First Thoughts

We will never speak critically about someone without a plan to help them Gossip consists of critical comments made about another person without a plan to help them. At First Baptist, our ministry staff is not allowed to talk this way. I hope this is true for your ministry team as well. To help you understand why, I want to tell you ten true statements about gossip. 1. Gossip Is Very Damaging When I first came to First Baptist, there was a terrible problem with gossip. It seemed that everyone …

When We Discover a Problem, We Will Neither Deny It Nor Complain About It But Seek to Resolve It All Ministries Experience Trouble The Apostle Paul wrote the book of Philippians while locked up in prison. He was being unjustly held for a crime he never committed, and you would think—even expect—that such treatment made him bitter. It didn’t. In fact, he wrote to us from prison and gave one of the most amazing instructions ever handed down by a convict, “Do all things without grumbling or disp…

We Must Address Sin When We See It, Confess Sin When We Commit It, and Forgive Sin When Victims of It. The Greatest Threat to Your Ministry Staff In the first blog in this series, I shared about the many staff problems I had to begin addressing when I became senior pastor at First Baptist. When I began to deal with those problems, things turned ugly very quickly. Long-term staff members began to plot with others about how to damage our church. People I have known for years began to slander me…

As We Pursue Excellence Together No Person May Ignore or Reject Correction but Must Respond Positively to It Correction is Hard Anyone close to me can tell you how much I really dislike correcting people. It is one of the hardest parts of my job. But, because I am committed to regular, truthful, and loving communication, I am committed to providing correction when it is necessary. Years ago, a member of my team did something I specifically requested he not do. I hated to have a corrective con…

Because Silence Creates Trouble We Will Communicate to Stay Ahead of Problems and to Resolve Problems Staff Problems Are Communication Problems Almost every problem you can imagine in any relationship you have traces back to some communication failure. Years ago at First Baptist, several of us in leadership trusted a staff person to work on an important set of problems with a few key people on our ministry staff. As the months passed, however, the problems were increasing, and the relational …

The People You Work with Are More Important Than the Tasks You Are Accomplishing A Problem of Priorities One of my first meetings during my first week as Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church was with a leader on our staff who had received dozens of complaints from the people who reported to him. The complaints painted an ugly picture: He was angry, loud, accusing, forceful, and generally created a hostile work environment. Several women who reported to him were afraid to come to work. This e…

A Broken Church and A Broken Team When I became Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville the church was facing overwhelming challenges. Decades of decline in membership created a number of punishing financial realities, the most obvious being $90 million in financial liabilities the church had no idea how to pay. But the most challenging difficulties we faced were related to our staff. Many problems existed. For starters, the staff was far too large. Back then, we had a paid staf…

These appear to be the darkest of times. It is no secret that we have a mental health crisis. Week after week, we are confronted with the stories of devastation. The headlines sometimes don’t hit home, but they don’t have to. We know personal stories. We know our friends who are despairing of life itself. We see families pierced with the pains of anxiety, eating disorders, attempted suicides, and unstable emotions. Real people made in God’s image who are harming themselves and harming others….

“Prince William is having an affair!” “Another woman is pregnant with his baby!” “Princess Kate can’t be seen in public because William hit her!” “She is filing for divorce, and another royal marriage is ending!” Those were a few of the reports making the rounds in the last few weeks as the world was ripe with speculation about the reason why the Princess of Wales had not been seen in public for months. Those reports were widespread and viewed by millions of people all over the globe. Of cour…

Part 4: We Must Have Solutions That Understand the Way Our Convention Works No Right to Fatigue During the release of the most recent update from the Abuse Reform and Implementation Task Force (ARITF), the chairman, Josh Wester, observed a sense of fatigue setting into the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in our response to sexual abuse. He warned against an attitude that desires to move along too quickly. I appreciate Pastor Wester’s service, the hard work of his committee, and his words of…