

• Integrity [Adam]
• Courage [Mike]
• Patience [Brian]

I liked Brian’s quote that he shared in relationship to his ideal. He said, “Loving truth takes courage, loving people takes patience.”

Adam’s follow to that thought was, “You may have a prophetic word, but you are always a pastor.”

Adam talked about two different kinds of leaders. The first he described as downward spiraling leaders which are those who look at the work ahead and can only seem to consistently repeat how difficult things are going to be or how unlikely it will be that success is achieved. The second type of leader that Adam described was a leader that “radiated possibility.” These types of leaders are champions of the positives and tend to make everyone around them feel a great sense of energy and passion around a particular task. Adam shared some visuals which I copied into my notes.

In talking about mission statements for the church, Adam said, that these guiding ideas need to be either written by the leader or meet the standard of something that the leader is deeply passionate about. If this standard is not met, the leader will not be faithful to keep that vision before the people. In the case of the local church, the preacher won’t preach on it, and it won’t become a part of your church DNA.

Further, Adam said, “never allow a committee to write your mission statement. It’s the best way to kill your mission.”

Also he said, “the mission has to be compelling to the leader first and then it has to be compelling to your people.”

In developing strategic objectives for your local congregation, Adam shared the following ideas of what makes something a “smart” objective.

• Specific
• Measurablle
• Aggressive
• Realistic
• Time-Specific

Adam said that for an objective to not only build a sense of energy and purpose but also get completed by the end of the year, the objective has to meet all of the above criteria.

For 2008, Resurrection set the following three strategic objectives.

• Double the number of people who were incorporating prayer and Bible study into their daily lives.
• Increase by 20% the number of people in the Resurrection family who were participating in efforts to alleviate poverty in the greater Kansas City area.
• Develop plans for future campuses for Church of the Resurrection.

This post is from a series written following the first gathering of the Young Pastors Network at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in October of 2008. The rest of the series is available below.

1. Home from Ohio
2. Self Leadership
3. Prophetic Leadership
4. Strategic Leaderhip pt. I
5. Strategic Leadership pt. II
6. Strategic Planning

This post is a continuation of my notes from Adam Hamilton’s session on “Strategic Leadership” at the first gathering of the Young Pastors Network. To read the previous notes, click here.

I thought this quote from Adam was interesting in relationship to preaching. He said, “I don’t always preach something that I’m practicing, but I never preach anything that I”m not going to try to live in my life.”

Adam shared some information from Ron Heifetz’s book, “Leadership without Easy Answers,” which I thought was some of the best info we received during the entire event. Paraphrasing Heifetz’s work for application in the church, Adam shared that Heifetz believes that leadership is about, “helping followers to become more authentically human.” The process of completing this task is as follows.

• Get followers to clarify what matters most [To God].
• Lead them to care about these core values.
• Identity the present reality.
• Help them understand the gap between the ideal and the reality.

Our third session of YPN was led by Adam Hamilton and titled, “Strategic Leadership.” Last week was the first time that I had ever met or heard Mike Slaughter speak although I had heard of him and Ginghamsburg for years. I was much more familiar with Adam because of my attendance at his church’s Leadership Institute in 2006.

A side note to begin with from my notes…

Throughout the week, Adam talked about what he calls “Conjunctive Faith,” which he [in mainline church terms] describes as what is “emerging” within the church today. Conjunctive faith is the bringing together of the evangelical gospel and the social gospel and is representative of the shift [what many call the emerging church] from both the liberal and conservative sides of the church towards the center.

Adam’s language for this is much different than some of the more prominent “emerging church” authors. Having Adam & Brian McLaren together was interesting because they both recognized and affirmed that while they both represent this movement towards the center, they are coming at it from opposite directions… Adam from the left of the theological spectrum as a United Methodist and Brian from the right as a former pastor of an independent conservative church. If you’d like to know more about the idea of conjunctive faith or the nature of theology at the center of the spectrum, I highly recommend Adam’s book, Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White.

Back to the subject of Strategic Leadership…

Adam opened the session with, “The failure of leadership in the United Methodist Church isn’t Bishops or General Church Agencies, it’s the local church.”My comment in my notes was, “we need to own this.” I think there is an unhealthy tendency in the church to look to the leader above you to express blame, but Adam reminded us that you are solely responsible for the way you lead the local church. Great reminder to get us started.

Adam then walked us through an exercise where we reflected first on the characteristics of some of the worst leaders we ever worked for… What was it that made them ineffective? What were the pitfalls for them? After that, we flipped the question and looked at what some of the best leaders we have ever been around were all about. After spending some time thinking and reflecting, Adam then said, “What’s interesting about leadership is almost everyone knows what a good leader looks like and does. We just don’t keep that vision in front of us.” Adam’s challenge to all of us [which I haven't done yet, but plan on doing] is to spend some additional time coming up with our list of characteristics of great leaders and not to great leaders and look at that list every single day before we leave the house.

His key question: What would you begin to look like as a leader if everyday you started with your vision of what a great leader really is?

Ok. That’s about half of that session with Adam, but a lot of content to digest. I’ll post the second half of “Strategic Leadership tomorrow.

This post is from a series written following the first gathering of the Young Pastors Network at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in October of 2008. The rest of the series is available below.

1. Home from Ohio
2. Self Leadership
3. Prophetic Leadership
4. Strategic Leaderhip pt. I
5. Strategic Leadership pt. II
6. Strategic Planning

Our second session at the Young Pastors Network gathering was on the subject of Prophetic leadership and was led by Mike Slaughter. Mike started out the session by talking a little bit about the Jesus Movement of the 1970′s which he described as “an awakening” which pointed to a future “reformation.”

In Mike’s understanding, the Jesus Movement molded itself into the modern “Church growth” movement where worship attendance has been the primary measure of success in our churches. The future reformation which the awakening of the 70′s pointed towards is the time we find ourselves in right now according to Mike.

If that’s true, the times we are currently living in right now could be as transformational for the church as the times of Martin Luther when the unity of Catholic church was forever divided into Catholics and Protestants.

During this session, Mike also talked about four general worldviews he sees present in our world today.

The Secular Worldview

The secular worldview is held by those who are totally skeptical of anything supernatural. Generally speaking those who hold this view are more likely to be over the age of 40, white and there are also a large number of individuals leading in the field of education who operate from this worldview. They could be described as humanistic and dedicated to the idea that satisfaction is directly tied to the accumulation of material wealth.

The Soft-Secular Worldview

The soft-secular worldview is held by those who believe in God, but place their trust in secular culture. They draw their meaning and security from the material world while showing a limited amount of interest in the supernatural. Soft-secular people struggle with the idea of sacrifice because of their connection to the material world and so they tend to think of their gifts as donations rather than intentional sacrifices. Those who hold to the soft-secular worldview are most interested in bringing God into their worldview. It was Mike’s opinion that our churches are filled with individuals who have a soft-secular worldview.

The Post-Secular or Post-modern Worldview

The number of individuals in our churches who hold to the post-secular worldview is growing, yet not nearly at the same rate as the number in the general population. Post-Seculars are usually under the age of 40 and show a high interest in the supernatural. Their worldview is radically shaped by the idea of Expressive Individualism which says that, “something if true if it works for me.” Also central to this worldview is the idea that the present is what really matters. A lack of attention to the past and the future means that those holding this worldview have deep struggles with the question of identity. Again, while there are fewer of these in our churches, listening to them is critical because they have the ability to understand the large number of younger individuals who are making a mass exodus from our faith communities. For more on that, Mike directed us to David Kinnamon’s book, UnChristian.

The Christian Worldview

Finally, we have the Christian worldview which says that, “it’s bigger than my life.” Those holding to this worldview believe that truth will prevail because it’s true, even if it doesn’t happen within their lifetime. Etc, Etc…

In relationship to how we view ourselves, Mike talked about two differing ideas…

The Moralist worldview says that, “I work hard to be right and to be accepted.”

The Gospel worldview says that, “I’m accepted so now I’m free to work hard at being right.”

[I wonder what your thoughts are as to the difference between those two statements.]

His closing thought for the session, which might have been one of the most profound I heard all week was this: “Your ministry will not be defined by what you achieve, but by who you develop.”

This post is from a series written following the first gathering of the Young Pastors Network at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in October of 2008. The rest of the series is available below.

1. Home from Ohio
2. Self Leadership
3. Prophetic Leadership
4. Strategic Leaderhip pt. I
5. Strategic Leadership pt. II
6. Strategic Planning