Leading Major Change in Your Ministry by Jeff Iorg
The first section of Leading Major Change in Your Ministry outlines foundational concepts to leading major change. The second section explains a six-fold model for leading major change in churches and ministry organizations. The book includes illustrations throughout, not from hypothetical situations, but from real-life ministry challenges in both local churches and large organizations. While theories about leading major change are interesting, practical insight about how to do it—written by someone who has led multiple organizations through major change—is far more helpful.
The stakes are high. Leadership decisions in ministries have eternal consequences. Almost every church or organization needs—or soon will need—to be led through major change. Leading Major Change in Your Ministry is your guide to successfully getting it done.
I really enjoyed reading Leading Major Change in Your
Ministry by Jeff Iorg. It was very easy to follow and he wrote at a level that
anyone could understand. I didn’t have to be a ministry expert in order to make
sense of what he was explaining. A lot of the illustrations and examples were
familiar, and I think he may have used some of them in previous books, or they’ve
been mentioned in class, but they were absolutely perfect for the context and
topics where they were used.
The first thing I looked at closely was the definition of
Leadership from the 1933 Oxford Dictionary “The dignity, office, or position of
a leader, especially of a political party; also, the ability to lead.” I
followed the instructions from the beginning and crafted my own definition of Leadership.
“Leadership is guiding others, by example, design, and language, toward a
common goal or purpose.” I also took note of this leadership definition from
the team of Joseph Rost, “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders
and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes.” Some
key take away items for me were that Leadership involves a relationship,
includes real change, and that the parties involved need to have a mutual purpose
for the change to be successful. In fact, he goes on to state that “without
mutual buy-in, a leadership relationship does not exist, and real change cannot
happen.”
Leadership is not only about real change, but the leadership
relationship itself is dynamic and fluid, constantly changing and evolving as
team members learn new insights, adjust to unexpected changes, manage personal
challenges, and develop new interests. Leadership relationships by definition
cannot be static because leadership is about change.
I really found his clarification between leadership and
management enlightening. Both are important, but management is about improving
processes, creating efficiency, streamlining progress, and making timely
decisions to keep an organization running smoothly. Leadership is only in
effect when real change is required.
Also, he reiterated many times throughout the book, “The mission
matters most.”, even going so far as to state that it became not only a catchphrase
at Gateway, but the definition of their mutual purpose. Meaning that the
mission, God’s specific mission for your church or ministry organization, comes
before anything else, that it is the key. “There are no self-serving Christian
leaders, only self-serving people occupying leadership positions.” If you’re a true
leader, you’re not in it for yourself, you’re there to glorify Christ and
pursue the mission God has set you to complete. He also discussed the fact that
the mission is not only the most important, but also the first step that should
be taken. “Aligning your organization’s mission with God’s mission is a step
you must take before initiating any other major change.” Even the very last
chapter in the book brings this thought back with the heading “Focus Everything
on God’s Mission”, and a reminder to keep fulfillment of it at the top of the
list throughout the project. This also ties into another text we are reading
for class, Aubrey Malphurs Advanced Strategic Planning. “Laying a
spiritual formation is foundational to strategic envisioning. Zechariah 4:6 6 Then he said to [a]me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, saying, ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of armies. Spiritual
formation connects God with the strategic planning process and then its ministry
product or model, and it must undergird the entire process” (Malphurs, 79).
I know I’m not perfect, none of us are, but when we’re
feeling inadequate, we need to remember that God chooses flawed people as leaders
– He chooses and uses us despite our shortcomings. In fact, he uses our
shortcomings and our past experiences to prepare us or suit us for certain tasks.
“Have confidence in God’s placement and bring all of who you are to the task at
hand.”
Reading about ministering effectively during unhealthy
conflict, and what happens when there is unhealthy conflict made me think about
some conflicts that I have seen in churches. There are often illustrations shared
in class that make me think of a specific conflict from my childhood. My family
attended a local church, which at that time was a neighborhood church that was
healthy, but not gigantic. This was still the era when Southern Baptist pastors
didn’t stay. They came for a few years, and then moved on. In this case it was
definitely not that they didn’t love Wyoming or wanted to be somewhere else. He
has passed away, but she is 93, and in our frequent phone conversations she
often talks about how much she loves Wyoming and misses all of us. That’s not
necessarily relevant to the story, just some context.
During the search for a new pastor, the church had an interim
pastor who stepped into shepherd the congregation for a time. The search
committee and I guess the body agreed that they would not consider this interim
pastor as an applicant for the position of pastor. I’m not sure on all the
details, because I was 8, and I just know some of what happened, and what I’ve
been told in the years since. Several
months, maybe even longer, went by, and some of the church members who had been
praying earnestly really began to feel led to call the man who was serving as
the interim pastor. It was a bitter battle, led by one individual in particular
who absolutely refused to budge on the initial agreement, and refused to even consider
that this could possibly be the person God had chosen. The church split. We
left and went to another local church, where we stayed until my folks left the area.
I know of other families who went to different area churches, and some who quit
going at all.
I guess I feel this story relates to this book, because it
was a Major Change, and there was definitely unhealthy conflict, and now I see
how a united purpose to accomplish God’s mission could have negated that, or at
least showed them how to work together for God’s goal, not just because “this
is what we decided”.
One of my favorite quotes from the book is “When God guides,
He provides.”
