Keeping staff & volunteers on mission

Lee Stephenson: Well, welcome everyone to our Unfiltered podcast. Lee Stephenson here, church planter and executive director of Church Planting.

Danny Parmelee: Danny Parmelee. I oversee church planting for Converge MidAmerica.

Lee Stephenson: And I, I’m excited about the conversation we’re going to have today, Danny, because I think this is such a critical thing, no matter what stage of life you are as a church plant. How do you actually keep your key volunteers? And how do you keep your staff? If you have a staff, whether or not they’re volunteer staff, or they’re paid staff. How do you actually keep them focused on mission versus just doing the tasks or what’s required of them? I don’t know about you. But I see it over and over and over. And I feel like it’s just, it’s repetitive. As a lead pastor of just watching your key volunteers, even your most trusted staff, sometimes get off focus on mission and they’re going this direction. You’re going, No, you’re if you do that, you’re going to create sideways energy. I think this is such a critical aspect for developing momentum and growth and really maximizing impact in your community. So share maybe a couple pain points, and what have you learned over the years of leading, either personally, or even watching what other people have done when it comes to keeping those key people on mission?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, well, I do think that we’ve talked about this before, but just the dangers of comparison right now are there they’re real. So they’re the same for your leaders and your staff as they’re going and seeing what the other children’s ministry is doing, or what the other, you know, church is doing with their missions conference, or whatever. It’s like, oh, man, we have to start doing this. And we have to do this. And we have to do this. And so I think just even helping your people, as much as you’re helping yourself as the church planter, to not play the comparison game to the same thing with your staff and to say, you know, here are the things that we’re set out to do. The other thing that I know that you talk about a lot is just how culture actually drives everything. Because in a moment, yeah, we’ll talk about goals and that type of thing, but the culture is what drives so much or the values. And so I think that it is worth finding ways that you’re continuing to reinforce the values over and over and over and over again. So if your ultimate mission is to reach the lost, then you’ve got to find ways to celebrate when the lost are being reached, and you’re constantly saying yes to activities, you’re highlighting when that’s happening. And then maybe when people are getting off course, that you’re saying, hey, that’s not part of our culture, that’s not part of our values. That’s not part of kind of our goals. So I mean, you’re in it right now. So I’d love to hear, I mean, you’re a church planter. So you’re right in the thick of it. And maybe even if you speak to how you begin to identify when you’re starting to sense drift, what are some of those indicators that leaders and stuff are starting to drift?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah. You know, we’re, I mean, we’re in the thick of it right now. And we’ve got a staff team and some key volunteers. And I think you hit one of the key points is you’ve got to constantly trickle the culture, vision, the value system, in the life of your people, and you’ve got to figure out different ways to communicate it, but you never let off that gas pedal. And so every time you’re together, whether or not it’s a quick huddle before the service, if it’s a staff meeting, if it’s a volunteer celebration, any of those type of moments, you just, that is your moment to identify and define the culture and making you want to make sure mission is the driver of your culture. And so you continue to combat either complacency as a result of just that constant, you know, trickling it in. For me, I think one of the things I personally look for, and honestly, I’ll self-identify, it is more intuitive for me. So I have to pay attention, try figure out why do I do the things I do when it comes to this? But one of them is when I notice people get more task focused than relational and ministry focused, that’s they probably have lost sight of the mission. And Jesus’ mission is people, right, period. And we’ve got to figure out. Yes, the tasks are important to our day-to-day ministry and us doing what we do because if certain tasks weren’t done, then we wouldn’t have ministry, but the task should never trump ministry, and when it comes to how we relate to people and connect with people’s hearts, and so if I see volunteers, if I see key staff go too heavy on the task side, that I know I need to reapproach the mission and remind them in a unique way of, hey, this is what really matters, this helps us get there. But I want you more focused here than here. And I think it’s that gentle rebuke that builds trust versus coming in heavy handed and just slugging them constantly. Because that’s going to get, that’s going to derail everybody, when it comes to how they stay engaged with the mission. I think second of all, you’ve got to show it in your own life. So you’ve got to reflect it, that this is something you believe in, and you’re living it, and they need to be able to see it that this is it’s evident in the way that you live life and you approach people and you approach ministry as a whole. And then you find ways to celebrate it. So celebrate life change, celebrate all of those key moments that are a result of the mission being carried out. And the celebration itself just empowers people at a totally different way than you could ever do on your own.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, I think the modeling it, you know, figuring out ways that you even can work that in both on a small scale and a large scale. So you know, again, for us, you know, we had the value of spending time with nonbelievers. So I was a part of a hockey team. And it wasn’t a church hockey team. I don’t even know if there is a church hockey league, there’s church softball leagues, but I just don’t think that church hockey leagues actually exist, which is great, because I wouldn’t join one. But anyway, so even in my sermon illustrations, I would talk about things that were happening on the hockey team. So I didn’t have to say, our mission and our value is spend time with nonbelievers. I literally just had to mention those types of things. So like you said, it’s that vision trickle, that you’re, you know, able to say that are talking about when you’re at some sort of outdoor festival, and yes, they’re serving beer, they’re, you know, type of, you know, I went to this concert, you know, just see what was going on in the community. And I ran into this person, and it was great to see Jeff there. And you know, so they know another elder was there, whatever, and you’re communicating, the modeling of it, I think is just a really is a really huge thing. Do you do individual goals with staff and leaders? Or do you guys have kind of like team goals? Does that help? Doesn’t it? What role does that kind of play?

Lee Stephenson: I would say both and. So we work together and do kind of the God Dreams StratOp type of process on a regular basis. So every 90 days, we’re kind of setting some corporate goals. And out of those, and we work together holistically as a team to identify and define this is what matters the most. So we fight against silos happening by doing that. But then out of that, we will assign individual goals go into, hey, this is necessary for you to accomplish in the next 90 days for this to become a reality. And so there’s the personal responsibility, along with the team responsibility to make sure that we go where we need to go.

Danny Parmelee: And not to sidetracked but 90 day goals in comparison to five-year plan, church planters love to put, hey, this is where I’m going to be in three years and five years, that’ll keep everybody kind of focused going in one direction. You just said 90 days, why 90 days? And do you have is there one maybe that you can share kind of as an example, even if it’s a pre-COVID, one, you know, type of thing like, Hey, this is what we had kind of planned or maybe we just need to get here.

Lee Stephenson: A great, great, great example. So we set four goals. We set an overarching what we kind of call the beyond the horizon vision for our church that this is what we want to attain to be. And so like the way we define it for our church right now is we want to be all about leadership development that will eventually lead to geographical saturation. So that’s in five years, we want to see that actually be how we operate and who we’re kind of known for. Then out of that we build a three-year goal of kind of where do we need to be in three years to know that we’re still moving that direction, and then we build a one-year goal. And then out of the one-year goal, we build 90-day goals. Knowing that every 90 days we reprocess, OK, we accomplish this. Now we need to focus on this all year towards how do we actually see the one-year goal become reality. So for instance, when we hit January 1, we were wrapping up the previous 90 days. And we were getting ready to identify the next 90 days. And so as we sat down, we began to pray and talk about it. The next 90 days, we came up with four things that and that’s our goal is we try to just identify four things. You get beyond four it gets, the reality of you actually be able to accomplish is very slim. So we went, OK, here’s the four things, and two of those big four goals for 90 days were for us to get our online presence to a different level. Well, that was identified and we started on that February 1, and March hit, and we went, OK, we don’t have 90 days, we now have two weeks to finalize this. And we look at that and just say that was a god moment. For us of saying, we said we needed a different social media presence, we identified that we needed a new website, designed by the end of the year, we needed better camera angles, and camera work and more tech, in order to increase our visibility. And then we needed a way to capture online testimonies that were meaningful and distribute those on a regular basis. So those were kind of our four main things. And I mean, it was God was obviously in that in preparing us for the COVID season. So when COVID hit, we were already there, and able to move and so then we sat down in May and identified, OK, it looks like COVID things can be a whole lot longer than we expected, we’ve got to totally shift. And so even we throw our one-year goal out the window, and said, OK, next 90 days, what’s really going to matter the most for our mission in this season and reidentified those.

Danny Parmelee: That’s great. And I think, too, that the younger you are as a church plant, those, the timeframes have to be shorter. I mean, to make a three-year plan when you’re one years old, I mean, I remember I did that, because that’s what I read in a leadership book, like, hey, make sure your organization is working backwards from, you know, five years or three years. And you can’t make actual steps and strategies backwards from that when you’re just starting out. You don’t even own a facility, you don’t know how many people you’re going to have, you don’t know what your budget’s going to be. It’s just not as predictable. So you can set some vision stuff, but as far as working a strategic plan, in those beginning days, it’s, Yeah, well, you know, what’s 30, 60, 90? You know, take those baby steps till you have a little bit more stability to plan.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, and I think even on the individual side, I don’t even know which book I read it in. But years ago, I was reading about a leader who set up, they call it a six-by-six system, what are the six things that you need to accomplish over the next six weeks. And I just think that’s a good healthy perspective for any leader even for their own individual development and make sure that I stay on mission with what’s most important. I don’t want to approach my day, I don’t want to approach my week just winging it. It’s like, if I really believe that God has called me to be a steward of this and steward of my time that I need to give it some level of attention to it. And so I try to work that way, even from an individual standpoint, and then and teach that to my team to think that way.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, I think it made me think of, yeah, modeling it for your team to not get distracted. I think that some church planters or pastors can have kind of the conference syndrome, they go to the conference and pick up, you know, the next new idea and come back all excited. And yeah, and then they wonder why, you know, their staff are doing the same thing. So I love conferences, and I think it’s a wonderful place to get ideas. But any idea that you get at a conference, just sit on it for a little while. Once you get back instead of like, buying some new system with a bunch of binders and handing it out and now changing. We’re now going to become this type of church, right?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, yeah. And then again, yeah, I agree. Like as a visionary leader, you’ve got to be careful with that because a visionary leader can reinvent the vision every 90 days. We just said this was what matters. Yeah, I know, but now we’re here. You gotta be careful because you wear your people out, you wear your leaders and your team out doing that. Well, great, fun conversation just about mission and how do we stay on mission with our key volunteers or staff. Thanks for tuning in everyone. This has been the Unfiltered podcast. Till next time, keep it real.