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    Flow: The Surprising Role of Systems in the Health of Church Staff and Key Leaders
    Flow: The Surprising Role of Systems in the Health of Church Staff and Key Leaders
    Flow: The Surprising Role of Systems in the Health of Church Staff and Key Leaders
    Ebook81 pages46 minutes

    Flow: The Surprising Role of Systems in the Health of Church Staff and Key Leaders

    By Wayne Stewart

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Sometimes church staff people-problems are not actually people-problems.

    And, sometimes, because we're people-people, we don't know where else to look.

    But many 21st Century churches are organizations as much as they are organisms. The same dynamics that sink a tech startup or Fortune 500 company can wreak equal havoc on church health and momentum.

    Solvable?

    Absolutely.

    Three focus areas get us moving in the right direction.

    Projects. Planning. Resources.

    Using the idea of an electrical circuit, we're aiming to remove unnecessary resistance from these critical areas of church staff and leader life. The end result?

    Flow.

    Let's get to work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne Stewart
    Release dateJan 13, 2020
    ISBN9781654147938
    Flow: The Surprising Role of Systems in the Health of Church Staff and Key Leaders
    Author

    Wayne Stewart

    Wayne Stewart has been a professional sportswriter for more than thirty-five years and has authored thirty books, including Name that Ballplayer, You’ re the Umpire, and The Little Giant Book of Basketball Facts.

    Read more from Wayne Stewart

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      Book preview

      Flow - Wayne Stewart

      May 1990:

      The first images came back and everyone knew something was wrong. Very wrong.

      A few weeks into low Earth orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope had produced nothing more than grainy distortions. She was, and remains, the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever focused on the cosmos. Given decades of attention and serious funding—eventually topping out at 4.7 billion—this was not supposed to happen.

      The technical term was spherical aberration. The actual flaw? An edge of Hubble’s nearly 8ft across lens, off by 2200 nanometers.

      2.2 micrometers. 87 microinches.

      Less than 1/50 of a hair’s width.

      Hard to catch, especially when the measurements showed true. It turns out a testing device had been improperly assembled, again at a very slight inconsistency, this time 1.3mm. More than enough. While hard to believe that the world’s premiere agency in the business of scientific precision could make such an error, the same would happen if a builder spec’d an 8ft. high wall, using a tape measure with a foot indicated every 13 inches.

      They didn’t see it. Until they saw it.

      But the end of the story, at least so far, is a happy one. Three years were spent devising and training for the fix. While in orbit, NASA initiated a space-walk repair amounting to the installation of some very high-tech contact lenses. And what a repair it was. Given regular update missions, the last in 2014, we’ve received images of the universe we never thought possible, and learned more than we ever imagined.

      The heavens declare the glory of God.

      And now we get to see this truth (and the heavens) with ever increasing clarity and beauty because—and this is very important—though the problem seemed small and likely difficult to diagnose, the men and women of NASA were absolutely committed to reversing its affects and releasing the promise that Hubble presented.

      Okay.

      Let’s make the shift to church. Your church. My church. The Church.

      And more specifically, your church staff and key leaders.

      Sometimes ministry feels like a grainy distortion. We know something’s wrong. That’s obvious. It’s also frustrating. What did we do? What didn’t we do? And what’s next, especially when we’ve done all we know how.

      The conversation unfolding in these pages is dedicated to those very questions, the idea that some measure of your challenges may be related to dynamics you’ve yet to see, and the hope that knowing where to look (and a little bit of what to do about it) can make a big difference for the ongoing health and vibrancy of your staff and key leaders.

      Fall 2019

      Resistance

      As protective measure or moral stance: necessary, honorable. Among church staff and volunteer leaders? Not so much.

      Think of your church staff and key volunteer leaders as a light bulb, fully lit. Glowing. Spreading. Spilling light across the room. What might this look like? The Word: informing and shaping interactions. The joyful Family of God living out its calling. The presence, gifts, and fruit of the Spirit—on full display and in use. Grace in misunderstandings and reconciliation for hurts. Hope and energy towards a collective future. Transformation. It’s an exciting proposition, not unlike our earliest images from the Book of Acts.

      Now think of your staff and leaders as a light bulb, partially lit. Intermittent. That last cycle-on before the filament pops. One can imagine how this might appear as well. Deadlines passing, with key ministry initiatives held up somewhere. Staff and leader missteps in communication. Lack of trust or willingness to collaborate. Silos. A serious downshift in momentum and teamsmanship and a surprising lack of emotional margin.

      Something’s not right.

      In electrical circuitry language, there’s something hindering—resisting—that free flow of energy. To be fair to the metaphor, some resistance is a good thing, just like physical strain builds muscle when faced with opposing force. But that’s not what’s going on here. The church-circuit isn’t designed to induce strain. God may

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