Leading in a Time of Crisis 4

Well, we recovered. We got back to an underlying growth curve of 5% that August. We’ve been up to 10% and made massive adjustments to our team. We decided to invest in 5 or 6 new staff members. A pastoral care worker, a new church administrator, a new facilities manager, two more part-time admin staff and a full-time social action worker came in. We made the decision on our facilities not to relocate but to extend the crèche rooms. And we decided to launch a third Sunday meeting. Hearing Mark Driscoll at Brighton made me glad we had made that decision before the conference.

As to the financial challenge – in the end we made a £2K loss rather than the £90K predicted and we did that by cuts and by going to the church – we had two Sundays where I did a 10-15 minute exhortation on giving. We had standing order forms available around the auditorium and encouraged people to sign up then and there. This was the first time we had done such an approach and we found that people responded to the situation generously. We realised that we needed to make giving an easy access thing.

On the diversity challenge we taught through David Anderson’s book called Gracism. We invited Robert Kwami – a Ghanaian pastor now in our church – to join the team for a year.

On the apostolic challenge we sent some of our members to join the Greenwich church plant which continues to prosper. And we stretched even further by going for the third meeting – impelled by the desire to see more people saved. We made the decision on that before we knew the full implications of implementing it. I’m glad that I didn’t know that a third meeting would require another 100 volunteers a month to run!

We have also moved into another new area – an advertising campaign in our locality with one large (huge!) billboard next to Catford station and also posters in bus shelters. We will review this in due course.

So, to summarise the Leadership Lessons:

- Remember eternal truths
- A good team knows exactly where it stands
- What is my measure?
- Teach into the situation
- Know when it’s time to reach again