It has been over 3 months since my last blog post. Most of my online life is spent in micro conversations through Twitter & Facebook and so I seldom have the need to blog. But occasionally there is something I want to say or do that cannot be limited to the 140 characters Twitter provides or the limited reach of my friends on Facebook. For that I turn to my blog. So here I am.

I am writing this to pastors who are perhaps a little like me. In case you are new let me tell you a little bit about me. I am a pastor who is keenly aware of his inabilities to do anything great on my own. I once had those allusions but I have been humbled beyond compare. I’m just a man trying to do his best to serve his magnificent creator. I currently pastor a small community of under 50 amazing people who love God and are learning what that means in everyday life. We are a young church experienced more in how not to be the church than how to, so we fumble along as best we can. It’s truly a wonderful journey.

I am also a techie who is always looking for new ways to leverage technology for the greater good and the advancement of the kingdom of God. I’ve had my share of successes and failures at it though, I must admit. I have always wanted to be a part of a community of pastors that work together to solve problems, prepare messages, and just encourage one another. Perhaps like me you have found that to be a difficult task what with having to work another job and perhaps some not so inviting ministers in your area. I don’t know your situation but I assume that it’s the same where you are.

What if all of us could join together in real-time for all of those things regardless of what community we live in, denominational background or size of our respective churches?  What if we could put that all aside without the conferences and organizations to just take this trip together? I think we can and I think Google Wave could offer us that solution. Here is what I propose…

If you would like a Google Wave invite to participate in this group or if you already have one, simply click the “contact me” tab at the top of this site and and send me a message. Include your Google Wave username if you have one. I’ll create a Wave and add you all to it and we can discuss how we may proceed. Here is one way I think we might be able to use it. Comment below if you have more ideas.

Message Collaboration

This obviously works best with several active people but for examples sake lets says we have 5 pastors working together. This would be the flow as I see it.

• Each pastor would create a wave with their thoughts on a message they would like to do. This could be a topic, concept, Scriptures, or any other information they have gathered.
• Each pastor would then add the other pastors in the group to their wave.
• Everyone would collaborate and add their insights, questions, and creative elements to each others waves thus exponentially increasing our what each of us would be able to do on our own.
• The creator of the wave could then use what they like and discard the rest or save it for future study.

The benefits are many but the big ones from our example above are that we would have 5 preachers experience, resources, and creativity working on each of our messages and each would walk away with 5 possible messages for the future. Not to mention all of the great side ideas that would be birthed from this kind of collaboration.

What are your thoughts? Are you in? Send me a message or comment below on your thoughts.

The past 2 months have been an interesting break for me. I took a break from blogging. I took 6 weeks off from speaking at LifePoint. I spent no time planning anything. I just rested. It was good but it also drove me crazy. Mostly becuase if I’m not in a project I feel aimless.

Something good did come out of the rest though. I realzed that I need to make myself available to do what I’m good at. I also need to focus on what’s important. So I am not in the process to figure out how I can do both without buring myself out.

With that being said, I will be spending more time leading and teaching while at the same time doing more freelance web design, SEO and Social Media consulting. Nothing says new focus like a new website design. Take a look around and let me know what you think. It’s still a work in progress but I felt like it was time to push it out of the nest. Perhaps I will dive a guided tour in a future post.

If you have some projects that you need some help with feel free to contact me and let’s see what we can create together. Also, keep an eye out for a portfolio page that should be coming soon.

Peace out.

Give the gift of humanity

Give the gift of humanity

This is a great guide of over 200 different religions. The author lays out each one in a fairly similar fashion describing what they are and what they believe. Included is a historical timeline of key events of each religion giving the reader a snapshot of how the religion was formed and various events that have impacted where they are today. A Q&A section in most of the religion is included to help the reader reason through the content if they should need it. The book is admittedly evangelical and so with each religion it offers a section to the Christian either dispelling some folklore or pointing out areas of concern.

I really enjoyed the book and like have it available as a quick point of reference. Obviously not the book you curl up by the fire with but when you need some information on a religion quickly this is a great resource. I was also impressed that although the book is written from a Christian perspective it didn’t take an immediately condemning role. It makes the differences very clearly known but does so very gracefully.

Or, I love it when a plan comes together…

Welcome to my leadership improvement journey. I you missed the first two posts you may want to check them out by using the links at the bottom of this post. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you.

This is where this process gets tough. Not only do I have to deal with the realities of my shortcomings but I also have to create some action plans to improve those areas. Now mind you, one way of improving an area is to join forces with someone who has my weakness as their strength. This gives me more time to focus on my strengths. Whether or not I do a good job of that is perhaps the topic of another evaluation.

Today we are going to look at the first grouping of questions which are on the topic of strategy. All the questions in this evaluation followed the same form. Two extremes on a scale of 1 to 5. Here were the three questions that I asked and how I scored.

Thinks short-term or long-term?: 3.82

Lacks vision or has a vision for his organization?: 4.27

Spends his time fighting fires and resolving crises or spends time setting the direction for his organization?: 3.82

My overall strategy score was a 3.97

Now what I found with this survey as I began to analyze the results is that a lower or mid-range score does not necessarily speak poorly of your leadership. A lot of the answers should change depending on the size of the organization you are leading and smaller organizations with a fewer key leaders require leaders to run the middle on many of the areas that I evaluated. With that in mind, let me share with you how I read my results as if I were to write up a review based on these results.

You are a man with a vision. You know where you are going and why it’s important. You are looking to the future but are still engaged in the day to day details and conflicts. At times your focus is directed at the immediate while the future gets closer and closer. The problem here is that the immediate is always with you. Unless you more regularly focus your attention on where you are going you will constantly be entangled with where you are.

My Advice: As the organization grows you need to allow others to focus on the details in a much greater capacity. Find detail oriented leaders and release them not only with the responsibility but the authority to carry out the vision. Free yourself up to dream regularly and talk about those dreams regularly.

One last thing. Included in this evaluation I asked each person to list 5 words they felt best described me. At the end of each post I will share on persons list of 5 words with you. I will also write a wrap up post with all of the words and talk about those that find a common theme among all my reviewers. Here is today list.

5 Words That Best Describe James

1. Confident
2. Outgoing
3. Loud
4. Honest
5. Vision

Well, that’s how I read it. What are your conclusions and more importantly, what advice do you have for me to improve in this area?

Almost two weeks ago I sent out a request to 17 people to evaluate me in 10 different areas. Since then 11 responses have come in and I don’t expect to see any more show up. Therefore it is now time for me to go through this evaluation in great detail to see what I can learn about myself and more importantly, improve about myself. There will probably be a lot of posts as I work through this publicly on this blog. My goal is to be transparent. When it hurts, I’ll say it hurts.

To begin I want to share my own distractions even in this evaluation. Evaluations like these can bring a lot of emotion to the surface both for the evaluated and the evaluators. With this in mind I want to offer how an evaluation like this ought to be processed. No expert has told me this, it just seems like wisdom. You can comment if I am wrong.

Don’t get caught up in the details

Below is a grid that shows how each individual scored me on each question for each category. Each color represents a number and in most cases the higher the number the better. This is all subjective though.

1 = Red

2 = Orange

3 = Yellow

4 = Light Green

5 = Dark Green

Now here is my tendency. I want to focus on the red and the orange. It doesn’t matter how much green there is in the above grid. Red and orange mean someone is not completely please with my performance and therefor I start asking questions. Before long I start going through each persons answers trying to figure out who or why.  Perhaps  you are more secure than I am. If so, great. My gut tells me that many more of you are just like me. Don’t sweat the details. This is not meant to be read line by line.

Why? Because as I stated earlier this can be an emotional experiment. Not only will my conclusions about people’s individual responses be wrong, the people may actually be wrong themselves.  One lone red in a column of green may simply be a persons emotional response to a decision I made or their misunderstanding of a particular situation they think they witnessed. One lone green in a column otherwise marked in the colors of the sun might just be someone who has never seen you in the appropriate environments and is offering a graceful response.

This evaluation is a broad stroke not a scalpel.

Get the big picture

Here is what I am looking at. Once I drill away the extremes by averaging everyone’s answers I get a clearer picture of how I am perceived on the whole. This help me. I immediately see areas that I may be in weak in while seeing others that I seem pretty solid in.

At first glance here are some of my thoughts. I would have liked to see some more dark green. Light green is still awesome and I am ecstatic that there is so much of it. However, in most cases dark green would be ideal. Obviously delegation seems to be a source of weakness but am very happy that integrity is the strongest.  Over the next few weeks I will write a post on each category and share the questions I asked. I hope we can have a discussion on how anyone, including myself could improve in these areas. This blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic but I hope those of you who do visit will participate and perhaps bring others into the discussion.

Until next time when we discuss STRATEGY.

I would hope that everybody would like to be a better person. Not for approval or acceptance but for the simple goal of being better for the people around you. I want to be a better person. A better husband, friend and yes, leader. But how can anyone do that.

The problem is I can’t be honest with myself. I am always either harder or easier on myself than I ought to be. The data is corrupt. Another problem with self-evaluation is that I may answer questions based on my intentions and not on my observed actions. This is also corrupt data. I could just ask people who know me but unless they are extremely confident they will never be as brutally honest with me as I would need. Not to mention that it might be hard to receive face to face. I am human after all.

So what are the options when you know you can’t trust yourself to be honest or don’t believe you could handle a face to face critique of your very being. Well there are paid services that you can use to send evaluations to your people and then have that data given to you. I just filled one of these out for my boss a few weeks ago. I don’t have the money to spend but I do have my own free metods.

Using Google Docs I created a form with all of the questions that I wanted to be evaluated one and and sent the form to people who knew or have observed me well enough to answer it. I sent this out yesterday and some replies have already started to come in. Apparently some people are very eager to evaluate me. I appreciate that.

Over the next…however long,  I will be blogging full-disclosure of this process and my findings. This is very difficult for me because, like anyone else, I want to be liked. I have to be very careful not to read into the results. I will be writing about that as well. With all that said, I want to be a better husband, son,  brother, friend, leader, servant more than I want to be liked. I realize that those don’t always go hand in hand.

How do I get there from here? It’s a simple enough question with an answer that doesn’t come easy to us when we are on the journey. We have goals, dreams and aspirations but our actions say that we believe what we do today doesn’t affect where we end up tomorrow.

In the Principle of the Path, Andy Stanley tackles this great disconnect between our intentions and our direction by pointing out that only one actually determines our destination. He warns that every path has a destination of it’s own regardless of where you wanted to end up so choose wisely.

Andy Stanley does an excellent job in this book of laying some of the foundational principles of wisdom. Although it feels like it’s a second stab at one of his earlier books, The Best Question Ever, I’m glad he took the time to approach the topic from a different angle. I highly recommend this book to…anyone. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you are in. This book opens up the seemingly obvious to the un-admittedly oblivious.  Of which I am chief on more occasions than I care to share.

This Principle of the Path is an easy read about a simple reality that governs our complex lives.