[0:00]
so systems and path just here's my summary slide you can you can look at this and then go if you want if it's getting boring systems and pathways need to upgrade to anticipate the next growth better i think i said that don't wait till the symptoms appear once you've made a link to a new stage you need to say okay how do we what's the next what's the easiest and simplest thing what's the most urgent thing to do to get ready for the next growth barrier we're going to hear you start so as you hit hit 120 you need to think

[0:32]
okay we want a greater 350 what do we need to start doing differently to if we if we're going to survive and be able to go through that growth barrier next slide tom next transition transition would be great um okay the leader and the leaders around them must reallocate values most important roles and time and the really important thing is letting go it's not a matter of just adding things

[1:03]
to your resume you've got to for everything you put in the canoe you're going to throw something out of the canoe you've got to let go of doing other things and divest them to other people next transition leaders and those around them you've got to train yourself and those that you're you're leading in new skills and i'll explain i'll give you an example of that in a minute and the next one is next is um leaders must communicate

[1:34]
what is changing and explain persuasively why it needs to change articulating vision and values so if you can't give your people a vision of you know it's been great meeting in my lounge room but if we're going to reach our suburb we really need to move to the scout hall where people it's easier to find us it's easier for people to who would find it hard to break into a small group to come

[2:04]
we'll be more visible we can have a kids ministry the music will sound a bit better here are the reasons why those things need to change if we're going to reach our suburb you need to have some kind of vision and start articulating a different set of values for the next size of church that you're going to be at so be on the next slide tom uh let me give you an example of how that work oh sorry yeah so we as scott said before we're going to talk we could talk about character character really matters and character matters

[2:35]
more as you get bigger you might even get a sense for that as we talk about the other thing which is bandwidth which is your leadership practice needs to make quantum leaps as church leaps next slide so let me give you an example outside of our context to help you really get how this works if you imagine an afes worker goes to a campus where there's never been any ministry before and what he does is he just sits in the cafeteria sees someone in the rain goes

[3:06]
up and says hey mate can i talk to you for 10 minutes about what it means to follow jesus and he keeps doing that and doing that get some knockbacks get some conversations and that's his day every day he turns up and he does that you might think about what what skills does he need to have to do that huge amount of personal resilience being able to deal with one-to-one knock-backs he needs to be flexible he needs to be someone who doesn't need a timetable and a structure to make his day work he needs to be

[3:37]
self-motivated there's a lot of things he doesn't need but he needs to value the fact that he's a pioneer missionary uh reaching people and he has to love evangelism okay let's imagine he he meets with a bunch of four guys and he they're converted and he's got them in a small group next couple of next transition time will be good yeah okay next one uh converts four students and they're in a bible study and he takes them out doing walk up like

[4:08]
he used to do he now needs a new bunch of new skills he now has to get a calendar app on his phone because he's got a regular meeting that a group are turning up to he has to uh be able to expound the bible and teach it he has to be able to disciple people and he has to be able to train people not just do it himself but explain what he's doing and why he does it when they watch him do walk up with them so he's starting to become a trainer next slide tom yeah

[4:39]
imagine his four students are now at the point where they're each leading a small group themselves he needs a whole lot of different skills now he needs to be able to try and equip people so you can send them out and not see what they're doing and he needs to be able to catch up with him every now and again and not see what their group is like he can't sort of you know put a camera in there and watch them but through questions coach them and understand what their group's doing and coach them in that

[5:11]
notice what he needs to value now he needs to not say i love playing soccer because i get to kick the goal what he uh that's what he did as the evangelist as a disciple maker he says i love what i love is putting the path through where my team member kicks the goal once he gets to this third stage he needs to be sitting up in the stand as the coach and saying i love that my guy just kicked that goal listen to everyone applaud him and watch

[5:43]
him but no one notices me the leader who leads leaders has to value that next slide tom imagine now you've got to know you now send out these four leaders to four different campuses to start doing what you did the first time you need a whole new level of being able to imagine what's going on of equip people to be self-starters you need to give them the vision and the values of what you've

[6:13]
done in those three steps so they can go out and do those three steps there's a whole new set of skills that need to come on board so the next um yeah and the things that you need to value now is not so much look at my guy kicking that goal what you need to value now is saying our organization is kicking lots of goals you need to be able to say hey look at your guy kicking that goal well done you and

[6:45]
you're much more remote from that but still strategically hugely important we keep going so just just a little example to show you how the skill set needs to change the solo worker on campus he doesn't need to have good time management he doesn't need to have lots of things he doesn't need to know how a calendar app works but if he's no good at this evangelist if he can't do the job he's going to he's going to die the next step you need to absolutely be a trainer or things aren't going to

[7:16]
progress the next step you need to move from training to coaching and you need to especially think about how the pathway is working how the system is working but at the final stage for the for the the head leader it's all about coaching and it's about coaching character you're not mainly telling people how to structure things you've done that already or you shouldn't have sent them out to the different campuses what you're doing now is equipping them

[7:49]
to have the character needed to lead a complex organization where they have to deal with lots of conflict and risk and all sorts of issues the larger the organization gets as a leader the more you end up spending your time managing conflict and guarding the vision the only conflicts the only problems that get to you are conflicts that have come through four or five sets of good hands where people who've got lots of skills

[8:20]
have not been able to resolve them so the only you feel like you spend your whole day dealing with messy and complex issues that are really hard to work out and never really resolve themselves in a really neat clean way they have great skills of dealing with ambiguity and chaos in how things work and if the value you have is you say you say yourself i really wish i was just out there sharing jesus in the cafeteria and you actually value serving the

[8:51]
organization by creating a system and a culture and creating in the character of your leaders and a movement that can go forward you won't make the transition well you must change the things you value i've got more detail i could talk about but i felt that's probably enough to get some questions going on what do you need to work on as a leader and what do you need to help the team immediately around you to really work on

[9:22]
i want to go to you again just get a bit more reflection like which did you which do you find the hardest in terms of making that transition uh probably the first one i just love meeting with people and looking at the bible um and now i get to meet with people so one of the things i've realized i need to do as a leader is i need to actually occasionally do that i would love always to have one non-christian person i'm always meeting with but most of my opening the bible is now

[9:52]
investing in in leaders the thing i find hard is other people getting the credit for that so if this is not being recorded it's our kids ministry um we used to have uh an an intern a bible college student and my wife lead that it's now got to the stage where it's the kind of thing most churches would have a staff member look after we have three lay people volunteers who look after that together they did a training thing last sunday

[10:24]
where they asked me to come along for the first five minutes and just talk about how kids ministry matters and then they said we're the three leaders of this here's my role he's your role he's their role here's how leadership's structured hearing job describes did it really well and someone said to me they said where do you find all these great leaders our church doesn't have leaders like that and i'm thinking i invest all my time in developing these people i didn't find great leaders we had to work and train and develop

[10:54]
them and i have to say yeah they're kicking great goals aren't they uh so it's not really about if i want to if i want to get the credit if i want to be in the limelight if i wanted people people to think isn't craig great i've really got to let that go and i've got to value people looking at other people and saying hasn't craig got an easy job because he's got such great people who keep going goals so i had two things valuing valuing success through others yeah yeah that's gonna happen but i also heard actually

[11:25]
you know valuing that actually that's the thing i want to be doing not doing you know doing the ministry as well yeah which is which is a really really hard thing to do yeah yeah so you've really got to say to yourself what's going to reach australia me meeting up and reading the bible with people or me raising up a hundred people who can do that yeah i was i was coaching someone last week on this and uh and i made them cry and um and and i've always said what did i say did i say too harshly have i if i've been unhelpful but but

[11:55]
they stopped and i said i'm just grieving uh the fact i really love meeting up with these people and discipling them and and you've just made me realize i'm not gonna be able to do that as much as before and and and isn't that great that they they value that ministry but it isn't great they've made that value change and it'll come it'll come in little unexpected ways so like i said before it's that sunday where you think oh well bill and mary there i don't know they're in my launch team you know and then up there it when the time comes to not shake hands at the door if that's what you do because

[12:26]
there's still the cues too long you suddenly feel like people people think oh it's a shame i don't get to shake hands with scott anymore but you're the person most impacted by that okay and you've got to find other ways to connect with people as church gets bigger you connect with people through your preaching and from a platform so they still feel they know you well if you've been part of a large church you'll notice that in the preaching of the senior pastor everyone feels like they know them they

[12:57]
know all these quirky stories about them and that i think it's not because they're more quirky than other people but because they actually through accidental design work really hard at people knowing them it's not a two-way street they don't know the people in the congregation nearly as well although they do need to spend lots of time thinking about what kind of people we got they need to listen when problems come along and issues come along and say why aren't we reaching high schoolers why aren't we reaching

[13:27]
this ethnic group why do we have a pattern of people who've been with us this long stop coming and you need to understand your people even though it's hard you can't know every one of your people so that's that's really helpful if you helped us think about the application of our time needs to change uh what we value needs to change as we step through those leadership uh pipeline sort of kinks and then the last one there uh our skills as well now we didn't get

[13:58]
time to talk about character but a couple of things just on on why character needs to grow and we're going to go to questions well there was no questions and then and then as i asked that question be more interesting a question a question does that say just give us one or two things on the character question then i'll go to paul's question okay uh okay yeah so character matters at every level of um leadership um but it'll get tested as church gets bigger so we could talk about things like transparency

[14:28]
how do i say before your knowability is a really important part of that um people need to know that they trust you that you're reliable and people need to know that you know what you're doing that you're credible in what you do especially the people around you because when you're small if people have got an issue with the fact that we're we're not seeing colin songs anymore or whatever it is in kids church or whatever what's happening you deal with that but as you get bigger your people take a

[14:59]
bullet for you they take a bullet for your dumb decisions and so they need to really have a lot of confidence that you have their back that you know what you're doing that you're going to keep turning up and doing what you're doing and that they know you and understand that the vision matters to you and that they they know where they stand with you they know when they've done a bad job they know when they've done a good job so those things matter at every level of of uh every size of church but as church gets

[15:29]
bigger and as you ask more of the people around you particularly those things become more important and the small cracks become big cracks good that's helpful just to have a little little quick wave on that and your reach australia and geneva coach can help you work on those things good good excellent i have paul has asked would you be able to comment on different styles of leadership and personalities and how they might contribute to bottlenecks yeah so don't mention any names here just the personality types

[16:00]
sure um i uh all leaders as churches grow need to become more self-aware about their strengths and their weaknesses uh they need to not uh you at the beginning you're the jack of all trades right you can do the kids talk maybe leave the singing uh you know how to run a small group you know how to do a sermon play guitar do you play guitar no i don't you don't play guitar okay i can um i can tap like this um you do all those things

[16:30]
and if you do an average job it's okay but the church gets bigger aesthetics means you have to specialize and you need to realize that your strengths are narrow your gifting is narrow and you need to trust the people around you and recruit people out of the gifts that you don't have the same is true in leadership so there's an area of leadership not character if you you need to work on character and character will just limit how how big a group you can lead but if you're not good at you know cultural

[17:02]
intelligence you know reading how we're connecting with different groups in the community if you're not super good at strategy if you're not good at designing systems and pathways you you need to have some sense of those things but you need to bring on board people who can help you with that and give so you need to build a team around you who aren't like you but have gifts that complement what you do i think if you can do that it doesn't matter what leadership style you've got what personality type you've got

[17:34]
you can grow if you're willing to actually be humble enough and self-aware enough that you need to grow a team i will say leaders of churches this is counterintuitive over 350 tend to be introverts because if you're an extrovert then uh the the leader of a large group needs to be able to you know steer the ship while everyone else is down in the mess having fun together and not decide to leave the wheel abandoned

[18:05]
or leave it with someone incompetent because they want to go down and connect with everyone you need to be able to step back from the group and think about how the group is going so the extrovert finds it harder to lead a church once once that he's that 350 barrier but and i'd say the introvert finds it hard to lead the house church because it's all about relationships and it's not really about thinking about how the group's going uh it's just about getting there are

[18:35]
there some personalities or people who who just can't like can anyone not grow past to the growth barrier so actually their best to just be the person who starts you know starts at church gets it off the ground and then goes right out i've hit my threshold it's time to hand it on yes i've coached some people and they've said i want to know whether i can grow my church or whether aren't the reason it's not growing and whether i need to leave i think i think almost anyone if they're willing

[19:05]
to sacrifice and let go of the roles and the values they treasure can do the next step but in saying that it's not sinful if you can't some of us just can't do that if you're wired to be an evangelist and you love that and you you're terrible at organization and administration then maybe you need to be the guy who stays in the cafeteria and evangelizes people and you're not the guy to grow things bigger so it's partly about working out where do you fit best

[19:35]
and where can you help help us reach australia by being in the place you're in now final question for you craig you're married to kathy yep some advice uh for husbands out there on loving supporting their wife as as she goes through the growth barriers with you in the minute and a half you got like i don't know we could go a little bit longer so we do a whole thing on this um uh i think the thing to say is your wife will go through all the same griefs you go through as things change

[20:05]
but she'll feel like she gets less say in what happens so uh my wife was super central to before the launch team there's the two of us dreaming a dream praying prayers even the launch stage she was really crucial now she feels like she hears hears about major decisions at church when they're announced in church and so she feels like she's been pushed to the outside even more than you know i feel like things have changed for me but i still

[20:36]
i still get together leadership two minutes she's been pushed to the outside and there's bits of her that like that and there's bits of her that struggle with that and really grieve that as well so you need to love your wife and care for your wife as you go through that process and it may well be that you're up for church getting bigger but it's going to so break her heart but as a couple you aren't the right fit to grow it's grow bigger

[21:06]
as uh as craig said there's lots of resources on that we've got a number of marriage and ministry talks from our fresh marriage conference which you put on for geneva church planning couples uh it'd be well well worth having all that as well but just to recognize uh as as craig has hopefully got us to think uh there's a pro there's a greeting process for your people there's a greeting process for you uh but there's also a green process for your wife and and and kids as well as you move through these growth barriers as well craig really uh helpful to have your wisdom on this topic today uh one of one of craig's roles is

[21:38]
actually to train our coaches i think this is a critical coaching question and so we as a as a network want to continue to have uh coaches that are pressing into these growth questions and uh and helping you as a leader think into that so if you're wanting to have a coach uh then go to registration.com.edu and uh and ask about coaches that are available as well we finished with the reach australia song no song there's no song

[22:10]
excellent you