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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the crucial discipline of keeping a church focused on its core mission. He shares practical steps for pastors and church leaders to help their leadership teams avoid mission drift, ensuring they fulfill their calling with clarity and impact.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Orge, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, carrying on our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Well, ideas for the podcast come from different sources. I recently, did a retreat for the staff of a larger church in the Western United States. And as a part of that retreat, I was so impressed with some of what I experienced there that it connected with some other ideas I've already talked about on the podcast in the past, but caused me to come up with some new material that I wanna share with you today.
Jeff Iorg:I wanna talk with you about maintaining mission discipline for pastors. Now, I know I've talked about this before, but usually in the context of organizational leadership or more general leadership ideas. But I wanna talk more specifically about maintaining mission discipline for pastors and for church leaders. And I want my comments today to really focus on local church strategies for maintaining mission discipline. Now, where the church comes in that I recently did the staff retreat, the pastor's been there a long time.
Jeff Iorg:The church is very focused on its mission and accomplishing what God intends for it to do. And I walked away from that experience so impressed with their mission discipline. And then during the couple of days I was with them, asked a lot of questions about how they created it, how they've maintained it, how
Jeff Iorg:they facilitate it. And quite frankly, their
Jeff Iorg:response back to me was, well, we're not really all that good at this, what you're talking about, and we're learning so much from what you're saying that we need to do better. So it was interesting to see their humility in the moment, but at the same time, the model of effectiveness that they really are. So let's talk about it today.
Jeff Iorg:Pastoral leadership to stay focused on your mission in a typical Baptist church.
Jeff Iorg:The first step is this.
Jeff Iorg:You have to clearly articulate your mission.
Jeff Iorg:Now, the mission of the church is the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment. Now, how you say that, may be much shorter than those two longer sections of scripture, but that's really what we're talking about. How do you fulfill the great commission that Jesus gave us in the spirit of the great commandment of loving God and loving people that he also, left us? Now what's interesting to me, when I say clearly articulate, that may not even be the best choice of words because articulate means that you verbally say it. What I really am trying to communicate is you have to clearly own, clearly possess, clearly have inculcated in you your mission.
Jeff Iorg:Now, when I teach this in, you know, classroom context,
Jeff Iorg:I say that a mission statement is a one sentence statement of your reason to exist, your reason for being. It's a one declarative sentence that states why you're here. Now, what was interesting to me was this church where I recently was speaking doesn't have
Jeff Iorg:what I define as a mission statement. They do not have a one sentence declarative statement of their reason to exist. I went to their website and I found what they call a vision statement, which is a much longer document, and it was spelled out in some detail. I went back to the pastor and said, do you have a one sentence statement of your church's mission that's clearly articulated anywhere that I've missed? He said, no.
Jeff Iorg:We we really don't have that. We've put much more focus on the vision to fulfill what we believe is our mission, is the great commission. So here's what I learned from that experience. It's more important that your church leaders and your church itself embrace your mission than that you have it written down in one cute sentence that I would say a plus four on a seminary test. Now, that's hard for me to say because I am such a strong proponent of writing this thing down, this thing called mission.
Jeff Iorg:But what I learned from this experience was if you have a clearly articulated mission that you've been, in this case, articulating because this pastor's been there a long time for more than thirty years, this is what we do. And you express that mission in a longer vision statement which you're trying to get people to live up to and live out, then the culture that you've created around the mission that you
Jeff Iorg:have becomes strong enough to propel you forward without that single sentence statement. However, having cited this one example, I can
Jeff Iorg:tell you conclusively that there are far more organizations that are thriving with mission discipline because they have identified a clearly articulated mission than there are those like the one I've just described. So I wanna challenge you to clearly articulate your mission. Now, I've been saying in a sentence, but let me also challenge you to think about doing it in either a slogan or a symbol. Now, slogans and symbols can be helpful if they emerge out of the statement of your mission rather than try to control or influence the statement of your mission. So for example, when I teach about preaching, I'm often asked about alliteration.
Jeff Iorg:You know, starting all your main points with the same letter. I'm asked, should we do that? And the answer is yes and no. If alliteration emerges naturally out of the text, go ahead and do it. But if your alliteration causes you to force the text to say something that it really doesn't say, then don't do it.
Jeff Iorg:Same thing with a symbol or a slogan about your mission. If you can sloganize or symbolize your mission statement in some concrete way that really lodges in people's minds, go ahead
Jeff Iorg:and do it. But don't come up
Jeff Iorg:with a slogan or a
Jeff Iorg:symbol and then try to force that to fit your mission. I'll give you
Jeff Iorg:an example of this using symbols. There's a church again in California. I've spoken a few times. They have a greeting time in their worship service like many churches do, and the pastor stands up and says, welcome to our church. We are a church that does these things.
Jeff Iorg:And when he says that, four quadrants on the screen light up with four different symbols, and he talks about the four things their church does. I can't remember the exact ones this morning, but on the podcast today, but they're like, you know, the things you'd expect, witness, disciple, serve, mission, these kinds of words. So he stands up and says, these are the four things our church does. And when he says those four words, rather than the words coming up on the screen, the symbols come up on the screen. And those symbols forming a a square, four symbols, you know, like
Jeff Iorg:in a quadrant of of a square, they're on their website, they're on
Jeff Iorg:their church Sunday bulletin, they're on everything pretty much that their church puts out. That symbol is there. And so if you're there very long, you learn what those symbols mean and what those words mean and how key those words are to the mission of the
Jeff Iorg:church. So the first step in mission discipline is to have
Jeff Iorg:a clearly articulated mission that's usually best done in a single sentence, which states in declarative fashion why you exist or your reason for being or the reason you're here. And then you can use a slogan or a symbol to enhance people's remembering of this mission and using it going forward. The second step you can take as a local church leader in enhancing mission discipline is to use your mission statement in decision making. In other words, don't let it be just a slogan on a wall or something on a slide or or even something that you use, you know, in a in a Sunday service with these symbols that I've been describing, But bring your mission statement to meetings. I can think of several examples over the years in my pastoral ministry where this happened, but one I've told many times because it's so revealing of my own misunderstanding about this issue.
Jeff Iorg:When I planted the church in Oregon, I wanted pretty early on to get more people involved in the in the decision making of the church. Because from the very beginning, I wanted to build an organization that would outlast me no matter how long I stayed there. And so about the second year into the church, I felt like it was important for the church to be involved in in in developing its budget. So I pulled together five people, and one of them was a young businessman who was the manager of a franchised business in our area. He was a Christian.
Jeff Iorg:He had graduated from a Christian university. Very young a very promising young man. I asked him to chair this budget task force. So I brought them into my office and said, here, let me train you how to do this. So I spent about an hour training this task force on how to create a church budget.
Jeff Iorg:When I finished, I said, do you have any questions? And this young man
Jeff Iorg:said, well, not so much
Jeff Iorg:a question, but just a statement. That's not really how I thought we would do it. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, brother, amateur hour. Okay. And, you know, not very condescending but a little bit.
Jeff Iorg:I said, okay, well, how would you like to do it? And he said, well, you know, when when our church was planted, we had a
Jeff Iorg:really clearly stated mission. And every new member class for the last two years, pastor, I know you've taught that mission to every new member, and we highlight it a lot and talk about it a
Jeff Iorg:lot in different contexts and different places. I said, yeah. He said, so here's how I
Jeff Iorg:thought we would develop the budget. I thought we'd just ask all the people that lead different ministries to submit their budget request and tell us what they wanted to do with the money. And the things that they asked for that are really directly connected to our mission, we put those in the budget.
Jeff Iorg:And the things that really aren't as directly connected, we just leave those out. I sat there thinking, wow. That is brilliant and better than what
Jeff Iorg:I just rolled out for a methodology. So I said, all right, let's let's try that.
Jeff Iorg:And that's what they did. And they came back with
Jeff Iorg:a budget that I thought was pretty unrealistic, honestly. I forget the exact number, it was like 22, 23% over the previous year's budget. And I thought there is no possible way that we're gonna be able to make this work. But I had committed to letting this budget committee do their work and make their presentation, and so they did. And then when they made their presentation, they said the same things I've just said to you.
Jeff Iorg:This is our budget because everything in this budget seemed like it was essential to our mission for this next year. Based on everything you guys told us and the things we left out, we just didn't think were that essential. The thing was passed overwhelmingly, and then to my great surprise and delight, the giving poured in the following year, and we exceeded that budget.
Jeff Iorg:And I walked away from that experience gripped again with this reality. Let mission drive decision making. Ask the hard questions of how every aspect of a decision will fulfill the mission of your church, and then decide accordingly. Use your mission in decision making. Third.
Jeff Iorg:A third thing you
Jeff Iorg:can do as a church leader is to control the agenda of meetings you lead. Now I know what you're thinking. I can't control what gets said in a meeting?
Jeff Iorg:Didn't say that. I said, control the agenda of the meetings you lead for your church. Now here are some examples. You you lead the largest meeting your church has every week. It's called your worship service.
Jeff Iorg:Control the agenda of that service. You lead staff meetings, committee meetings, deacons meetings, elders meetings.
Jeff Iorg:These are the kinds of meetings that leaders have in churches. And while you cannot control everything that's said in these meetings, and I wouldn't even encourage you to try, you can set the agenda and say, these are the priorities that I wanna talk about in this meeting because they all relate directly to the mission. This is our mission, and this is what we wanna magnify in this worship service, in this committee meeting, in this deacons meeting, in this elders meeting. These issues are what we're going to put on the agenda because these issues are germane to our mission.
Jeff Iorg:Now stepping out of the local church context for a minute, I've been
Jeff Iorg:doing this for years and that is working hard to control the agenda of meetings I lead. That's why a lot of things that are going on in our world today, including our denomination and our culture and and all around us, don't make it to the agenda of meetings that I lead. Because when I call
Jeff Iorg:a meeting, it's about the mission of the organization. You're a church leader.
Jeff Iorg:You do lead meetings. You lead worship services. You lead staff meetings. You lead committee meetings. You lead deacons and elders meetings.
Jeff Iorg:You lead meetings. Set the agenda by the mission. Don't set the agenda by talking about your critics, by talking about current events, by talking about social media posts. Don't set your agenda by talking about things that are not really directly connected to your mission, but fill out your agenda with mission driven issues. And you may say, well, yeah, but there's a few things that we need to deal with that really aren't that connected to the mission.
Jeff Iorg:They're sort of ancillary. They just have to take be taken care of. Like, in the wintertime, the parking lot has to be cleared from snow, and I I get all that. I'm saying nothing goes on there that's not on an agenda that's not directly related to the mission or in some way supportive of the mission. And if something is even ancillary to the mission, you can still put that on as long as you don't put anything on the agenda that is contrary to or distracting from your mission.
Jeff Iorg:That's what you're trying to avoid. Things that are contrary to or distracting from your mission, don't get on the agendas. And if someone brings one up in a meeting, you can say, hey, thanks for bringing that up. Maybe we can talk about that offline after the meeting. Let's get back to the agenda.
Jeff Iorg:Let's go
Jeff Iorg:on to number four. Keep focused on mission. And then number four,
Jeff Iorg:to stay mission driven, mission disciplined, you have to communicate consistently and persistently about your mission. Communicate consistently and persistently. Now when I say consistently, I mean use the same language. That's why I like a written statement because it helps you to say the same thing over and over and over and over again. Then persistently means not only do you say consistently the same thing over and over again, but you say it repeatedly in different locations, in different places, at different times, but you stay persistent in the communication.
Jeff Iorg:Now, here's the problem that you have as a leader with consistent and persistent communication about your mission and that is you get tired of talking about it. I know that there are times when I get tired of saying the same thing over and over again. And I think, why am I continuing to say this? Surely, they all have it by now. Well, hard reality is they don't because here's what's happening.
Jeff Iorg:You're speaking to a group of people, and while you're speaking to that group of people, some people in that group are not listening. Some people are distracted. Some people are zoning in on every other word, and a few people are getting it. Then the next then thirty minutes later or an hour or two hours later, you're in front of a different group. You're sharing over coffee with some with a small group or you're talking about a with a family about your church, and you're going over the same thing again, and you're having a different audience.
Jeff Iorg:And then the next night or the next day or the next night and the next day, it just goes on
Jeff Iorg:and on like this. And you can easily get tired of saying the same thing consistently over and over again, persistently, and start to drift into other things. But here's what you're missing. Your audience is not the same every day. And even when you have people that are in the same audience more than once, they're not all listening fully
Jeff Iorg:every time you communicate. So communicate consistently and persistently about the mission. Let it be the one thing you talk about all the time in every place in every way so that people expect when they see you coming, they're gonna hear about the mission of your church. Now beyond that, I want you to think about your consistent and persistent communication in two venues. First, in what I call formal venues.
Jeff Iorg:This is what happens in the meetings, in the sermons, in the blogs, on social media. These are the places where you are formally and intentionally communicating. Make sure
Jeff Iorg:you're on your mission. But now the informal areas, the informal venues. This is what happens in the hallway after the meeting. Now, you may not fully grasp how important this is unless you think about your own way of accessing information. But a lot of times, the meeting will take place and then everyone goes out in the hallway and has the post meeting
Jeff Iorg:and people talk about real issues out there or what's really on their minds out there. When you go into a formal venue of a meeting in your church, you have to talk about the mission consistently and persistently. When you walk out in the hall after,
Jeff Iorg:same thing. Stay on mission. Now, a part
Jeff Iorg:of this is that you have to learn to absorb and deflect distractions to your mission. When you have a distraction to your mission come up in a meeting or in a hallway conversation, you don't magnify that by saying, oh, Let me tell you about that. Oh, yeah. I saw that on social media.
Jeff Iorg:Oh, yeah. I heard what they're saying about us. You don't do that. Instead, you say, you know, I
Jeff Iorg:hear you on that, but what I'm really focused on is this. You know, I hear you on that, but what I'm trying
Jeff Iorg:to accomplish is this. That's what I mean by absorb and deflect. You don't take in
Jeff Iorg:and magnify, you absorb and deflect distractions to your mission. So here's what we learned so far, to stay mission disciplined. Clearly articulate your mission, use your mission statement in decision making, control the agenda of meetings you lead, and communicate consistently and persistently about your mission.
Jeff Iorg:Number five, promote people who support your mission. Now when I say promote,
Jeff Iorg:I don't mean give them a raise and a bigger title. What I mean in church life is to promote them by emphasizing them, by referencing them, by encouraging people to follow them. So for example, the books you ask people to read, the leaders you invite in to speak, the kinds of conferences you take people to.
Jeff Iorg:These are things that ought to all, again, support your mission, that feed into and support what you're trying to get accomplished in fulfilling the mission that God has given you. Promote people who support your mission. Now number six. Now it gets a little harder. Eliminate activity that does not fulfill your mission.
Jeff Iorg:I think you probably know the second hardest thing to do in a Baptist church is to start something new. The hardest thing to do in a Baptist church is to end something old. To say, this program just doesn't work as as it used to. This this approach just isn't as effective as it as it once was. This method just isn't retrieving the results that we need.
Jeff Iorg:And because of that, we need to stop. Now, I wanna challenge you to watch out for your personal favorites on this issue and only be willing to stop those things that you personally don't like, especially if you're older like me. Listen, if I was evaluating what goes on in the typical church by what I liked and what communicated with me and what met my needs, a lot of
Jeff Iorg:things would stop and a lot of things would change. But I've had to come to reality. I'm not 35 anymore, and I don't think like a 35 year old. And I am not sure that I am the best authority on what it takes to reach a generation of people between the ages of 25
Jeff Iorg:and 45 these days. But people that live in that generation, they do know. And so I'm not willing to stop or start things based on my personal perspective. I wanna get something more concrete and that is data. I wanna actually look at some facts.
Jeff Iorg:Now, if you're going to stop an activity in your church, a program, an emphasis, a method, you got to have some reasons why. And the reason can't be, well, I don't
Jeff Iorg:like it anymore, or it seems old fashioned, or I
Jeff Iorg:don't think it works. No. You gotta have some data. You gotta be able
Jeff Iorg:to say, spent this much money, we put in this many volunteer hours, and we achieved these results. And frankly, that doesn't seem like a good investment of our time and energy because the results we achieved either didn't relate to our mission or were so small in impact that we just felt like that we can do much better. Why is it that leaders in ministry organizations don't like data? Well, it's a couple. Number one, we don't like information because it doesn't make us look good.
Jeff Iorg:Sometimes it makes us look bad. You know, if you've been at a church for a few months, it's not your fault yet, but if you've been
Jeff Iorg:there ten years, it's on you. Getting the data out and asking hard questions like, how many people
Jeff Iorg:have we baptized in the last five years? And how many of those people truly came from the community, and how many of
Jeff Iorg:them came from within our church with our own children and teenagers? And
Jeff Iorg:when we spent this much money on this kind of mission, how many people actually resulted in coming to faith in Jesus? When we did this project that went into our community to accomplish this purpose, did it really accomplish the purpose? Looking at that kind of information can be hard because sometimes it just frankly doesn't make us look all that good. A second reason that we we don't like to look at data is because we think it's somehow sub spiritual. Like, well, we're not about numbers.
Jeff Iorg:We're we're we're about people. Well, I'm about people too, but numbers just tell us what we're doing with people. We're we're not all about the numbers, but somehow you have to quantify, you know, what you're doing. If you say, we have a discipleship process where we move people through these four steps of discipleship in our church. Well, logical question is, how many people have you moved
Jeff Iorg:through that process in the last five years, last year? How many people are currently involved in it?
Jeff Iorg:Are you changing that number every week or every month or every year toward the positive if that's your mission? So data, information, facts, some people don't like to look at them in church life because, frankly, it makes us look bad. But secondly, some people don't like to look at it because they
Jeff Iorg:feel like it's sub spiritual to really look at data to tell us what's happening in the lives of people. Well, look at the data, but beyond that,
Jeff Iorg:be willing to make the hard decisions, the hard decisions. Not based on your personal preferences or what you
Jeff Iorg:like or don't like, but the hard decisions about the mission. Is what we're doing, spending this money, this time, this energy, is it accomplishing the purpose of our mission? And if it is, let's keep doing it. But if it's not, let's take a giant step
Jeff Iorg:back and ask the hard question, what needs to change? Now, one of the things I've learned over the years is that good people given good information will often make good decisions. Now, there are always outliers, people that are cranky, bitter, mean spirited. Yes. I recognize that.
Jeff Iorg:But for the most part, the people in leadership in your church are good people. They, if given good information, will make good decisions.
Jeff Iorg:And so don't be afraid of looking at data, looking at information, and having the courage to make hard decisions to eliminate activity that isn't supporting your mission and to start new approaches that are fulfilling the mission more effectively. Now,
Jeff Iorg:finally, number seven, I want you to resist some positive positive
Jeff Iorg:mission drift factors. I wanna highlight two of them here on
Jeff Iorg:the podcast. There are some things that happen because we fulfill our mission
Jeff Iorg:that are so positive that they can get us off mission.
Jeff Iorg:Here's the first one, financial prosperity. Financial prosperity. You say, well,
Jeff Iorg:you must not been in our church because we don't have any extra money. I understand. Ministry money is always a challenge. But what happens when you are doing well financially? When you have more resources coming in than you have expenses to pay?
Jeff Iorg:What do you do?
Jeff Iorg:Well, this margin to play with can be very, very dangerous to the mission of your church because you might find yourself using the margin, this extra resource you have to do things that really aren't about the mission.
Jeff Iorg:Now I realize I'm focusing this all on church today, but I just have a illustration that's come to me recently that I can't pass up. An organization, a foundation that I have a relationship
Jeff Iorg:with really has a very clear and focused mission of raising money to support kingdom expansion purposes. And last year, they had an unbelievable year.
Jeff Iorg:They had over a million dollars more in resource that they earned from their investments and from their work than they had budget to spend and payout.
Jeff Iorg:A million dollars. So they asked themselves the question, what do we
Jeff Iorg:do with this? And, of course, they had some suggestions. Let's hire some more staff or let's fix this project or let's clean up this part of our building or let's do something like that. But ultimately, you know what they did?
Jeff Iorg:They gave it all away. All of it. They said our mission isn't any of
Jeff Iorg:these other things. Our mission is resourcing kingdom enterprise that is expanding God's kingdom. And we have certain ministries and certain programs that we see where there's tremendous advance being made for the gospel. So we're just gonna give them even more to help them do even more because they're so effective at what they do. Man, that made my heart sing because here was an organization that said we're not gonna spend it on ourselves.
Jeff Iorg:We're gonna spend it on our mission. Look. Financial windfall, financial success, financial extra, if you will, can be a positive, but also a positive cause of mission drift if it gets you off your focus. And then that often leads to something that's very closely related and that is what I call comfort demands and comfort driven decision making. So that you start spending money, time, and energy on your own comfort.
Jeff Iorg:Making your organization more comfortable to work in.
Jeff Iorg:Not more effective, just more comfortable. Making your church more comfortable. One of my sad illustrations of this is a church that built a new building, had a beautiful facility, and
Jeff Iorg:then decided to remodel part of it just a few years into it. When I asked them, Why why are you already remodeling that? They said, Well, we didn't feel like that part of our building really connected with the community and really wasn't all that appealing to people that we're trying to reach with the gospel. I said, Oh, okay. Okay.
Jeff Iorg:So after another year or so went by, I asked them, how has this gone for you spending all this money to redo this part of your building? How many dozens of people have you reached with the gospel that have come because of this? And the leader said, well, I don't I don't know if you ever really thought of it quite that way. I thought, no, of course you haven't because you really spent this for your own comfort. And if you spent it to appeal to consumer driven Christians who are looking for the next hot church, God help you.
Jeff Iorg:Listen, the typical lost person in your community is not sitting at home on their porch on Saturday night watching their kids play in the front yard thinking, you know, that Baptist church just had a nicer parking lot or that Baptist church just had a better foyer or that Baptist church just had, you know, newer bathrooms. We'd we'd go down there one Sunday. They're not thinking that at all. And yet, we spend money on these things, not saying we don't need them to be done, but let's don't justify them as part of the mission and let's definitely don't make them only a part of our comfort. Let's make them essential for what we do if they're necessary, but only essential for the functionality and the accomplishment of the mission, not our comfort.
Jeff Iorg:Well, you get the idea. Mission discipline matters a lot. Leaders must stay focused on mission. In the past, I've taught about this more from an organizational perspective. Today, I've tried to speak almost all of it about local church leadership.
Jeff Iorg:Brothers and sisters, you have a mission. It's the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment. You articulate that as best you can in your situation and then live it. And as you maintain mission discipline, God will narrow your focus but expand your reach. And I pray you do it today as you lead on.