Lead On Podcast

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, examines organizational barriers that can inhibit ministry growth. He identifies systems and practices that may be keeping a ministry from reaching more people and more effectively fulfilling God’s mission.

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Host
Jeff Iorg
President, SBC Executive Committee

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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.

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From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.

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Jeff Iorg:

Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. Thank you for joining me again as we continue our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. This is Jeff Iorg, president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, welcoming you again to our continuing conversation about what it means to manage the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows of ministry leadership today. Well, last week on the podcast, I talked about some leadership barriers to ministry growth. Most of us want our ministries to grow.

Jeff Iorg:

And I mean by that numerical growth, we want more people to be involved. If we've got a ministry to children that has 20 children in it, we'd like for it to grow to 25. If we have a church with a 100, we'd sure like to see it have a 125. We want our ministries to grow. And yet there are many factors which mitigate against this, including as we talked about in past weeks, vision and vision casting and the absence of that process being done well.

Jeff Iorg:

And then last week, we followed that up with a discussion about leadership barriers to ministry or organizational growth, meaning what happens when you are the problem. And there are certain qualities or characteristics of you as a leader that actually become barriers to the growth you're trying

Jeff Iorg:

to achieve. Now today, I want to follow-up on this idea one more time and talk about some organizational or what I call system barriers to growth. In other words, if your system has certain limitations built into it, then it's only going to be able to grow to a certain amount and then it's not going to get any larger. No matter how hard you pray or how hard you work or how sound you're programming or how innovative your communication, you're just not going to break through if these systemic or organizational barriers are in place. So maybe, five or six of these today on the podcast.

Jeff Iorg:

The first barrier that is a system barrier is single cell mindset.

Jeff Iorg:

Single cell mindset

Jeff Iorg:

says, we all are in this together and all of us have to know each other all the time. The diagnostic question is really simple. In our organization, do we all have to know each other? In our church, do we all have to know each other? Now changing from a

Jeff Iorg:

single cell mindset to a multi cell

Jeff Iorg:

mindset seems like a simple thing to do on paper. You just draw more boxes and move people around, but

Jeff Iorg:

it's oh so much more difficult because people tend to think of themselves, especially in church context, as being a part of a family, a part of a gathering, part of a community where everyone knows everyone. But organizations that hold on to a single cell mindset can only get so large. And then the relational connections begin to fray, in some cases even to break down, and the organization will shed whatever pressure is producing that kind of friction to get back to a comfortable size where everyone can know each other all the time. Single cell mindset.

Jeff Iorg:

Okay, another barrier. It's related. Decision making methods.

Jeff Iorg:

If baked into your organization or baked into your system are decision making methods that go back to number one, single cell mindset, then you are going to have a very difficult time growing. So the diagnostic question is, do we all have to be part of every decision? Do we all,

Jeff Iorg:

do all of us have to be part of every decision? Now,

Jeff Iorg:

many organizations, particularly churches, have either rules driven or relationship driven

Jeff Iorg:

governance because we all have to be a part of every decision.

Jeff Iorg:

So rules driven governance is we have this comprehensive set of bylaws and operational manual and information about how things are to be done, what's allowed, what's not, etcetera, in our organization. And then, seemingly on the opposite of that, but not really, just a different version of that, is what I call relationship driven decision making. That's where decisions are not made by the rules, they're just made by the relationships. Well, we know what brother so and so thinks, and we know what grandma and grandpa think, and we know what this person believes, and those are the key people, and I'm in relationship with them, and we've talked it through, and now we got it

Jeff Iorg:

all worked out. Well, did the organization ever decide that or vote on that or determine that? Not really. No need to because all the key people in the right relationships are all on board. So rules driven and relationship driven governance can only be practiced in smaller organizations.

Jeff Iorg:

They can only be practiced in smaller organizations because that's where you can preserve the rules and that's where you can maintain the relationships. It is not possible to have governance, meaning decision making based on rules or relationships in a very large or growing ministry organization. It simply is not possible. It's important then to think about, well, what kind of decision making is required in a growing organization? Well, it's mission driven and delegated decision making.

Jeff Iorg:

In other words, in a large organization, what drives the decisions is not the rules in the

Jeff Iorg:

relationships, it's the mission. And then out

Jeff Iorg:

of that mission, there's delegated decision making, meaning decisions are delegated out to subgroups within the organization with the confidence that those decisions will be made in light of and in support of the mission. So you can have an almost unlimited number of people involved in your movement if they are consistently making the decisions based on the mission of the movement. And along with that, if they are making decisions that are then delegated out throughout the organization so that many more people are making decisions and are empowered to make decisions to keep the organization moving. Now, I made a very significant mistake early on in ministry because I did not understand the first barrier, single cell mindset, and the second barrier, decision making methods, and how they interplayed with one another. So I'm in

Jeff Iorg:

my first pastorate and it's going well and the church is growing and we decided we'd reached a point where we had more than saturated the use of our facility on a Sunday morning and we needed to go to two worship services. And so we did that. We worked hard, laid the groundwork, recruited the leaders, and opened an 08:30 service to go along with our 10:45 service. It went really well, really well. The early service thrived.

Jeff Iorg:

More people started being reached by the two services. It was awesome. And we went along like this for several months. And then we came to our church business meeting. First one we'd had in a while, and, some important decisions had to be made, and

Jeff Iorg:

we publicized it widely in both morning worship services that we would be having an all church business meeting and that we needed to come together to make some important decisions about the budget and other things going forward into the future. Well, we arrived at that meeting and I stood up as pastor and said, well, we have some proposals to consider tonight, and the first one is one that I have generated that relates to the ministry of the church, blah blah blah, and I put it before the church,

Jeff Iorg:

this idea. And immediately,

Jeff Iorg:

some tension erupted as people started asking questions about the presentation.

Jeff Iorg:

And I realized fairly quickly what was happening. People who had never met each other were trying to make decisions together.

Jeff Iorg:

And when people who had come into our church either through conversion or through transfer growth in the previous few months, who had an allegiance to me or a commitment to me as their pastor, saw me walk into a meeting with a lot of people they'd never met before and then question my input or my perspective or my recommendations.

Jeff Iorg:

Well, that was a challenging

Jeff Iorg:

meeting. But the bigger picture was it was a challenging meeting because while I had moved us away from a single cell mindset, we all have to know each other by all attending the same worship service. Now we're in multiple services and multiple Sunday schools and home groups. We've changed and moved away from our single set mindset, but we kept making decisions on a relationship driven governance.

Jeff Iorg:

Up until that time, we would have conversations with each other prior to the meetings. Leaders would have conversations among themselves. We'd come to the meeting,

Jeff Iorg:

and it would be relatively calm because there's strong relational connections that facilitated group decision making. When you take those relationships away and just put a bunch of people in a room, they don't even know each other, they've never met each other, they're just then told that they're all members of the same church because they attend different services and they came into the church at different times, they just don't have that relational base which makes relational driven decision making possible. And so we had conflict, but we also recognized that night we got to step back and reinvent our governance and our governance procedures and expectations to match up with the mindset of our church, which is no longer a single cell but is now a multicell mindset. So barrier one, single cell mindset. Barrier two, decision making methods.

Jeff Iorg:

Barrier three.

Jeff Iorg:

The third barrier to organizational growth is what I'll call institutional preservation. Institutional preservation. The diagnostic question is this, what matters more, legacy or mission? Now these are not polar opposites in their level of importance. They're more things that are close to each other on a spectrum.

Jeff Iorg:

Legacy does matter, just not quite as much as mission. So what causes institutions to grow slowly if they're too focused on institutional preservation? That's one of the problems.

Jeff Iorg:

Institutional preservation means that you are more focused on maintenance than mission. And despite all your high sounding statements about how much you believe in God's mission and how

Jeff Iorg:

much you want to participate in God's mission, when it comes down to making hard decisions about allocating personnel and money, it goes toward maintenance. I saw a beautiful and sad example of this a number of years ago in the Pacific Northwest. We had a church that had been a very strong church but had peaked and was in some decline. They wanted to call a new pastor and so they did, and the one they called seemed perfect to me. He was old enough that the legacy members of the church, those who'd been around a long time, would respect him and I hoped to follow him.

Jeff Iorg:

But he

Jeff Iorg:

was young enough that he still had the passion and vision necessary to reach younger families. Well, he had

Jeff Iorg:

been at the church for a year or so. He called me and asked if I would come as a guest speaker, then he said, and also after you speak, I wonder if we

Jeff Iorg:

could spend some time, over lunch on Sunday and just talk about, what I'm facing here at the church. Well, sure, that sounded normal to me. I've done that with pastors for several decades now. Went to the church, walked in and thought, man,

Jeff Iorg:

I was not expecting this. This church needs a pretty significant, remodel. I walked back through the preschool area and the younger children's area, it was clean, but man was it dated. Very out of touch with what was going on today in church ministry to preschool children. Well, I went on into the worship service, when I stepped into the auditorium, I

Jeff Iorg:

was just shocked, really. I mean, shag carpet and some chandeliers that had been around a while, and I thought, man, this this entire facility just looks worn out. You know, it it looks like it's about 30 or 40 years old and hasn't had really much done except kept clean for all these years. So I preached to the service and it was well attended and things went well. I left when we went for lunch and I said, man, your church is interesting.

Jeff Iorg:

You seem to be reaching a a number of young families. And he said, well, we're we're doing a

Jeff Iorg:

little bit of that. But we

Jeff Iorg:

got some barriers. You maybe saw them. Our preschool and our children's areas are are just not really conducive to modern ministry to children. And I said, well, I could see that's a bit of a problem. And he said, then the worship area, you were in it as well.

Jeff Iorg:

You you saw that it's, you know, it's fine, but it's just out of touch. It's out of date. It it communicates 1950 or 1960,

Jeff Iorg:

'60, not not the the the day. I said, yeah, I I I feel that. He said, you know, buildings aren't a total barrier to reaching people, but when young families come to our church, what they experience in the worship center and in the children's ministry area, the preschool particularly, is just not good.

Jeff Iorg:

We need, he said, to make some pretty significant shifts in terms of our facility in order to support the aggressive work we need to do to start reaching dozens and dozens of young families again. And I said, well, man, that's gonna be tough to do because, you know, the resources, the money that's gonna take to get that done. And he said, oh, no. That's not

Jeff Iorg:

a problem. I said, excuse me? He said, it's just not a problem, Jeff. He said, we've got about $400,000 in an account that our church has saved. Now this was twenty five years ago everybody, so that's a

Jeff Iorg:

lot of money back then. Still a lot of money today, there's really a lot more money back then.

Jeff Iorg:

I said, You have $400,000 He said, Oh yeah. I said, well, man, this is not that complicated. You need to spend some of that bringing your facilities into the twenty first century to support the work that you're trying to do to reach this community. And he said, I've been saying that for months now, but I don't see it happening.

Jeff Iorg:

And if it doesn't happen, I don't see a

Jeff Iorg:

future here for us long term. I said, well, what's the resistance? And he said, well, a number of people in our church are the ones who built this facility originally, and their phrase is this, it was good enough for our family. It's good enough for families today. Legacy.

Jeff Iorg:

It's our legacy that's on the

Jeff Iorg:

line here. Because this was good enough for our families, it ought to still be good enough for families today.

Jeff Iorg:

And the idea of changing anything

Jeff Iorg:

really struck at their sense

Jeff Iorg:

of legacy and investment and of building something that they thought would be a permanent fixture in what it required to reach people. I'm sad to say that story did not have a good ending. That very effective pastor gave it another year or two, and then finally walked away. Not because he was upset or because the relationships were bad or because he was totally ineffective, but because he knew they had an organizational barrier to growth. It was institutional preservation.

Jeff Iorg:

They valued maintenance over mission. They wanted legacy,

Jeff Iorg:

not mission. And because of this, the church not only lost a good pastor, but then went into decline for which they really never recovered. Well, a fourth barrier, a systems or an organizational barrier, is what I call rules limiting involvement. Rules limiting involvement. And the diagnostic question is this, can outsiders be part of our inside operation?

Jeff Iorg:

Now when I say rules limiting involvement, I'm not necessarily meaning here that you have a drawn up list of rules that are keeping people from participating in your ministry or of being a part of it. I'm talking about the unspoken rules almost, the things that everyone seems to know. And when any of them are violated, there's a negative reaction back that really limits and inhibits large numbers of people freely and with enthusiasm joining a church or a movement.

Jeff Iorg:

Can outsiders be part of our inside operation? You know, we had this experience a few years ago. We we moved into a community and joined a new church, and we struggled. We struggled the first year because we couldn't figure out what was going on. Because one of the unspoken rules of that church was that information was shared and it was shared relationally and through the connectivity of the congregation more so than even shared publicly or through the formal communication channels.

Jeff Iorg:

Now it was there, but not at the level of detail that everyone else seemed to know. And it took us a while to understand that relational connections and plugging into the, if you would, grapevine of that church was essential. And I actually, after we became members there and we're stabilized in what we were doing, had some very frank conversations with the pastors. And they were very receptive to what I said because the two lead pastors had been there a long time. They they didn't even realize how this system had grown in their church to where now, unless you were really somehow relationally connected, you really didn't know everything that was really going on in terms of how the church functioned and operated.

Jeff Iorg:

And to their credit, they took some strong strides to become much better at that kind of communication. But rules limiting involvement means that there's rules and sometimes unspoken rules that hold people back from being involved.

Jeff Iorg:

Is your organization what I would call a closed system or an open system of involvement? Is it hard to get involved in your church or your organization,

Jeff Iorg:

or is it relatively easy to connect and find your place in that community? You know, when I moved to plant a church in Oregon, I had thought a lot about this issue of rules limiting involvement and wanted specifically to not have that be a part of what we were as a new church. You know, when you're a new church, you you don't have any anybody to do anything. There there's not even anyone to be an usher or a greeter or anyone to help with the setup or the takedown or certainly to teach a class or anything like that. Maybe there's a small cadre of Christians that come along to help you with some of these core things, but very quickly, you gotta have a lot more people involved.

Jeff Iorg:

So we made a decision, and this will be a controversial decision for some of you, but we made a decision that if it did not involve communicating the doctrine of our church, that we would allow people from the community, including some non Christians, to be engaged with us and to get involved in our church before they were members. Now we drew a

Jeff Iorg:

line, a very firm line. No one had an opportunity to communicate or to teach or in any way represent the church and what it believed. This included singing, it included praying, it included speaking or teaching, but there are a lot of other roles that do not involve the doctrine of the church or standing firm or clear on the doctrine of a church. And we made the decision that we would not make a lot of rules that would prohibit people from being involved. And as a church planter, this proved to be one of my most important decisions because it allowed me to let people get involved in our church even before they became members of our church, and in many cases, even before they became Christians.

Jeff Iorg:

Now the most stirring example of this is, of course, my friend Steve. The first Sunday that our church had practice church, we weren't even having church yet. The first Sunday that we ever set up in a public school auditorium, we told our little handful of people, we've got to see if we can actually do this and we'll practice it this Sunday. And then next Sunday, we'll start inviting people. But the first Sunday, let's just keep this quiet and let's see if we can actually do this one Sunday before we open to the community.

Jeff Iorg:

Well, there was a family in our church that just couldn't wait, so they invited their friends that were not yet Christians that they so desperately wanted to come to Jesus. They invited their friends to come to our church and they did. They came on practice church Sunday. This fellow walks in, he's kind of looking around like, What am I doing here? And I said, Hey, I'm Jeff.

Jeff Iorg:

And he said, I'm Steve. And I said, Man, I'm glad you came today. Just to be honest with you, really wasn't expecting a lot of company today or a lot of guests today because we're just kind of getting started. He said, Yeah, I know, I heard that. My friends invited me and my wife and we just want to check it out anyway.

Jeff Iorg:

We've never been to church before. Never heard of anybody starting a church and we definitely never thought we'd ever go to a church in a school, man. This is crazy. And I'm like, yeah,

Jeff Iorg:

I know. I know. So I

Jeff Iorg:

talked to him for a little while longer and explained what we were doing and why. I said, hey, listen. I said, I know you just came to check it out today, but I wonder if you'd like to help me today. And he said, I guess. What do you need?

Jeff Iorg:

And I said, I need you to be my sound operator today. He's like, you're what? I said, I need a

Jeff Iorg:

sound guy. He said, man, I don't know.

Jeff Iorg:

And I said, yeah, yeah, look, let me show you what I need. So I walked him over to this table and we had super basic sound system. I mean, this is a church plant with no money. All right? We barely got a microphone.

Jeff Iorg:

I said, You see this little board right here? You see that red button? When I walk up there and pick up that microphone and kind of nod to you, I just need you to turn that button on, And at the end

Jeff Iorg:

of the service, if you don't mind, just turn it off. He's like, yeah, I can do that for you. So he pulled up a chair at the soundboard, first Sunday. He'd ever walked on the property.

Jeff Iorg:

I got up there and I nodded to him. He pushed me he pushed on the button, kind of leaned back across his arms like, well, got that done. Well, a few months later, he was our first convert

Jeff Iorg:

in Oregon. Man, no rules limiting involvement. Now I'm ask that guy

Jeff Iorg:

to preach a sermon or get up and say a prayer or give his testimony or somehow teach a Sunday school class, but what would keep a non Christian from turning on a soundboard for you? And in those early months, we used a lot of non Christians for a lot of things. We let them be on our setup crew. We let them hand out bulletins on the sidewalk outside. When people would come and say, hey, this is really something.

Jeff Iorg:

I said, well, you want to

Jeff Iorg:

get involved? You want help us out? Yeah, I guess. Well, let me give you a job. When you're here on Sundays, do this job for us.

Jeff Iorg:

If you want to

Jeff Iorg:

stay and help afterwards, we got to tear this whole thing down and put it in the truck. So, yeah, I can I can do that? Rules limiting involvement. Now I'm not saying there are no rules. I'm just asking you to think through what rules do you really need.

Jeff Iorg:

And I believe very strongly that there have to be some pretty hard lines drawn on who represents the church where it's doctrine or it's teaching or it's communication of spiritual truth are involved. I have no problem holding those lines and there are some rules there that have to be in place.

Jeff Iorg:

But if you've got too many rules that are always limiting involvement, you're always telling people, don't sit there, don't eat there, don't go there. What you're telling people is there's a lot of insider rules here and that's gonna hold you back from reaching more and more people. Well, let me just give you one more, and that is you may have a organizational barrier of what I call a poor self image. So the diagnostic question is, how do we see ourselves? Did you know that organizations develop a way of seeing themselves that really is pervasive and really mitigates against growth in so many cases.

Jeff Iorg:

I moved to my first pastorate. It was a working man's blue collar church. We reached a lot

Jeff Iorg:

of people that were in that strata. Good It in that regard. I had half a dozen college graduates in a congregation of two or 300. One day, a young man came to visit our church with his family. He was the youngest bank president ever in the history of our city that anybody could remember.

Jeff Iorg:

He was a remarkable young guy and a very committed Christian and a Baptist.

Jeff Iorg:

Came to visit our church,

Jeff Iorg:

and he and I were similar age, a lot of things about us that we, you know, get connected, and

Jeff Iorg:

and, he came back that second Sunday to visit and had

Jeff Iorg:

a great time. When he left, I was standing on the porch as he drove away with our deacon chairman. I said, Man, it's great to have that guy here, bank president coming, that's awesome. And the spiritual impact he can make in our church and the financial impact, of course, would be helpful as well. And the deacon chairman looked at me and said, Hey, he's not going

Jeff Iorg:

to come here. He's going to join, and he'd named another church. And I said, Why do you say that? And he said, Well, because he's that church's kind

Jeff Iorg:

of people. He's really not going to fit in here. Well, a few weeks later, my my new friend came back to church and visit again, and he said, Jeff, I I just need to tell

Jeff Iorg:

you straight up. I I love so much about your church so much, but despite having been

Jeff Iorg:

here two or three times now, we just don't feel like we we fit, that we can connect here. And he I wished him the best as he went off to another church, and I've stayed in contact with him for all these years in one way or the other as he's continued to faithfully serve the Lord now for the decades. But he didn't connect with us because the image of who we were was so pervasive that when someone came to us that was really very different than who we were, they had a subtle sense of rejection, a subtle lack of enthusiasm, a subtle sense that you just don't really fit here. And while there was no overt action to keep people from coming, there was just a sense of it that was so clearly communicated. Now, this is a tough one to change because you have to change how you see yourself.

Jeff Iorg:

And it can change, but it changes slowly over time as you work with people to envision a future that's different than perhaps they've ever had before. Well, for the last two weeks on the podcast, we've been talking about organizational growth and what holds it back. Last week, talked about leader style issues and leader style barriers that prohibit growth. Today, we've talked about organizational barriers, things baked into the system that can hold you back. Look, you can go to all the conferences and seminars you want to, read all the books you need, you can preach and pray and do all the work necessary.

Jeff Iorg:

But if you don't go to work addressing some organizational issues, taking down some of these barriers, then all the effort you're putting into it just won't produce the results you need. So, I challenge you. As a part of thinking about how to achieve growth, work on leadership barriers to growth and organizational barriers to growth. Think about these kind of systemic, baked in issues as you diagnose what it's really going to take to change your organization and to change yourself, to position yourself for real growth. These are hard things to do, but I know you'll work on it as you lead on.