Building trust, setting goals

I would stress that a key component in leadership is trust. If you don’t have the trust of your fellow leaders and of the people you lead then you’ll know about it because every time you initiate something, you will recognise there’s an underlying issue with resistance and lack of trust. To gain trust also involves giving people confidence in your leadership and the decisions that you make, so I present our vision goals to them in faith. ‘We’re going to see 10 people saved this year’ - and we saw 3 saved in the following week. I’ve seen too many leaders present faith goals which are against the past trend of their achievement and everyone in the church who hears them says ’yeah, yeah, yeah’ publicly but in their hearts they say ’no, no, no’.

So we set yearly goals and then as we gained some momentum we then began to set 5 year goals to give us a longer framework within which to work. Our set of 5 year goals set in January 2007 included reaching people - to grow from an average of 750 to 1,100 attending at King’s on Sunday and we are currently seeing around 1400 now (2012). Children are included in our attendance figures because their numbers impact us every week. In order to make space for the adults in the auditorium we provide kids’ work for the entire duration of our meetings. With multiple meetings this has an on-going impact on our room space elsewhere in the building – it’s essential to provide facilities for our kids’ work. It would be true to say that currently our huge facility problem is faced predominantly by our children so I count the children in to keep their needs in high profile - that’s been one of our big issues. One of the other areas impacted would be adequate office space for our staff and volunteers.

So we set goals - goals built from trends that we have seen, that are measurable, not just taken out of hope – goals based on past evidence. If your church hasn’t grown for 10 years you need to create some momentum moments to encourage growth. So don’t say, ‘Steve Tibbert says set goals!’ and then set goals that are so far ‘out there’ that in a year’s time you realise that you’re going to have to really move on them because you‘re already 30 behind. You‘re setting yourself up for failure and failure is never an encouraging thing!