A Structure That Reproduces

Coming out of Community Makeover I get several common questions about how to pull together 80 churches, 700 projects, and 7,000 volunteers. The most common question is “How does all that happen?” In other words what is the leadership trick to pulling off a begin event. I’m not sure there is any one trick, and I don’t view myself as having any secret, magical leadership skills beyond anyone else.

Here are a couple of quick thoughts that can replicate any ministry or department, and not just a big event.

1) It’s not about a single personality. A fast growing ministry cannot be dependent on the person at the top. This is not just a Senior Pastor issue (although that happens), it’s about whomever the top leader is in the ministry/department.

The person who is ultimately responsible has got to communicate clear vision and values and give them away. When a church comes to me about participating in Community Makeover (CMO) here’s the first question, Do you have a leader strong enough to recruit and care for other leaders and to put a simple structure in place? The first thing you need is a leader of leaders who’s not afraid to replicate themselves at the risk of sharing glory, credit, etc. They need to know their strengths and have people around them to compensate for their weaknesses. Every leader will learn and share the same values and vision, and be able to speak about them in a way that it is clear they own the vision.

Too many churches/organizations stay small because everything has to run through a certain person. Sometimes we pretend their are checks and balances to prevent this by putting whole committees in place. In reality everyone is waiting for approval of the Head Deacon or whomever. This type of control freak leader stifles the growth of their area and a whole organization. The trap for this kind of leader is the happy knowledge that the organization has not grown past their leadership…and it never will.

2) The structure can’t be complicated. There cannot be layers of structure that create barriers to communication and creativity. If you care for people well you don’t have to use terms like “Chain of Command”. If you take the time to invest just a little bit relationally with people you will create an environment of mutual trust. This type of environment allows people to be creative, and allows the leader to be able to come back and tweak the creativity if needed.

Every volunteer should be able to get answers to their questions no matter who they ask, and every leader must be approachable.

CMO is not complicated. The entire structure of this enormous event can be boiled down into four parts moving together like Bono and the boys to help a church of 50 or 5,000 ‘rattle and hum’ along with excellence. It can be applied to any church environment whose desire is to allow leaders to lead.

When it comes to CMO having the right leader and a simple structure allows churches to own the event themselves. This is crucial. The goal of the makeover is not to connect people in different counties back to our non profit, Engage Atlanta. Engage does not want to plan the Outreach of any given church. The desire of Engage is to create an environment that allows churches to connect to each other and reach out to their own community the way they are being led to. Maybe the churches can even work together in the future. We create a catalyst opportunity for churches to engage their community with the love of Jesus Christ. The church is still in the community after CMO is over, and the church ‘makes disciples’ not the non-profit.

The desire is that getting people involved and recruiting new leaders through this event helps set up ministries to have greater success in reaching their community in the months that follow.

Everyone Belongs,

Paul