First Thoughts

Because God Raises Up Authority, Leaders Must Lead with Selflessness, and Followers Must Submit with Joy We live in a day of massive exposure to harsh and corrupt leaders. We usually don’t make it more than a few weeks before hearing another painful story of cruel and abusive leadership that left wounds and destruction in its wake. This environment makes leadership hard for everyone. Leadership is hard for wounded and suspicious sheep who wonder who they can trust. It is always hard for faithfu…

The Presence of a Preference Is Not an Argument to Pursue It When any team member departs a church staff, it is always painful, but years ago, we experienced a departure that nearly split the church. The trauma was not because the person who left was highly effective, profoundly influential, or was more loved than anyone else. In fact, he was strongly divisive and deeply controversial. The reality that nearly killed the church was the sinful way this man behaved in the lead-up to and in the aft…

Because We Want People to Be Patient with Our Weaknesses, We Must Be Patient with Theirs I hate to brag, but I imagine I have broken the world record of senior pastors who’ve had the most brain surgeries. I’ve had six since coming to First Baptist. No one has ever said they’ve had more. My surgeries have been to correct blood vessels applying pressure to nerves in my brain, which create pain and spasms throughout my body. The surgeries have not come about because of anything that is my fault bu…

We Will Always Assume the Best of Another’s Actions, Words, and Motivations Until Evidence forces Another Conclusion A Staff Mess Conversations can be complicated on ministry staffs. Years ago, a staff member at First Baptist asked for my plan about his boss’s future. That would have been an inelegant question at any point, but in this case, it was positively awkward. Recently, our leadership team had decided his boss was a great man who was poorly placed. Everyone wanted to keep him on the tea…

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 ta…

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 disput…

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 t…

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 conve…

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 te…

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 env…