What do you do if your church is dead…stuck…stagnant, and simply not growing? And…once it starts growing, how do you get ready to scale the growth barriers most leaders never figure out how to scale?
Jeremy MacDonald interviews Carey Nieuwhof about the backstory of two decades plus in church leadership, from starting with three small dying mainline churches to the over 1500 people who attend today. Carey talks about how to jumpstart the mission of a dead church, how to recruit leaders, how to get people to stop expecting the pastor to do everything, and how to empower a team to lead the church past 1000 attenders.
Welcome to Episode 266 of the podcast. Listen and access the show notes below or search for the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and listen for free.
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3 Insights from Carey
1. If you want to break through growth barriers, you have to be able to let go
Most organization are currently hitting growth barriers. 94% of churches aren’t growing, 80% of Churches are 200 or smaller, and 96% of all for-profit businesses never break the million dollar sales mark. Often times, the cause of this is because the visionary leader can’t let go. If the visionary can’t delegate, you will hit growth barriers and get stuck.
Carey has had to learn to let go of different decisions to the leaders under him. This is a really hard thing for most visionary leaders to do. But, if you want your organization to grow past those growth barriers, you have to be willing to let go and delegate. People will not be able to do things as well as you can right away, but if you continue to invest, you will find that there are people who can do those things even better than you can.
2. If you want a healthy organization with healthy leaders, cultivate a healthy culture
If you don’t engage the toxic people in your organization, they will eventually leave. The same thing happens with trolls and haters online. If you ignore their toxic comments, they will eventually leave. By focusing on the helpful, positive people you are working to build a healthy community and culture within your organization. A healthy system will squeeze out toxic people. A toxic system will squeeze out healthy people.
One helpful way to know if someone is toxic or not is to look at their track record. Usually, if they are toxic at your church or organization, they have been toxic to 5 others also. Carey always filtered opposition through 2 questions:
1. Is there a biblical argument for what they are saying?
2. Is this the kind of person we can build the future of the church on?
If the opposition didn’t pass through these filters, it wasn’t worth listening to.
3. When it comes to next-gen ministries, to get great results you must make a great investment
Next-gen ministry is one of the most critical ministries in a church. When you need hundreds of volunteers to serve well, you need someone who can lead that many volunteers well. That’s a very high level of skill and leadership. You need to fund that leader and program really well if you want to see good results.
Another key to building a great student ministry is creating and executing a shared strategy with the leader of those ministries. To keep a shared strategy healthy, someone in Next-Gen ministries should be a direct report to the senior leader. When you keep that relationship strong and continue to invest in them, you will continue to see positive results.
Quotes from Episode 266
Read or Download the Transcript for Episode 266
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Read or download a free PDF transcript of this episode here.
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Next Episode: Margaret Feinberg
When she was in eigth grade, Margaret Feinberg’s teachers asked the class to write a story. While most students turned in four pages, Margaret turned in a 127 page book. Today, Margaret has sold over a million books and in this episode, we unpack how not being one of the cool kids shaped Margaret for the future, dissect the daily disciplines she uses to create content, why she spends 95% of her time as a writer marketing, and why never mixing business and pleasure has been so energizing for her.
Subscribe for free now and you won’t miss Episode 267.
