team | Mike Bonem

Planning for the Future: Avoid These 4 Obstacles

Mike Bonem — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 09:52:00 +0000

When I help churches and ministries discern plans for the future, I often say, “The answer is in the room.” What I mean is that the people on the planning team – the ones who are “in the room” – know their church’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. They are highly committed leaders who have hopes and dreams for the ministry. So the “answer” should emerge from their conversations around these topics.

And yet, leadership teams sometimes struggle to develop plans that will truly move a church forward. I still believe that the answer should be in the room, but I also recognize several obstacles that get in the way:

Not listening to the Spirit. God’s presence, which is promised when 2 or 3 are gathered (Matthew 18:20), is essential to discerning the best path forward. But teams must be intentional about listening for the Spirit’s guidance. Ministry planning that is indistinguishable from corporate planning will miss the answer.
Inviting the wrong people. Discernment processes can easily be derailed by a few people. Individuals who are not spiritually mature, too tied to the past, or afraid of change can squelch a team’s dreaming. The best teams have a wide representation of perspectives and gifts. They don’t automatically include the person who has “always” been in leadership unless that person can make a genuine contribution.
Deferring too much to the pastor. A pastor (or the leader of a ministry) has a unique role in discerning future direction for the church. Unique, but not exclusive. Important decisions on how to move forward require the collective wisdom of a leadership team that is prayerfully seeking God’s will. Allowing the pastor to unilaterally set priorities ignores the gifts and insights of others in the room.
Lacking outside perspective. It’s wonderful to have highly engaged people on a discernment team, but they can also be a constraint. They often spend so much time inside the ministry that they’re unaware of the external context. The best teams include people with fresh eyes and engage in learning experiences that expand their understanding of their mission field.

Whether you are planning are for a specific event or for your entire church, today’s ministry context demands boldness, not minor tweaks to the status quo. None of these obstacles will prevent you from planning. But when the work only produces incremental changes, these factors are often to blame.

The four obstacles are not trivial, but the good news is that they are not insurmountable. You can create space in a discernment process to listen to God. You can be intentional about who is on the team and how they learn together. You can resist the temptation to offer an answer when someone asks, “Pastor, what do you think?” And as you do so, you may discover that the answer does emerge from within the room.

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“Eyes Up” Leadership

Mike Bonem — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 07:01:00 +0000

The primary job of a point guard in basketball is to bring the ball up the court, read the defense, and set up a play to give their team the best chance of scoring. One phrase that highlights this vital skill is “eyes up.” Even as they are dribbling and preventing the opposing defender from stealing the ball, the point guard needs to look up, scanning the court to find an opportunity for a pinpoint pass. The tendency is to look down at the ball rather than at the horizon. Great players make this look effortless, but it’s much more difficult than it appears.

Does this sound like your role as a pastor or ministry leader? It takes a great deal of time and effort to keep the ball(s) bouncing – all of the regular tasks and activities that must be done well in your church or ministry. You also need to keep an eye on the opposition – whoever or whatever that threatens to keep your church or ministry from moving toward its mission. But to do your job well, you must keep your eyes up – looking beyond the bouncing balls of routine tasks to see new and exciting opportunities.

This may sound impossible, but so does the job of a basketball point guard. Here are four lessons that bounce directly from basketball to ministry leadership:

Practice. Knowing that a skill is important is not the same as developing the skill. Great point guards have learned through hours of practice to dribble with their eyes up. “Eyes up” leadership might be developed through intentional balcony time or interactions with forward-thinking, creative people. How are you expanding your “eyes up” capacity?
Know your role. The best point guards understand their roles. They know what they must do well, and what they don’t need to do. In a sport that celebrates points scored, it can be difficult to focus on making good passes and letting others take the shot. But that is the role of the guard. Do you have the same clarity about your role?
Build a great team. The point guard’s abilities are useless if they are not surrounded by teammates with complementary skills. This requires both assembling the team and building the chemistry where team members trust each other to play their respective roles. Do you have the right team? Does your team have the chemistry that leads to great results?
Learn from a coach. Great point guards are developed by coaches who see their potential and help them take the right steps to reach that potential. A coach notices things that the guard will have difficulty seeing. Who do you trust to both encourage and challenge you?

The point guards that receive the most attention during March Madness have incredible skills, in the top 1% or better. That level of expertise may be unattainable for most other basketball players, but that shouldn’t keep them from improving their skills. The same is true for your leadership – you may not become a top 1% leader (whatever that means), but you should always be eager to learn and grow. Eyes up!

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Just a Small Crack?

Mike Bonem — Tue, 25 May 2021 17:09:35 +0000

In Houston, where I live, most of the homes are built on concrete foundations. A common saying here is, “There are only two kinds of homes in Houston – ones that have already had foundation repairs, and ones that will need repairs in the future.” The culprit here is the clay soil, which soaks up water and expands in wet seasons, and then shrinks when the weather is dry. This underlying, undetectable soil movement will eventually cause cracks in the concrete foundation. At first the cracks are invisible, but they will eventually show up in the exterior bricks or interior sheetrock.

After a difficult season, I suspect there are some “cracks” within your church or ministry’s staff or leadership team. They may seem very small right now. A person who has a shorter fuse than normal. Someone else who is disengaged. Team meetings that lack energy or that struggle to make decisions. Tension that you can feel but can’t quite put a finger on.

A homeowner in Houston can ignore a small crack in the wall, but it is a clear sign of a deeper problem. In the same way, those small signs of trouble in your team, especially among individuals who are normally strong performers, may indicate a deeper problem. You can ignore the warnings, but the problem won’t go away.

Houston homeowners water their yards in dry periods, not just for the grass and plants, but also for the foundation. There are also proactive steps ministry leaders can take to repair cracks within their teams:

Ask. A starting point is to make an observation about the behavior you’ve seen and ask the person how he or she is doing. This simple invitation to open the door for conversation can have tremendous value.
Name it. When an entire team is out of sorts, naming the issue(s) is an important step. Especially in this challenging season of emerging from covid, staff members want to know that their leaders understand and sympathize with their struggles.
Care. The first two steps (“ask” and “name it”) will backfire if leaders don’t follow-up by demonstrating their care for staff. Care can be expressed in a variety of ways. Just don’t relegate it to the bottom of a long “to do” list.
Nourish. At the risk of ending with a “Sunday school answer,” the importance of spiritual nourishment cannot be overstated, especially in a difficult period. In dry seasons, your staff need a fresh drink of living water.

Do you see any cracks in your team that need attention?

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One Day to Celebrate

Mike Bonem — Mon, 03 May 2021 05:56:00 +0000

There is a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. It’s getting brighter and more hopeful. But with so many unknowns, planning for the future continues to be challenging for church and ministry leaders.

And yet, more and more signs point to the likelihood of living and interacting in relatively “normal” ways by the start of school. For most churches and many ministries, September 1, not January 1, is the real start of the year. Why not kick off the “new year” with a special celebration that sets the tone for what is to come?

That’s the message of this article: set aside one day now to plan for one special day in the fall. It takes time and creativity to plan a celebration, so choose one day this spring for your staff or leadership team to do this work. It may not even feel like “work.” After so many months of negative planning (e.g., How many people can fit in our sanctuary with social distancing? What do we do about the person who refuses to wear a mask?), this can be a forward-looking, hope-infused activity. So how should you do it?

Pick a Sunday that coincides with the start of school in your area – perhaps August 29 or September 12 – and dream about what that day will look like. Assume that people will be able to gather indoors for corporate worship and smaller groups with minimal restrictions. Then discuss questions such as:

What will we do to make that day special?
What will make people glad they came and want to come back?
What fall programming will we be launching? (This question looks beyond the specific day. It also implicitly determines programs that will not restart.)
How will we include people who aren’t comfortable or able to participate? (While this may be a small percentage of people, they are still an important part of the body. Your answer should include elements of both technology and pastoral care.)

As you plan for that celebratory day, think beyond it as well. How can we best catalyze spiritual growth this fall? How can we best care for the needs of our people? Those needs are likely to include a range of issues such as ongoing fear of covid exposure, post-pandemic trauma, marital struggles, and more.

I hope you have a great time this spring planning for a great day in the fall. I’d love to hear about it!

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Leading with Prayer

Mike — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 10:30:55 +0000

I don’t know any church or ministry leader that would say that they intentionally ignore God. We routinely talk about being dependent on God. So in what ways do your leadership decisions reflect the influence of the Holy Spirit? How does God shape and set your priorities?

There are a variety of behaviors that signal that we’re leading mostly from our own strength with little reliance on the Spirit. One of the places where this tendency is most apparent is in the ways that we engage in prayer around important organizational decisions. Have you ever seen any of the following scenarios?

As the meeting begins, the leader says, “Let’s open with a quick prayer and then we’ll get started.”
A leadership team is wrestling with a difficult decision and is clearly divided on what to do. Someone says, “We just need to take a vote.”
The team engages in a vigorous debate about pros and cons, but when it’s time to pray (if they pray at all), the energy and intensity drops noticeably.
You don’t ask how God has spoken to individual team members about the decision because you suspect that no one has really prayed about it.

It’s easy for me to make this list because I’ve fallen into each of these traps at different times. The first one, in particular, is both a pet peeve when I observe it and one of my biggest weaknesses. The quick invocation signals that prayer is obligatory, but the real work is what happens after we pray. It allows God in the room, but just barely.

I truly believe in the power of prayer and in God’s ability and desire to guide our decisions. I not only believe in it – I’ve seen it in action. Of course, the role of prayer in important decisions is a principle that comes directly from Scripture. I love the description of the Council at Jerusalem in Acts 15, specifically verse 28 which describes the resolution of a heated debate with these words: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us …” Can you use that phrase to describe the important decisions in your church or ministry?

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