Video Transcript: Decisions
Being an effective manager. Task 10, decision making. Proverbs 3:5-6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding in all your ways. Submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight. The importance of
decision making. Number one, people in the organization need to know what to work on. As the manager, you're in charge of the people, the resources that you have in the organization and getting them to work on things. What is your organization about, what are you trying to accomplish as a church? What are we trying to do if you're doing a church plant? Okay, so what? What do we need to concentrate on? Number two, people in the organization need to know what to work on first. So not only do they need the list of things to work on, but they need to know the priorities. How, what do we do first? That that's probably the hardest thing for people to work on, and it relates to our last session with the ROI. Return on Investment. Sometimes people work on something, and it's a good thing, but it's the thing that doesn't help us. One of the things I keep stressing in on the staff at my church is, how is what we're going to do grow our church if we spend all of our time working on things that don't grow our church like you know, someone wanted to spend $80,000 on fixing up our parking lot, and I said to them, I think we could spend $80,000 and we won't get one single family from all that work. Now I'm not saying that parking lots don't need to be fixed, but there's probably a lot of other things we need to do that will, in fact, grow our church. So what are the priorities? So when you're just trying to decide, what do we do? How do you figure that out? Well, few questions, does this decision fit our vision? You know, someone wants to start a I remember someone wanted to have a food truck in our parking lot. Let's, let's have a food truck people that can't afford food, they can come to our parking lot and we could have this whole feeding people program, and that's a good thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There's a lot of churches that do that. That's good, you know, something that you could do. But I said to them, okay, our vision, the particular vision that we have at our church, is all about getting people to own their own walk in their own home, to take responsibility. You know, instead of having the church take care of your kids and educate, you know, and teach everything to your kids, you know, we're going to have the program do that, our goal is to get parents owning, you know, some of that, that parents have to have to have to own their own families, that that that the faith is best when it comes down through the family tree. So we're going to equip you parents to so ownership and trying to help people own their own walk, of their own solutions. So we could do this program. We just invite all kinds of needy people and they can come. But, but does that fit our real vision? Wouldn't our vision be more like teaching job training for some of these folks, like, you know, less we're going to help less people, but instead of, you know, giving a fish to everyone, we're going to teach a few people how to fish, and maybe then they could teach some other people how to fish. So, so it's a good thing to do, but does it fit our vision, what
we're trying to do? What's our goal with what we're trying to do or be? Does, does this decision give us great ROI I remember when I was planting a church in Vancouver, and we only had 10 people in our church, and we were doing this phone campaign. We were calling 20,000 people in our community, inviting them to a grand opening service. Okay? So we don't have very many people, we don't have programs, we don't have resources. We're trying to grow our church to the point where you have resources and you have people that are gifted at things. So I remember when someone was on the phone with someone, and they said to the person that was doing the calling, they said, if you're willing to come and pick me up, then then maybe I'll come to your grand opening service. And so the person on the phone said, hold it. And they asked me, Are we going to have like a bus ministry, or are we willing to pick people up? And I said, priorities. We only have 10 people. We can barely do anything. We need to build the church to the point where we have gifted people, and maybe we'll have someone that loves to drive a bus or as a bus, but until that happens, we have to focus on the four or five things that we can actually do. It's a good thing to do, and if you want to pick up this person, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to tell you what God is calling you to do. You should do what you're going to do, but we're not going to start a bus ministry, because we need a lot more people. There's a lot more programs that we need to start way before the bus ministry. So it's hard, you know, the person did say no, you know, we just don't have the resources to do that, and people don't like to say no to needs. But the return on investment if we had started that bus thing, if we had started we're going to pick people up, we would have gotten 10 dependents, and they would have taken all of our time, and we would have grown no we would have gotten nowhere with the church, because we would have been consumed by the needs of 10 people. Now, when you're five, a church of 500 and 10 needy people come walking in the door, you at least have some resources that won't bankrupt. You see, does this decision maximize everyone's time? Is it going to waste people's time? Is it going to be a good use of everyone's time? How to make good decisions? Number one, ask God for insight. I mean, that's where you start. You know, we got to figure things out. What do we do? I don't know. Let's ask God. Search the Bible for insight. One of the reasons I like topical preaching, sometimes not just exegetical, but topical preaching, is people need to learn how to come to the Bible with a topic. I have this problem. I have this decision. I don't know whether to take this job and move my family to some other place. I don't know what I should do for a living. I don't know if I should marry this person. All these big questions that people have decisions that they need to make, and how do you go to the Bible with those things? How do you take your topic, your thing, your question, your decision that you need to make, and go to the Bible and say, What does the Bible have to say about this number three, brainstorm with appropriate people so you don't know what to do. Call in people that are related to this decision, or people that you
trust, and you sit down and you go, Okay, so here's what I'm thinking. Here's the positives on doing this, here's all the negatives on doing this. What do you people see? What other positives? What have I missed? What do you ultimately think number four, if possible, come to a consensus. I showed an organizational chart of our church, we have what's called a Consistory, or it's a board of elders we meet once a month, and we make, you know, not a lot of decisions, because we have a deacon board, which is any leader, any leader of anything is on that board. Try to make most of our decisions there. But in our elder board, we have to make decisions about vision or what we're doing as a church overall. And we try to do things by consensus that that we all, we only have six of us, and we try to be keep we're going to keep talking until we all can agree on it. Now, it doesn't always happen, and so we have to take a vote sometimes, but the but the majority of things is we want a consensus. We're going to keep talking till everyone agrees on this number five, sometimes you have to make the hard decision yourself. I was living in Chicago, and then I had an opportunity to go to my hometown in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and my kids had been growing up and living in Chicagoland for a while, and I didn't make a decision about whether we're going to move, and none of them wanted to move. They were in school. They were in junior high, high school, and not one of them wanted to move. I got threatening letters from my own kids, but I felt God calling us to do this. So in the end, I just had to make the hard decision, and it was difficult for a few months, but I've talked to my kids, you know, over the years, and they now agree that that was the right thing to do. But So sometimes, as a leader, you just have to make the hard decision. Sometimes you really don't yourself know what to do. There's those times where you're like, I don't know what to decide, and it's up to you to make this decision that happened to my wife and I back when I was in seminary. I spent a year in the Philippines. My wife and I, we spent a year and we taught in the Philippines for a year, and then at the end of that year, I had to decide whether I was going to take a church as a pastor here in the United States or go back to the Philippines and become missionary to live. My career in the foreign land, and we didn't know what to do. We prayed about it, we consulted, we talked, and ultimately, it came to a day. The next day, we had to either sign up for this mission thing that would prepare us to go back or not. It was only offered once a year, so we had one day, then finally, to make the decision. And we wrestled with and we prayed about it that day, and I remember walking in the woods and Lord, give us a sign. Give us something. Let us know what we should do. Finally, both of us felt that we were being led to go back to the Philippines. So we decided finally, just before we went to bed, we decided we're going to the Philippines. That night, neither one of us could sleep. We wrestled and tossed and turned, and the next morning, we both talked to each other about that, and we decided to not decide. And ultimately, we took a call to our church here in the United States. So sometimes what you need to do,
especially when it's you really don't know what to do. You've talked, you've read the Bible, you've prayed, and it's still you just don't know what to do. Finally, you just have to make a decision. You just make the decision, and you keep going down that trail, unless God closes the door, unless you know, if God really doesn't want you to go down a certain direction, he will let you know, and he will make it clear, so sometimes you don't have to worry about it. I once had another big decision to make, and I went to my supervisor, a very wise man, and I said, I just, I just I'm 50/50, and I really don't know what God's will is. Lot of times we want to we want to find God's will. We want to do what God wants. And, and I always thought there's this one thing that God wants and and I'm afraid of making a mistake and picking the wrong thing. I want to do what God wants. I want to be in the middle of his will. So you're like searching and trying to make sure you do that one thing right? And he said something new to me. He said, Well, maybe you're 50/50, on it, because God doesn't care which one you do. I always thought that that, no, that God has one thing in mind, and you have to figure that out. And if you get it wrong, you got it wrong. He said, You know, God maybe doesn't care which job you take, because he's going to bless you and use you either way. And that freed me to finally just make a decision. So you do all you can, but you finally have to make decisions. A leader that doesn't make decisions leaves everyone confused, leaves everyone not knowing what they're doing. And to be honest, you just can't get anything done, even with simple things like sermons. I'm a quick decider. I have a sermon coming up Sunday. I look at the passage, and when I see an angle, I decide on it, and boom, that's what I'm going to do. And now the stress of that is removed for me. There's little more work to do with it. There's stories to find and little exegesis figure out what this is all about. But I have my angle, and I'm done. My associate pastor, he has a hard time with decisions, and so he'll decide, and then the next day he'll undecide, and then he'll decide, then he'll undecide. And so the whole week, he gets consumed by this one thing, and it comes back to this decision making. You know, don't be afraid to make a few wrong decisions. Ultimately, God will correct you, or life will correct you, or people will correct you, or the result will correct you. So be teachable. You make a decision, you get burned. Doesn't work out. Mental note. Don't do that again. So don't be afraid to make decisions, because even your wrong decisions will end up teaching you. And over a 20 year career, you make enough wrong decisions that eventually you figure figure things out.