Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

For the next two weeks, we are talking with the Executive Pastors of three different but fast-growing churches:
Kevin Peck of The Austin Stone Community Church in Austin, Steve Miller of The Journey in St. Louis, and
Josh Patterson at The Village Church in Dallas.

Rethink Mission: A lot of executive pastors work for a chaos-maker or work in a fast-growing church, which of course equals lots of chaos. How do you lead in such a way that brings order to & makes sense of the craziness?

Kevin: Leadership in a fast-growing church is a practice in change-management. One of the first learning lessons at The Austin Stone was learning the difference between chaos and innovation. Chaos is indeterminate change, leading to confusion, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness. Innovation is incremental improvements in paradigms and practices that are essential to creating a culture committed to the contextualization of the gospel.

I have found that my role is to be a passionate advocate for innovation, a deterrent for chaos, and a source of wisdom between the two. This is done through honest and clear evaluation of suggested change with respect to organizational vision, values, priorities, goals, etc.

However, this kind of leadership must be in balance with a consistent catalytic pressure to think past the paradigms and practices currently in place. In short, chaos is bad, but stagnation is no better. I think it is important to say that leadership through chaos is also largely a team effort. I really can’t overstate how critical it has been to The Austin Stone to have a number of leaders who share the responsibility of creating a culture of innovation without chaos. No person, or even pair of leaders, can sustain this culture.

Steve: I think it’s important to first evaluate how you view the craziness or chaos that’s happening. When God grows a church at a rapid pace, young leaders will feel the chaos. But growth is a gift from God that should lead us to thankfulness and also to humility as we are forced to look to Him for direction. Just like in the book of Acts, the Spirit moved and the church then built systems to support what the Spirit was doing. We get in trouble if we try and stuff the Spirit into our systems.

What I have tried to do is help our leaders be encouraged that God is at work (that’s why we have this chaos), and to continually focus them on who God called us to be, our mission and values. It’s easy to let your values become mere words on letterhead when growth overwhelms you. But what will help people is when you can take your God-given values and make them tangible for people, and keep them continually before them. Growth scares many people because they fear change. They want growth but they don’t want what comes with it. Helping them see the core of who we are hasn’t changed amidst the growth will keep them envisioned and on board.

Josh: I have been a part of The Village Church for 5 ½ years and the pace of ministry is something that  I have grown accustomed to.  The church has experienced a lot of fast growth which produces challenges and complexities for everyone, but I would not describe it as “chaos”.  It is certainly busy and our time is focused and directed.  Matt actually helps lead through the challenges and, thankfully, doesn’t contribute to them.

I am a team-builder and want to empower our team to move ministry and mission forward.  One of my roles is to direct the development of ministry, not micro-manage it.  So, I am not working through the challenges of the church alone.  Instead, there are dozens of gifted, talented and capable people who are working to implement the mission and vision of the church.  God has gifted us and given each of us a measure of faith to walk in these gifts (Romans 12:3-8).  Our staff is at its healthiest when we recognize our gifts and walk in them powerfully by the Spirit.

RM: How has your job changed as your church has grown over the years?

Kevin: To begin with, as I have conversations with my peers at other churches, it is clear that the job of the executive pastor is very different from church to church. Much of this is determined by the gift mix of the lead pastor and the gift mix of the executive pastor (as well as other senior leaders).

Over the last 5 years a lot has changed at The Austin Stone. One notable change has been the balance between working on efficiency and effectiveness. When the church was still a church plant my job was split between making sure we were doing the right things and making sure we were doing things right.

However, as the leadership team has grown in size and skill I spend almost all of my time on ensuring that we are doing the right things. In the beginning, I spent a large portion of my time developing core ministries such as groups, children’s ministry, etc. However, as ministry and leaders developed my time is now largely spent on innovation and new initiatives.

Another key evolution was a movement from ministry development to leader development. In the early years, I spent a considerable amount of time in ministry development as well as leadership development. In the more recent years, I spend the vast majority of my time developing current and future leaders. This also includes devoting a considerable amount of attention to developing and maintaining healthy, biblical team dynamics.

Pastor Steve Miller. Photo courtesy of Brea McAnally.

Steve: Well, the one thing that’s been constant is the change that I’ve experienced in my job over the years. With each new level of growth there arises more needs. Early on I led the small group ministry until we found a leader to do that. I taught and preached more often until we found another teacher to do that (some guy named Jonathan McIntosh). Then I did a lot of financial and business work until we found a leader to do that. The list goes on. The point is that in a young growing church, as an Exec Pastor who is scanning over the entire leadership structure of the church, you are the first one to take on the responsibility for the leadership needs that arise. So the goal is to not get buried in those needs, but to raise up leaders who can take it beyond what you could do. If we fail to raise up leaders, or if we fail to hand things off to emerging leaders, our plate gets too full, we become a bottleneck for the church, and we will ultimately be in danger of burnout.

Josh: The fundamentals of my roles are essentially the same as when I started in this role 5 years ago, but the nature of the job is more complex now.  I became the executive pastor when we had about 12 people on staff and now we are close to 80.  We were a single campus church with just over a 1,000 people, but now we have 3 campuses with over 6,000 people.  So, my job has changed by matter of degree.

We have had to shift and implement new processes and language to adapt to the changing culture of the church.  Multi-site was definitely a challenge that caused us to revisit our ministry philosophy and staffing structure.  Each new campus introduces new challenges and complexities.  All of this has been healthy for us as we continue to press in to the Lord to see what He has for us as a body moving forward.  That said, some of the basic realities of my job have remained: loving our staff, working toward a healthy, cohesive and unified staff culture, ministry development, etc.
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Part 2: Leading from the Second Chair.
Part 3: The Qualities of an Executive Pastor of a Missional Church.

You can follow each of these guys on Twitter: Kevin Peck Steve Miller Josh Patterson

The heart of this website are the Missional Q&A Interviews, updated weekly, where church leaders like you talk about the issues they face on a daily basis.

Tags: leadership

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Missional Q&A, church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.