RO Goes to Church - application to the growth and development of a mega-church - John Morgan

Speaker A I'm eager to share with you our experience of Ro in the church because I'm passionate about pushing as big a rock as I can in the church world because I believe in what the church does and but I'm also passionate about Ro. It has really changed my life. I've kind of got a second track going now where I train other pastors in how to get the right management structures in their church. And when I talk to them, I say, I feel like the guy who discovered Viagra. This has done great things for me, and I think it will help you too. I know that some of you do work in the world of helping those who are in the spiritual work to organize what's going on. Some of you may not. Sometimes I get funny reactions by people that are in the Ro world. How does that work in church? That seems strange. And maybe the church world may seem strange to you, and those of us that are church leaders may seem strange to you. We have certainly earned that reputation to a degree. But it reminds me of the story of there was a man and he was a barber. And one day the local candy shop owner came into his shop and he gave him a nice haircut. And when it was done, he said, that's on the house today, no charge. And the candy man said, wow, thanks. And so when the barber came back to work the next day, there was a thank you note and a box with twelve beautifully crafted handmade chocolates for him. And he thought, wow, that was really nice of him. Well, that day the local florist came in and he gave him his haircut. And when he was done, he said, you know what? That one's on the house, no charge. And the next day when he came to work, on the doorstep of his shop, there were a dozen beautiful roses and a nice little thank you note. He thought, man, that was gracious. That day a pastor came in and he gave the pastor the haircut and said, hey, that one's on the house, no charge. And the next day when he came to work, there were a dozen pastors lined up on his doorstep. So in that vein, we will be taking an offering after my presentation, so please be generous. I want to share with you how Ro came to our church. And I want to share with you how that our kind of church, I think is a particularly good fit for Ro. And then just walk through some general observations, I think of what we are in the process of learning, first of all, how Ro came to our church. I am 47, and at about 20 years old, I started playing out kind of these two tracks in my life of interest. One was the interests of spirituality, religion, theology, kind of that track. And then the other track of interest in my life was leadership, leadership management. I was always fascinated because I grew up in a religious environment that I considered leadership rich. We had some very charismatic and interesting type leaders, and it always fascinated me. How do these people get people to follow them? That's just an amazing thing to me, that you can get two people and one person says, follow me, and nobody follows, another person says follow me. And people are like, okay, here we go, and we'll give you our money. And I'm like, wow, this is a crazy thing. How does that work? How does leadership work? And then how do you put a structure together, an organization together to make a whole system work, to deliver whatever you're trying to deliver? So these were the two tracks of my life. And so I end up being a pastor, and so I'm reading the modern literature, at least western literature, on management and leadership, and I really drank the kool aid of the modern, what Elliot Jacks calls the psychological approach to management. It I really drank that koolaid. So I decided when I become a pastor and we have a staff and all this kind of stuff, then I'm going to practice this modern theory of management. We're all going to get in the room and we're all going to treat each other like equals. And, man, it's going to be teamwork and we're going to talk about what do you want to do and what's your vision. And, man, it's going to utopia is going to come in and people are going to love working here. We're going to get so much done. Well, I was trying to manage and lead that way, and I began hitting a cycle even as though our church was growing, I began hitting these cycles where about every three years we would have an implosion in our staff where we would have such crisis and conflict that some folks would leave. And one of the problems in church life is that a lot of your congregation obviously gets very invested in the lives of some of these people that are not working out in your management and staff structure. Man, it was like you emotionally go through hell every time that happens, and after a while you're wondering, why do I do this? Is it even worth it anymore? And as I approached kind of the 40 mark in my life, I was getting intellectually bored and wanted to pursue doctoral level of work and so found a program that specialized in organizational leadership. I went through that and the key question in my mind that I was trying to answer was, why is it that any population of people I look at, I intuitively get this, that they have different levels of leadership capability? Why is that? Is it because one's more educated, one's more trained? What's the defining thing on that? So I go through this nice PhD. Program. Do all the classwork study a lot of these leadership theories? Just barely glanced by stratified systems, I think in one of Jerry Hunt's books, but not enough that I spent much time on it. So I surveyed all these theories and when I was all done getting towards the end of that program, I'm like, I'm thinking, I still don't know. None of these theories are telling me why these are different levels of capability in terms of leadership in the population. My dissertation chair said, you know what? There's a guy over here named Elliot Jax. Few people are aware of him in our circles, but why don't you go read him? And so I went and began to read Elliot Jax. I read Clement and Jax and it was like, whoa. And I thought to myself, no way, no way. Because immediately it also began to square with my theology. And I'm thinking, this can't be true. This can't be true. If this were true, everybody would know it. This is just so powerful. So I had drunk the koolaid of the modern management theory. Now I have joined this cult because it really was a holy grail for me of answering my critical curiosity question about leadership and why there are different levels of capability in the population. So went through that, did my doctoral dissertation within the field. It was interesting. We did a complexity of information processing evaluations on three historic Christian leaders. Jesus, martin Luther King Jr. And Pope John Paul II. Glenn Melter and Herp Kopluitz helped me with those CIP evaluations and then some other correlations and analyses that we did. Fascinating stuff. I'm really intrigued by high level leadership and faith leadership and how that all works with cognitive complexity. But we begin now applying this to our church structures, particularly to our staff structure. And before I continue you know what, Ken, I'm kind of vague on what our time is. Would you flash me when I have about five minutes to go? Okay, thank you. Our kind of church is particularly conducive to Ro. I say that because I've come across a number of pastors and church settings that it's really a stretch to see how it's going to work. But in our situation it really works well because we're the kind of church that is generally described as an outreach oriented evangelical church. And if I were to put it in business model, we think of the church in an entrepreneurial way. And so our view of the church is that our key job comes out of what's called the Great Commission of Jesus in Matthew 28 before he leaves the world and he gets his disciples together, says, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go through all the world and make disciples of as many people as you can. So we feel like our core business model is to attract people into the faith. That is our core mission. We believe. Now, other Christian traditions don't see it quite that way, but that's the way we view it. And so since we have this sense of entrepreneurialism that you cannot force faith, obviously that's a personal decision. You've got to make it on your own. You've got to be attracted to the persuasive ideas. You've got to feel like there's some kind of spiritual awareness that draws you into it. So you cannot force faith. So the best you can do is you can draw people into the church, you can attract people into the community of faith. And so it's a marketing model really, that we're coming from this entrepreneurial sense that we expect to grow and we plan to grow. And one of the things that we discover, I mean, there's a whole world of research and church growth in this area and that is that churches that intentionally decide they're going to grow, you know, what they do, they do. And those that don't is because they have not intentionally decided we're going to grow. And so in the church world, there's a lot of ways you can just distinguish different kinds of churches. But I'm just going to kind of lump two big differences. And one of the differences is the kind we are we call it I would say it's entrepreneurial because we're more like a business model, which means we will take risks and we will seize opportunities in our community and in our culture to reach people that might not otherwise, just on their own, come into the faith. In other words, we're going to reach out to them and try to find ways that what are they concerned about? What are the needs in their life that the faith can help meet those needs and how do we present that in a way that we draw them in to what we're doing? So we consider ourselves that's the mission we are on mission. And then one of the things we will say in our circles and that I communicate to our church frequently is that mission trumps tradition. Meaning? Meaning if there's something in our traditional way is the way we do things, unless it's like some cardinal truth that we would be violating. But if it's just something we do, it because we've always done it that way, that we will bag the tradition in order to move on to the methods that are effective at reaching people in our community. So mission trumps tradition. Now, the other big category of kinds of churches, tradition is their mission. In other words, they see it as our mission is to be the protectors of this subculture over here called whatever brand of Christianity you are. And so it's our mission that our building looks like this. It's our mission that the ministers wear this garb. It's our mission that we do these things. It's our mission that we speak in archaic language that the average person on the street who hasn't been to church in 30 years. They walk and like, what the heck are you talking about? But we're keeping the tradition in this kind of a church. I think it really is difficult in these kinds of churches. The reason why it's more applicable is because as you intend to grow, you do. And as you grow, what happens is the ministry systems, the ministry systems like how are you going to minister to children? How are you going to minister to teenagers? How are you going to put together worship programming and music program? All these departments get big enough that they require at least a level three to manage the complexity of that system. When it gets to that level, then we feel they need to come into a staff structure, not be in the hands of lay leaders. Every now and then you can have a lay leader that can manage at that level, but generally not to get mission alignment and functional structural strategy alignment with where you're going. So we start growing larger staff. So our church for example, we have about 30 staff people that are paid staff in our organization. Our annual income just in terms of, think of, in terms of business model is about three point five to four million dollars. So if you would think of a family business of that size, then that would correlate to how complex our management structure is. So it's a good fit for us. I want to walk you through some of the observations of what we feel like is going on and stimulate you for those of you that are interested in that kind of a world. One of the areas that it helped us immediately was understanding how to do this staff thing. How do you hire, how do you manage? Everybody from level three up in our system knows the four key responsibilities of a manager and we try to practice it. You are responsible. You select the right people, you assign the right work, you evaluate their work. And if they're not and can't do the work they're assigned, we'll either put them somewhere else or we're going to have to deselect them. This may sound weird but some of the things that have caused our church to grow the most is people we've deselected off our staff. And some people are like, well how do you get away with that? I mean what would Jesus do? And my answer is Jesus would fire him. Because not only does the mission trump tradition, but the mission is bigger than any single person. And that single person needs to be where God's designed them to be. And obviously God has not designed them to be there. So we're helping them. And you know what's interesting to me is everybody we have deselected, we've watched their lives and they have moved to more fulfilling and productive work in other places. And so I know that in religious circles there's kind of this sense of, yeah, but, you know, we're all this community. We can't fire old Fred, he's been around forever, that kind of stuff. But you know what? The entrepreneurial church says the mission is worth it. And God's working in these people's lives. We're helping them get onto what God's really designed them to do. So it's helped us with staff. And you know what? I really like the phrase that Mr. Trainer was talking about. He says it's sane building. And I would say it this way. It's brought peace to our staff. It's brought peace. And you may think, well, didn't you already have peace? I mean, you're a church, for goodness sakes. Did you not already have peace? No, we did not. And you may think, yeah, but you're a religious organization. Heaven just kind of comes down and it's all cool. It is amazing the degree of conflict in religious groups that are people of good faith and they're mature and they're emotionally sound. I mean, they're good people. But there's something about the faith work and dynamic that if you're not structured right, you're setting yourself up for civil war. And we had had that several times. And so one of the great benefits is it feels we got five is it feels like we've got a greater degree of peace. One of our key guys on staff, who's my second in command is. We call him our executive pastor. He's here. His name is Stephen Lipperado. Steve, would you stand? I just want people to know who you are in case people want to confer with you. That's Steve Liparado. So we're trying to be a five level organization where I try to function at five, steve functions at four, and then we have our key department heads trying to function at three. And that tells us it tells us kind of like volleyball or baseball. Here's your position, play your position. And you know what? In a church, it just seems like it's a free for all if you don't make that clear. Play your position. And it brings a sanity. It brings peace, it brings functional alignment. The pay systems in the church can be crazy depending on what denomination people make crazy money or no money. And this brings us to a place where, say, you know what? If you did the same kind of work in the school system, you're going to be making about the same thing. If you did this kind of work over here in business, you'd be making close to the same, because you know what work is? Work. The size of the rock is the size of the rock, and you got to be paid for the size of the rock you're pushing, and it all makes sense. So another key area that's really been helpful to us is with our board, our board of directors. When I came to our church, our board was primarily guys that were twos and threes. And if you have a nonprofit board that are twos and threes, every time you get in a meeting, they're going to drag you down to operational work, management work at best. And so when I first came to the church, I would get in with these board of guys and I had these dreams of it's going to be great. It was horrible. And they would want to drag down to these nitpicky little operational things. They would pull out the monthly budget and go by every expense, line by line, in our board meetings. And I just said, Lord, I'm going to slip my wrist if I have to keep doing this. What has helped us do is to train potential board members, and we try to screen board members so that we have fours and up, which means they can communicate about strategy. So now what my board is to me is a think tank, a strategic think tank, and it really makes it the kind of environment you want to be in, to be thinking about what are we trying to get accomplished, what's our strategy like, how's our culture going, those kinds of kinds of deals. I'm going to wrap. It sounds like we're getting close, but I just want to conclude with this. Those of you who feel any sense of a draw into helping maximize the spiritual world, the world of faith or spiritual leadership, I really want to encourage you in it because I think that good, intelligent, well integrated, good faith, faith communities are very vital to a lot of people's lives. They're very vital to our communities. I think it's very vital at the higher level of what's happening in world events. And just want to conclude with a couple of examples of that. Slavery was ended in Great Britain in the late 17 hundreds, and the primary force was a group of guys who were men of faith, and one of them was named William Wilberforce Parliamentarian. He and a group of men who called themselves the Clapham Sect were very upset over the degeneration of the culture of Great Britain with the Industrial Revolution, child labor, inhumane prison systems, alcoholism, a whole lot of things. One of the things that really upset him was the inhumanity of slavery in the British Empire. They were people of conscience and faith that helped bring an end to that practice in the British Empire. When it came to an end in the United States, of course, during the Civil War days, you know, the primary influence that changed public opinion in North America were people of Christian tradition and primarily the Quakers. It was the daughter of a Quaker minister who wrote the single most important book that changed public opinion about slavery in America. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her book was called Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was a person of faith saying, I'm trying to apply to the bigger questions of life, these core transcendent concepts of faith that really change the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. Was a Baptist minister, and he delivered the first and most important civil rights speech of his life on December 5, 1955, several days after Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on the bus. And the question at hand on a Sunday night meeting filled with folks from Montgomery, Alabama, the question was, should we continue this bus boycott? And he stood up, and instead of talking about Montgomery, instead of talking about buses, instead of talking about the bad things that happened, he delivered an eight minute speech that took him 20 minutes to write. And he spoke about our ideals of democracy. He talked about our ideals of Christian equality. He talked about our ideals of humanity. And in doing that, he laid the whole philosophical groundwork for the civil rights movement. Pope John Paul II is one of three of the top leaders that brought down communism in Europe, and he fought it all his life in Poland as the Bishop of Krakow. And it was his thought leadership, as a spiritual thought leader that influenced so many of the people of Europe. You have probably heard of a popular American pastor of the kind of church I'm talking about, the entrepreneurial church. His name is Rick Warren, one of the top books selling right now in North America's, purpose Driven Life. I believe that Rick is functioning at seven. Somebody here needs to get in his church and help organize his church, because the next closest staff he's got are four in his church. He's outstripping them, and the people that work there are dying in his church. But he's an incredible thought leader. And where he is right now is he's trying to mobilize our tradition of churches to address and solve the global age problem, the global hunger problem, and to reduce war. And you know what I mean? You talk about worthy causes. You talk about worthy causes. And I know there's a lot of good groups that are doing it, but I do feel like the faith tradition is really a good one to invest in. So I commend you to it.