Video Transcript: Strong Relationships
Welcome back. In this next section, we're going to continue with our look at working with staff and leaders and our skill topic is going to be strong relationships. So let's dive in. There is a principle I'd like to share with you, relationships require investing in people. You might think of it this way, think of the return on investment that Jesus made in people. Now, of course, the primary group of people in whom Jesus made that investment was the original set of disciples, but there were others along the way, and of course, that continues these days. It's God the Father, God the Son, investing in the lives of people through God the Spirit. So that investment continues even to this day, and think about the rate of return on that investment. You know, the Christian faith has expanded across the entire globe, and all of this started with a handful of, rather, I don't know eclectic, an eclectic group, a strange combination of people, a small group of people, empowered by the Lord, filled with the Spirit, beginning to share the faith. And the return on that investment is immeasurable, leading, of course, ultimately, to that multitude in Revelation 5, that's too numerous to count. What a return on investment. Now, here's a question for you, what are the elements of relational investment in people? So let's talk a little bit about how we do this. Now, the first thing that I would like for you to look at is the something that we've looked at before. It's the support challenge matrix that comes to us from giant worldwide. We've already talked about this, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to rehash that material. What I want to do is zero in on quadrant number two, the liberator. I think it's reasonable for us to recognize that Jesus Christ was a liberating leader. He was a leader that brought freedom. Now this particular model identifies the Liberator as a leader that provides very high support for his people, those he leads, as well as issuing a very high challenge to those he leads. Well, I'd like for you to think about the Great Commission in terms of both challenge and support. What's the challenge? Well, Jesus says, Go and make disciples. Does that sound like a challenge to you? It does to me. I'm sure it did to them. It's a very high challenge. Jesus issues a very high challenge. He makes the startling claim that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him, and in that authority, he's sending them out. Therefore you are to go and make disciples, baptize, teach obedience. But where is the support coming from? He says, I am with you to the end of the age. How is Jesus God the Son with us? He is with us through the power of the Holy Spirit. So in the Great Commission, we find Jesus the liberating leader, issuing a very high challenge and yet offering very high support. He's an empowering leader. He's a leader that establishes a culture of opportunity, if we will just commit, follow him. Now, as I was preparing my notes for this video, I did some thinking back to folks that I've encountered in my ministry life, where I felt that I offered both very high challenge as well as very high support. There was one individual that was serving in college ministry, sort of the number two in command, but he had a real desire to move forward in his ministry. Life. He was feeling called to
pastoral ministry, but he was out of. Touch with a particular denomination. He didn't know how to pursue this. He didn't know how to go about getting a licensure and credentialing, that kind of thing that we now offer through CLI Well, I sat with him and walked through his options, and I offered to work with him, to connect him with my denomination, to help him navigate that world of licensure and ordination. Once he had completed that process, gone through some training, he already had the seminary degree that was required the night that he was commissioned. I was invited to speak at that occasion and to be part of his commissioning service. And he went on to join the staff of a very large church, and in the last few years or so has risen to the level of being the senior pastor of that church, but I can think back to about 20 years ago, when he was a young man wearing and wearing An ice hockey jersey, ministering on the college campus. I issued the challenge. I offered support. There was another gentleman, a seasoned pastor, who was looking at retirement, but he had become involved with the training that we offer through my ministry, and we had a discussion about his becoming a trainer, becoming a consultant, a coach for others. He gradually stepped into that, and he now works through our ministry, the Go center, and he serves as a trainer and coach to probably half a dozen different churches out in the Pacific Northwest. I still connect with him. I am the coach to the coach, the consultant for the consultant, the trainer of the trainer, high support, high challenge. Yet another pastor who was retiring looking at his prospects for the future. He and I got in touch, and a similar challenge was issued, of his becoming my counterpart, doing the things that I do in my part of the country, out in his part of the country, and he's risen to that occasion, high challenge, high support. Just recently, a pastor came into my world on my radar screen, someone that had benefited from the training that we provide in terms of revitalizing the church where he is the pastor, but he has a passion to help other churches, and the leaders of His Church share that passion. They want to be a church that shares what has happened with them with other churches, but not just as testimony, but as actual training and consultation and coaching, so he is now working with me in a two year plan for him to essentially develop the knowledge and skills that I have so that he and his leaders in his church can be a resource for other churches, high challenge, high support. That's how these things work. That's what they look like. Now Recall again that that mandate of being interested in other people, before being interesting yourself and having them be interested in you. So here are some questions that you have to realize that on people's minds as you are working with them, particularly if you in a positional authority over them in a supervisory way, maybe they report to you, they're thinking to themselves, are you for me? Are you against me, or are you in this, just for yourself? You see, the trust factor is an incredibly important factor. People have to know, have to know that you are acting in their best interest. And remember, the liberating leader is someone who's looking for the
highest good of others. Spiritual leadership, taking responsibility for the spiritual development of others. You see. How these things are starting to line up, working with staff and leaders. If you are in a position of being a leader among staff, a leader among leaders, as well as being a leader within a congregation, these are the kinds of things, the dynamics that are at work. And so as you incorporate these ideas, these principles, these techniques, you're going to become more and more effective at building strong relationships, trusting relationships, that can provide the foundation for those with whom you are working to develop in their ministries, in their spiritual lives. Now we're talking about managing ministry time in a you know, in our previous set of videos. And one thing that we need to take away from that study is that strong relationships are going to require the investment of time. So as you are thinking through the management of your ministry time, you have to build in those blocks of time in which to interact with people, to invest in people to build trust with people to inform, to train, to coach, to consult, to care for, because all of that is part of developing strong relationships. Strong relationships are going to take time at the same time, though, this time invested in building strong relationships is going to reap strong dividends. That's how we work together. Now I want to, I want to make a distinction between what's called a single cell church and a multi cell church, a single cell church is a church that has a single pastor who is the personal pastor to everyone in The Church, the vast majority of churches in the US, and I dare say churches anywhere, the vast majority are solo pastor churches, there is one pastor who is the pastor for everyone in that church. Now, as a rule, that church is going to be small, and it's going to be limited to the ministry capacity of that one pastor. If he or she is going to be the only pastoral leader in the church, then the church can only get as large as that single pastor can handle. Now, what about the multi cell church? Well, the multi cell church is different. The senior pastor will not be the personal pastor for everyone. The senior pastor will be the pastor to the leaders, and the leaders will take on pastoral responsibilities for pastoring everyone else. The church is spread out into units or or subgroups that we're going to think of as cells, now it's my it's my view that the distinction as to whether a church is going to be a single cell church or is going to be a multi cell church needs to be decided very early On, either at the beginning of that church being established, or at the beginning of that church being revitalized, or, in a sense, reestablished. So here's a principle that seems a little counterintuitive, but I want you to track with me on this. The size of a congregation does not determine whether a church is a single cell church or a multi cell church. Rather, the decision to be single cell or multi cell will determine the size of a congregation, or at least the potential size of a congregation. Now I realize that in most cases, pastors and church leaders are not thinking this way. They may not be familiar with this distinction between single cell and multi cell. So they reason to themselves, since my church is
small, I'm going to be the pastor to everybody, and they don't realize that, in so doing, they are casting their church in the role of single cell church, and that church cannot possibly grow beyond what that one pastor can handle. Now, this is not to say that that church can't multiply, but hold on to that for a moment. Well, let's move on to this next question. What is at stake here? What is at stake? Well, the local church of a single cell church that's led by a solo pastor is going to be restricted by the capacity of that pastor to personally pastor everyone now, on average, what we're finding is that the average solo pastor can handle somewhere between about 75 up to maybe 150 for a highly capable person. Now this is not a right or wrong, this is not a judgment. This is just an observation. Folks have limits. Now, a solo pastor can only pastor a small group, a smaller group. So how does such a church multiply? Well, the way the single cell church multiplies is that once it's once it's determined what the maximum capacity of that pastor is. As the growth of the church gets closer to that capacity, you have to start thinking about reproducing, multiplying the way you do that, let's say, let's say that a particular pastor has a maximum capacity of about 125 people. Well, as you are approaching that 125 what you would do to multiply is you would put a church planting campaign together where you would identify, say, 20 or 25 people as the core of a new church, probably a new single cell church, and those folks would leave That church with a church planter, move to another location, start a new church now that would create headroom in the original single cell church that could now be refilled so new people could come in, and the new single cell church could now begin To develop. So let's say that this new single cell church has a capacity of 100 people. Well, when both of those churches are reaching capacity, we're now talking about 225 people, and both of those churches could carve out, you know, say 10% of the congregation and plant new churches. So now we've got four single cell churches and so on and so on and so on. So the single cell model can still be a growing and multiplying model, but just operating as a single cell now what about? What about the multi cell Church? The multi cell church is a church where the senior pastor is going to pastor the leaders, the leaders are going to pastor the congregation. There is no limit to how large that church might get, unless you talk about the limit of, say, space. But here's the thing, we want our churches to be involved in planting. So in this multi cell church, we're still going to model. We're still going to adopt that model of periodically carving some folks out to plant a new church, or perhaps just putting the funding together to to to financially support the launching of a new church. But as that church gets larger and larger, more staff would be added. So you have a senior pastor, maybe you have an associate, maybe you add another associate, you have other department staff, so the church can continue to grow. Theoretically, it's unlimited, as long as we are providing that pastoral capacity from leaders other than the senior pastor. So regardless, either way you're working at it, the
possibility to multiply exists now, when I went into Arizona to pastor this church of 13, anyone who understood this distinction between single cell and multi cell would have concluded, well, they must be going for single cell, we've got a very small congregation. We've got one pastor, and so this is a single cell church. But
it wasn't why not? Well, I did know the distinction, in my sense, in terms of God's vision for this church, was that it would become a multi cell church. Why? Well, a couple of reasons. One is the area had a large growing population, and it seemed to me that it would need multiple churches of a pretty good size, but also I knew that I would be more effective as the senior pastor of a multi cell church than as the solo pastor of a single cell church. So right from the beginning, even when our congregation was very, very small, I began to plant the seeds of being a multi cell church, making sure that I was not taking on the role of being the personal pastor to everyone, but we were sharing that world among leaders. Now that was perhaps a little bit top heavy at the beginning, but the time, our church had about 300 people involved. It was a completely different matter, functioning as a highly functional multi cell church. So that's how these things come together. That's how they work. Well. That brings us to the close of this particular video session the topic of strong relationships, and how do strong relationships relate to multi cell and single cell? Well, it has to do with what's going to be the nature of relationship between the pastor and the people now in a single cell model, that would be a direct relationship, strong relationships between everyone in the church and the pastor, but in the multi cell church, it can be slightly different, strong relationships between staff and leaders, with the senior pastor, but then not so much with the congregation, more that the congregation is being developed into strong relationships with those other leaders. And as the congregation spreads and grows, more leaders are developed. And as more leaders are developed, the capacity for the congregation to grow more is developed so one feeds the other over time. So we're done with this video, and we will be continuing with our next video talking about still working with staff and leaders, and the skill topic we're going to be zeroing in on is going to be ministry clarity, ministry clarity. So we'll take a look at that next time. In the meantime, may God bless your efforts on his behalf. May God bless your ongoing studies that you might indeed be prepared for what he's calling you to be and do in the name of Jesus amen,