Leading in a Time of Crisis 3

Then another question came to me. I asked myself if I had reached capacity. Maybe the real issue was my measure as a leader, rather than anything else. Have you ever asked that question? If this was it, could I cope with that? Will I be at peace in my soul with the measure that I am? And the answer came – ‘I don’t know!’ When you are younger there always seems to be years ahead in which to achieve all you hope for. ‘Bring it on!’ is the attitude! But actually it’s not about me – or you – it’s about grace apportioned. And I thought – well, we shall find out… and we’re still finding out, by the way!

In the middle of all this I found another Leadership Lesson. I was doing a coaching session for leaders of larger churches within Newfrontiers, trying to explain some of the challenges of growth. I drew a triangle on the board with one side representing ‘Team’, the second ‘Buildings’ and the third ‘Finance’. I’d always thought that to grow a church from 200 to 500 you need to have a team in place, you need facilities that can cope and you need to be able to fund both. If one of them is not there – you’re stuck. I realised as I spoke that we are still dealing with this Leadership Lesson at the present time at King’s.

The next Leadership Lesson - you need to teach into what’s going on. So, on the first Sunday in January (our Vision Sunday) and conveniently just after my Boxing Day morning revelation, I stood in front of the church and went through all these things.

I had to help my team adjust expectations on what we were looking to achieve in the year to come. Once I was clear on that I needed to communicate it well at all levels. We called the church to pray – being open with them brought a great response in prayer.

So – that was January to February and then something else happened to me – an instinctive thing. I felt it was time to lead and make some decisions! (See the next blog for those decisions!) I had a phone conversation with Steve Nicholson (who oversees church planting in the Vineyard Movement in the USA and who is an old friend of our church) and said to him, ‘Our numbers are down – do you have any advice?’ to which his response was, ‘If you sent 40 people out a year ago and you are now almost back to where you were numerically – you have done well!’ He also reminded me that the 40 who went will be more committed than the new folk who are just coming into the church to ‘replace’ them. This changed my perspective – a useful piece of information that reduced some pressure!