The danger of a split focus
Do you have a split focus? As my friend Neil Cole says, “First things first. One thing at a time. Always one more thing.” That middle concept of “one thing at a time” can be one of the most difficult for us. We live in an age of multi-tasking and constant...
Pruning comes first
Before you can begin delegating new tasks and developing new leaders, pruning must come first. The primary question of pruning is: What are you going to stop doing? If you don’t prune, you don’t have the bandwidth to develop others because you’re still carrying loads...
Five good questions for focusing a ministry position
I was recently coaching someone who had a staff member leave their position. Instead of immediately looking for someone to fill the empty position, he took the opportunity to think through more clearly what was actually needed. These were the five questions I used to...
A picture of contentment
Here’s something I saw in Honduras: kids playing soccer with an empty liter of soda. They don’t have much at all, but they found an empty bottle, turned it into a soccer ball, and they were having a wonderful time. Seeing this, it struck me how much contentment is...
When are you a supervisor and when are you a coach?
In many cases where you are the supervisor, you may want to take a coaching posture as much as possible. However, a coaching posture requires that the person you’re coaching is the one who sets the agenda. The agenda they set may or not be most strategic for...
Doing more of the right less
In John 15:1-2, we find that the secret of greater fruitfulness is not doing more but doing less: “I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so...
Planting new churches: Focusing on what we do well
New, smaller churches grow not by being supermarkets that offer everything under the sun, but by being specialty shops. I remember the motto we used in the first church I planted when it was still small: What we do, we do well. We don’t do everything, but what we do...