I've Been Thinking About This…

Pete Wilson

Pete’s job – teaching, vision & discipling the other pastors. Pages of notes here about Crosspoint’s experiences (‘MS’ stands for Multisite; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.):

Regarding the campus plant:

• A launch team is essential
• Launch takes a massive amount of work
• Missions are a great way to bring multiple campuses together to help cement connections in the whole church
• Crosspoint has 4 ‘Serving Saturdays’ each year
• MS makes any DNA problems more evident
• MS appears to demand matrixed management, but it doesn’t work very well (something that’s become very obvious in the business world).
• MS has the advantage of making a congregation become less building-centric (cool insight).
• Launched new campuses with mailers, but word of mouth has always proven most effective. Not too much with Twitter/FB. Social media good for communication and assimilation; not so much for growth.
• Target is to have campuses self-supporting within 1 year
• Also give an offering to churches that are planted nearby

Regarding the CP, he must be exactly the right fit:

• same as the lead pastor except for the preaching – Crosspoint’s CPs report to Pete and Jenni Catron (the executive pastor) and meet twice each week.
• Qualifications: heart, commitment to the DNA, be a strong leader, strong communicator.
• Top passions: leadership and spiritual development.
• Every campus sees the CP as their pastor rather than Pete.

Regarding video teaching:

• Video teaching is working well – used to be a 1-week delay, now down to same day (actually about 10 minutes, and could be pulled down to a 2-minute delay if they chose).
• There are 2 backup messages ready if needed.
• Regarding the switch to video teaching –
  • it was hard to stop looking at the people locally and focus on the camera, and
  • gets feedback from the CPs about the video teaching.

Regarding the week’s schedule:

• Mondays: every visitor gets a handwritten card; volunteers get a card as well.
• Tuesdays: meeting day
• Wed/Thu CPs do counseling, visitation, meet with volunteers & staff

My takeaways here:

1. The way Pete talks about it sometimes, you might think that Crosspoint is a well-oiled machine that everyone else is running, and he’s just a figurehead wandering around. But it’s clear that he does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. Until recently, for instance, every new person coming to the church got a handwritten note of welcome from him – as the church growth rocketed upward, that alone was a huge amount of work.
2. Choosing the right people and investing them with the right vision is evidently an essential constituent of the growth – almost as vital as consistently great teaching and an environment of fellowship.

A wonderful talk to listen to – hard to miss the excitement he feels for the church and it’s people.

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What follows is the summary of the 15 pages of notes I took at the conference, speaker by speaker. Each of these men were encouragers; some were better atuned to the listeners than others, but I certainly got some tremendous help from each of them.

(‘MS’ stands for MULTISITE; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.)

Terry Broadwater

Director of the Chi Alpha Network

• Go where the people are.
• Lead the elders through a study of Acts – what should we be doing? Where should we be going?
• We must raise up and release a generation of church planters
• We should be people like Philip, who left the Jerusalem church and traveled to the desert, overtaking the lost eunuch in his search for Life.
• David’s attitude and praise in 2 Sam 6 – an example of NT worship in the OT
• Accountability is relational now, not legislated.

The question coming out of Terry’s talk for me is – are your elders or deacons so connected to the pastor that they want to spend time with him? … are they personal friends? … have they bought into the vision he has been given? Or are they ignoring or resisting what he’s trying to do? The founding pastor of a church plant gets to choose the elders, and they generally follow his vision and lead. When the founder leaves for whatever reason, the elders look for the replacement – and from that point on there’s always the concern that he’s bringing in change that they don’t agree with and that wasn’t part of the original pastor’s vision. After all, if they’re hiring him, then he reports to them, right? So there’s often an expectation that he should do the things they want the way they want.

But people and culture inevitably change, and so God’s desire and path for the church will change; can the elders grasp that if they haven’t had formal training? In general I think they can, but a real spirit of unity and humility must be present. Further, there must be a joy in the yoke. I think the proof of that is – do the elders enjoy doing things with the pastor (cookouts and hang times just for the lead team), or do they only get together at official meetings? If the latter, I’m pretty sure the church is in trouble.

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Just back from a great 2 1/2 days in DC at the Church Multiplication Network. Got Josh to drop by a couple of times each day to keep Biff company (thanks, Josh), and we conned a couple of folks in the small group to get us to the train station and pick us up on the return (thanks, Mike & Frank!). Naturally we had a heat-wave for traveling – over 100F in DC Monday through Wednesday – so that made lugging bags extra fun. Waiting in the sun on the platform for the Amtrak Vermonter that was 50 minutes late was a treat too.

Apart from the heat, though, this was an incredible trip. The Assemblies of God (http://AG.org) had laid the church planting conference on for free. I caught wind of it from Twitter, since I follow some of the presenters, and Pastor Ryan & I managed to sign up relatively early. (Some good responsiveness and follow-up from the AG staff during the leadup to the conference – thanks to Debbie Armstrong & Nicolle Rockenbaugh)

As it happens, there are a number of interesting events intersecting for us on this topic – first is the conference itself, of course; secondly the fact that we have just started a series called GOING – something very missional to encourage a more personal level of ministry and outreach. I’ll be taking the sermon “Mission (to the Promised Land)” based on Joshua’s invasion on 7/18 and then doing the follow-up to VBS on 8/1 (“Tidy to messy”) – pastor Ryan is covering the other 5 weeks. The third of these events is an elder meeting next week where Pastor Ryan is sharing God’s vision for Praise Christian Fellowship’s church growth.

So the timing of this was great for us. We’re also thinking of going to the Sticks conference (Nov 9-10) and considering a Grand Tour of a number of the churches whose blogs and pastors’ blogs we’re tracking – Mark Batterson at NCC, Pete Wilson at Crosspoint, Greg & Geoff Surratt at Seacoast, Dave & Jon Ferguson at CCC, Shaun King at Courageous Church and Andy Stanley at North Point and one or two others. It’ll be interesting to see how many we could fit into a weekend. Sadly we’ll not make it to Zak White at Revolution Church.

The other vital accomplishment during this trip was to get Ryan hooked on Doctor Who. All right-thinking men should be, so we watched the episodes written by Steven Moffett – one of the two best writers of current production TV (the other is Bob Larby, but you knew that).

More notes to come…

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Charles Stone

• Half of all pastors act like a turtle with problems – they process pain and hurt alone. Became closed, guarded and protective. Wish I’d found a couple of men with whom I could share and have speak into my life – mentors.

Anthoney Trufant

• place a premium on being open and honest.
• invest in the stewardship of self
• Keep your family first.
• develop some holy friends
• you may be the key leader, but you’re not the sole leader
• take risk.
• learn that the first ‘no’ may not be the final ‘no when you propose something.
• learn that conflict is not an enemy, but an ally
• learn different styles of coping with conflict.
• enter your ministry with an exit strategy – don’t leave baggage behind.
• deal with your own baggage immediately. Otherwise it will come up at inconvenient times.

Andrew McQuitty

• Success in ministry is not defined by numbers & money
• focus on faithfulness not results.
• obey God, don’t work for Him. Otherwise, God becomes your PR agent – it’s His job to make you look good.

Jim Herrington
3 wrong steps:

• We need to stop seperating sacred from secular.
• We need to stop thinking that information transforms – only experience transforms.
• We need to stop condemning failure.

Cal Jernigan

• Have a mentor.

Dennis Keating

• Can’t be father to the world. Can’t ‘do it all’. Just because the ministry calls you, doesn’t mean God is calling.

George Cladis

• It’s about management
1. Self-management – loving God & loving your neighbor
2. Family & friendship relationship management
3. Calling management – know your gifts and those around you; what makes for good team management?

Mel Lawrenz

• move close to the office ASAP
• Read ‘Getting things done’
• work with worship tema more
• connect with other pastors locally
• be more selective in reading
• be more regular in days off – with family
• handle criticism more directly
• delegate more organizational leadership
• collect more stories

Dick Alexander
A gravelly voice and some tremendous honesty!

• Make absolutely sure your focus is on family; seek counselling when necessary; protect your marriage and children.

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Bruce Wesley

• do you want speed to reproduce or strength in generating leaders?
• Develop 2 bars of leadership – a speed bar & a strength bar.
• Have yearly increments to move speed people to strength.

Tammy Kelley

• Ask more questions; make fewer declarations
• good things can become intoxicating; intoxicating can become toxic
• live a life more ‘fool for Christ’ and less ‘impress’.

Jason Barr

• I wish I’d never compromised
• I hired people too fast; should have done more due diligence; wish I’d hired on chemistry more than credentials
• noone can teach to be good stewards better than lead pastor – Don’t delegate this.
• I would rather do things for people than with people; I wish I’d been a better shepherd. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Craig Strickland

• church plants tend to be a magnet for dysfunctional people
• I seriously underestimated the importance of generous giving
• It takes 3-5 years to change the DNA of the church

Matt Hannan

• Avoid unnecessary wars
• lead from the middle not the edge, even though the edge is attractional because it looks ‘edgy’
• Don’t think that spiritual leadership is distinct from strategic leadership
• God’s core agenda is ‘YOU’
• People who model false values instill false values in their disciples (if you teach that prayer is important without actually being a prayer warrier yourself, people will learn to say prayer is important without actually being prayer warriers themselves.)

Jeff Jones

• Wish I hadn’t tried to do it all. Missed out on a lot of things, so did my family.
• Wish I’d tried to do only the things no one else could do, instead.

Kevin Harney

• Having people keep sending money and prayers is fine, but not enough.
• Having committees that plan outreach is fine, but not enough.
• Organic Outreach is the target lifestyle.
• Elders should be held accountable for outreach themselves.
• Budget needs to reflect giving and outreach – what God’s call us to do.
• Train and equip all people – youth, men & women.

Steve Stroope

• Wish I’d guided the church to live that ‘family’ is the spiritual formation driver
• Church must remind, resource & equip the family to do it
• Developed kiosk & online to resource the family
• Ensure that no ministry unintentially left the parents out

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Rough and ready blogging from The Nines. Here’s the messages from 10-11am.

Mark Beeson:
As a leader, be aware that sometimes people will join or leave your team:

• because of you
• because of your mission, vision or values
• because of the people on your team

Bryan Carter:
As a pastor I succeeded a great man …

1. learn to walk in somebody’s shadow – Learn how to honor that legacy
2. Learn to be yourself – never try to be someone else
3. Learn to be patient – people need time to heal over loss of prior leader – 5-7 years to be invested in their hearts and be allowed to lead them.

Anne Jackson:

Author of Mad Church Disease & Permission to speak freely

What does stress do to the leaders in a church?

Is there anything interfering with your work in church?

Weight? Appearance? Loss of focus on God as your provision?

Dave Furguson:

What do we do to develop another leader? Disciple someone?

5 steps:

1. I do – you watch (then we discussed it)
2. I do – you help (small steps at first)
3. You do – I help
4. You do – I watch (then we discussed it)
5. You do – someone else watches

2 Tim 2:2 – The way Paul discipled Timothy

Scott Hodges:

2/14/96 dad goes into hospital for bypass. Dad’s possible last message: “Stay close to Jesus, son” – goes on to live for another 8 years.

What should a pastor ask for in prayer? “Pray that (1) I hear God’s word and (2) I have the courage to obey. ”

I can be really cool in what I do, but if I’m not hearing from God, I’m missing the most important element in my life. I avoid all meetings in the morning. I will fail if my life becomes about Scott Hodges.

So, leaders: ‘Am I hearing from God?’ and ‘Am I willing to do whatever it takes to obey God, or am I more worried that I’ll lose friends and congregants.’

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