Category Archives: Strategy

The World's Scariest Fish Bowl

The World’s Scariest Fish Bowl

by on in Leadership, Strategy.

Student Ministry meet together to make sure everyone is still pulling in the same directions. And every once in a while, the world’s scariest fish bowl comes out during those meetings.

WHAT IS THIS SCARY FISH BOWL?

It’s what happens when someone asks you a tricky question… and you know they’re waiting for your response. In this bowl are a list of the hard questions you get asked by Small Group Leaders or parents. They are the questions that have no hard or fast answers. Things like…

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When I Won’t Strive for Excellence

by on in Strategy.

I cringe when I hear the word “excellence” thrown around in the church leadership conversation.
It seems everybody loves it. But, while I think it is a great concept and something to be concerned about… it can be dangerous.

Here’s my problem. In my years as an educator and working in churches, I have seen the word “excellence” used to validate and rationalize some of the most expensive and worst decisions I have ever seen.

I see this in church programming all the time.

I felt the pressure of this recently at North Point.

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How Small Groups Create Momentum

by on in Small Groups, Strategy.

As an old science teacher I couldn’t help myself but to talk about momentum in today’s post.

In the classroom, momentum is the principle that an object that is moving “wants” to keep moving in the same way. The bigger it is, and the faster it is, the more it “wants” to keep moving in that direction.

The other day I was doing a little writing and trying to uncover some of the “unstated” beliefs I have about our small group systems at North Point. It is working pretty well and I wanted to figure out why. (Actually, that would be a good post for another time: because we rarely take time to figure out why things work, we have no idea how to fix them when they stop working.)

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Strategic or Spiritual?

by on in Strategy.

I don’t know where this comes from…

Sometimes it’s a question about the business books on my reading list.

Sometimes, after a discussion about strategy, people ask… “but where does prayer come in?”

Very few people, if any, have ever framed it this way but it seems they want to ask me…

Are you strategic or are you spiritual?

Over the years I have developed an answer to that question.

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8 Simple Steps for Remodeling Your Calendar

by on in Leadership, Strategy.

Have you ever remodeled your kitchen?

Think for a second about when you moved into your current home. Think about what it was like to unpack your kitchen.

That looks like a good place for the silverware… the cleaning stuff should go there… let’s put plates and bowls over here.

But then life in your new kitchen started. You loaded and unloaded the dishwasher a few times, you got up early for the morning routine of packing lunches and getting the kids off to school, you cleaned up a few times at the end of the day, and then you realized…

There was probably a better way to organize this.

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