Logan Leadership

“Direct results always come first. In the care of feeding of an organization, they play the role calories pay in the nutrition of the human body.”  — Peter Drucker

One of the critical issues that we don’t recognize in church leadership is that it’s not the activities that matter, but the fruit that those activities yield. Attendance or participation is one thing to measure, but far more important is measuring the outcome created by that attendance or participation. For example, are we measuring church service attendance or life change?  Just because something is easier to measure doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to be measuring.

With my bum leg putting me on crutches, I am reading the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30) in a whole new light. Because I have less energy and ability than I used to, I have needed to recognize that I’m just not going to be able to do all I was before, at least not while I’m still healing. God only holds us accountable for what we do with what we’ve got.

Without any clear benchmarks for change, it’s almost impossible to measure whether change is happening. What is transformation? What does it look like?  Would you recognize it if you saw it?

Here are the 10 signs of change used by the ministry I visited in Mexico last month:*

SIGN 1: WEALTH CREATION AT THE BOTTOM: Increased access to the economic tools that allow people to provide for the basic needs of their families

SIGN 2: LEARNING THAT EMPOWERS: Education leveraged as a powerful tool that can help people out of poverty