Maintaining Mission Discipline - Part 1

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast-the first in a two-part series on Maintaining Mission Discipline-Jeff Iorg discusses why mission discipline is essential for ministry leaders. He explains how a clear, concise mission statement is the foundation for decision-making and unity within churches and organizations.

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Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:54

Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Thanks for joining me on the podcast as we continue this dialogue about the hard work of leading a church or ministry organization to expand God's kingdom. Today, I wanna talk with you about maintaining mission discipline, and in fact, I want to make two podcasts about this issue. Now this first podcast is going to be more of a leadership presentation about maintaining mission discipline.

Jeff Iorg: 01:29

And then on the next podcast, I wanna talk about really more from a spiritual perspective about how God works in our circumstances and actually in the midst of whatever circumstances we find ourselves to still accomplish his mission. But today, I wanna talk about maintaining mission discipline and some practical leadership things that you can do to keep yourself and your organization really focused on God's mission as it expresses itself through the mission of your church or organization. So let's start by defining what I mean by mission. A good mission statement is a one sentence statement of God's intention for your organization. A one sentence statement.

Jeff Iorg: 02:19

Now when I teach this in leadership seminars and have students work on writing their mission statement for their organization, I also give it these two limitations. It has to be a single declarative sentence with no commas and no conjunctions. A mission statement that has commas is really a summation of strategies, not a statement of mission. And a mission statement that has conjunctions, meaning and, and, and was generally written by a committee that really couldn't figure out what the organization was supposed to be doing, so they strung a

Jeff Iorg: 02:54

lot of things together and hoped for the best. That sounded a little harsh, didn't it? But I'm trying to get

Jeff Iorg: 03:00

you to think in terms of mission being that one declarative sentence, this is what we do. I would also encourage you to stay away from phrases like exists for or exists to. Just say it. For example, at the seminary that I formerly led, Gateway, we stated our mission this way. Our mission, shaping leaders who expand God's kingdom around the world.

Jeff Iorg: 03:24

That's what we do. Here at the executive committee, we say our mission, facilitating the work of Southern Baptist Convention and its entities. We are facilitators who work behind the scenes to make things happen. That's what we do. One sentence declarative statement without commas or conjunctions.

Jeff Iorg: 03:42

Now, the mission for the church is really pretty simple. It's the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment. But the mission for organizations might be a little more narrow than that. So don't automatically feel if your organization that you're leading is a Christian organization that its mission has to be the Great Commission. It may be a segment or a subset of that.

Jeff Iorg: 04:05

For example, when I was at the seminary, our subset was that we were a teaching organization that worked primarily on that part of God's great commission. And so you it's all right to have a mission that's more narrow than the broad mission of the church. And when you have the broad mission of the church, meaning the great commission and the spirit of the great commandment, you can still say that in ways that don't use those precise words. In fact, I would encourage you to state your mission in terms that any person can understand, not any Christian or any Christian scholar or any Christian wordsmith. In other words, use plain language to communicate your mission so that when you're communicating it not only to each other but also to a broader audience, that you can, state it very clearly.

Jeff Iorg: 04:55

Now, defining mission is one thing, but using it in your organization is a clarifying experience to keep your organization focused. So for example, identifying your organization's mission really is foundational to all other decision making. Going back again to the seminary, our mission was shaping leaders who expand God's kingdom around the world. Our mission was not really delivering graduate education. That was our strategy, or at least one of our primary strategies, but it wasn't our mission.

Jeff Iorg: 05:30

Starting churches wasn't our mission. Now training people to start churches was very much our mission, and so in the context in which we used them in internships or other training opportunities or other parts of our curriculum, yes, that was a part of our mission. But our mission really was focused narrowly on shaping leaders. And that mission, when it's essentially clear like that,

Jeff Iorg: 05:54

then becomes foundational to all other decision making. Now, one of the great moments in your organization, when you really know when you really know that your organization is mission driven is when in decision making meetings, you as the leader get challenged by your team

Jeff Iorg: 06:22

to set aside one of your own, quote unquote, good ideas because it's not part of the mission. I remember when this started happening at the seminary. I spent the first several years of my tenure as president articulating mission and calling the seminary to mission and teaching the seminary this simple phrase, the mission matters most, and challenging them to make decisions, budgeting decisions, scheduling decisions, personnel decisions, programming decisions, curricular decisions, every decision in light of the mission. And then and then

Jeff Iorg: 07:03

vice presidents and sometimes faculty members in decision making roles would hear me roll out a proposal or an idea or a thought, and they might ask, mister president, how exactly does that fit our mission? Is that something we should be doing?

Jeff Iorg: 07:25

Those were tough questions to hear because every one of my ideas is a good idea, and every one of my good ideas is something that we should be doing.

Jeff Iorg: 07:34

No. No. Leaders recognize

Jeff Iorg: 07:38

when their organization is really mission driven that all of the decisions, not just the ones that other people make, but the ones that you make as as well, and all ideas, not just the ones other people generate, but

Jeff Iorg: 07:53

the ones you generate as well, all of these things are evaluated in light of the mission. One of the hard and humbling moments of my leadership has been those times when I've had to say to my team, you're right, this is a good idea, but it's about my ego, or it's about my comfort, or it's a good idea that's for someone else's organization to fulfill, but it's not for us. This is one of

Jeff Iorg: 08:26

the hardest things about Christian organizations, is that we think that all the good we do is our mission. That's not our mission. Our mission is to identify what we are uniquely called or assigned or responsible to do, and then to fulfill that to fulfill that and that alone with everything within us. And that means that being mission driven, which is foundational to all other decision making, excludes some activities, excludes some responsibilities. It excludes things as well as includes things for our consideration.

Jeff Iorg: 09:08

So first we define mission, and then we recognize that identifying mission is foundational to all other decision making, and we use mission in that way. But we also recognize that identifying organizational mission is the foundation for functional unity. When you have a clearly articulated mission, it gives something for everyone to rally around. Your mission is not your preferences. Your mission is not your perspectives, your mission is not your ethnicity, your mission is not your different socioeconomic position or perspective.

Jeff Iorg: 09:49

Those things all affect how you do things in life, but they aren't your mission. When you try to unify around a program or a perspective or try to unify around a certain strata or or understanding of society or culture, eventually it starts coming unraveled, but not when you're unified around a mission. I remember when I announced that the seminary at Gateway was relocating those years ago, that I said to the seminary community, this is about the mission because the mission matters most. This is what we believe we must do for the future. And we saw, as you probably know the story, this remarkable unity that rose up in our organization in that moment, not because they were unified around my personality or not because they were unified around my leadership, not because they were unified around rejecting community opposition or even standing against the enemy that was before us, and certainly not unified around finances or around anything related to that.

Jeff Iorg: 10:47

They were unified around the mission. They really honestly believed that God's mission of shaping leaders who expand God's kingdom around the world as it expressed itself through Gateway Seminary was worth a commitment of their lives.

Jeff Iorg: 11:03

That's what gave us unity, mission.

Jeff Iorg: 11:06

You know, this is what unifies a big denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention. We are far too diverse, far too diverse to unify around worship styles or even preaching styles. We're too diverse to unify around church governance formats, around, many doctrinal choices. We're too diverse to unify around any particular language or any particular ethnicity or any particular expression of that in our church cultures. We are far too diverse to, unify around our geographical perspective or even our regional, or part of the country, or the world that we live in, or that we're from.

Jeff Iorg: 11:49

All of these things are legitimate ways for us to identify ourselves and to even define ourselves, but they aren't ways for us to come together in unity. The only way you can come together in unity with all this diversity among all these Christians and all these churches and all these different perspectives, the only way to come together is to come together on the mission. That's why the original mission of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 was the propagation of the gospel. That's what we came together for, to get the gospel to more people, to make the gospel more widely known. That's what we came together to do.

Jeff Iorg: 12:28

And when we're doing that, I believe we're at our best. And when we try to do about any other thing, well, it leads to argument, debate, division, fragmentation, confusion. So whether you're a big denomination or whether you're a local church, when you identify your mission, it becomes a great unifier. It becomes the one common thing that everyone rallies around and says, that's why we're here, and that's what we want to get done. So here's what we learned so far.

Jeff Iorg: 12:57

Mission is a one sentence statement of God's intention for your church or ministry organization. Try to write it as a declarative sentence. Try to write it without commas or conjunctions. A simple statement. Here's why we exist.

Jeff Iorg: 13:10

Here's our purpose. Here's our reason for being. Here is our mission. And once you've identified that, then you have identified the foundation for all of the decision making and the foundation for functional unity. Now, I'm going to assume that you have a mission and that you understand its importance.

Jeff Iorg: 13:30

Now, what are some practical processes you can implement to enhance mission driven leadership and mission discipline in your organization? Well, here are some suggestions. Number one, align your leadership lifestyle with your mission, meaning that you model your mission for your organization. Whatever the mission is of your organization, as a leader, you need to align your life with that mission and let your life and your lifestyle be a demonstration of what it looks like to fulfill that mission. Now for example, when I was serving as a seminary president, I continually talked with students about keeping their focus on sharing the gospel, making disciples, and training people to join us in doing the same.

Jeff Iorg: 14:27

That's what it means to expand God's

Jeff Iorg: 14:29

kingdom. Well, I had

Jeff Iorg: 14:32

to model that. So for years, I worked in baseball chapel as a chaplain for the San Francisco Giants, and in that context, I shared the gospel with men and with their with their wives and girlfriends and family members. I then led those who came to faith in Christ into a discipleship relationship with the Lord in which I taught them the word of God, helped to solve interpersonal issues and crises that came up in their lives, and gave them the motivation, the courage, and the encouragement to be obedient in a difficult cultural context, I was engaged in doing what I said our mission was, share the gospel, make disciples, and train people to join you in the task of doing that.

Jeff Iorg: 15:11

Do you know when I was a seminary president, students

Jeff Iorg: 15:15

liked

Jeff Iorg: 15:15

to ask me questions. Here's what

Jeff Iorg: 15:18

they never asked me. They never said, how's the seminary's budget development coming? They never said, How's that bylaw revision that you've

Jeff Iorg: 15:27

been working on? They didn't care

Jeff Iorg: 15:29

about that stuff. But dozens, if not hundreds, of students over the years asked me, How's it going with the Giants? Have you led anybody to the Lord lately? Is anybody that's come to Christ really growing in a way that would encourage you and inspire me to hear the story? Is any of Are any of these that you're working with stepping forward to engage in ministry themselves and reaching out to their friends and sharing the gospel with others or getting involved in ministry and mission either through a church or some other ministry organization?

Jeff Iorg: 15:56

Those are the questions that I got asked. It was always a delight to answer those questions because I knew that in answering them, I was modeling my personal investment with the mission. Align your leadership lifestyle with your mission. Model your mission for your organization. Invest yourself personally in the mission.

Jeff Iorg: 16:18

You know, there are some things a leader can't delegate, and one of those things is modeling the core issues related to the mission of a church or organization. I was a part of a church in California, for example. It wasn't a megachurch,

Jeff Iorg: 16:34

but it was a larger church. There were two things that I noticed the pastor never delegated. Number one, he did not delegate leading prayer meetings. He led a weekly prayer meeting in which he gathered people together to pray

Jeff Iorg: 16:50

for the ministry of our church and for the people that were impacting it and for personal needs that were expressed to him and to the others in the prayer group from the church family. He modeled a core part of our mission, which was to make a spiritual impact in the lives of people

Jeff Iorg: 17:06

by leading a weekly prayer meeting. Another thing

Jeff Iorg: 17:09

he never delegated was evangelism. He openly talked about his work of sharing his faith. He shared examples of sharing his faith. He came to outreach events and showed us how to do it by taking the lead and joining in the witnessing endeavors that we were attempting. He modeled the mission.

Jeff Iorg: 17:31

He had led our church to a mission statement which included spiritually impacting people by sharing the gospel and teaching them to live for Christ. He modeled that spiritual impact by leading prayer meeting and evangelism and outreach projects and letting us see him do that and then hearing him talk about it in sermons and studies and in other communications. One of the reasons I was so willing to line my life up with the mission of that church was because I saw a pastor who was modeling these behaviors on a consistent basis. Now, let me assure you, there are some things leaders should delegate, no doubt about it, but there are other things that wise leaders know they can't delegate, and one of those things is modeling personal lifestyle choices and personal behavioral choices that exemplify the mission of the church or organization. Now, let me go on to say that didn't mean that the pastor had to lead every outreach event, nor did it mean that he was the organizer of all of the outreach of the church, or that he had to be the only one who could show or model these things.

Jeff Iorg: 18:42

Of course not. But he

Jeff Iorg: 18:44

never gave up the modeling. He never said, You know, I've delegated out the outreach. I've delegated out the evangelism. I've delegated out the prayer meetings. I've delegated these things out.

Jeff Iorg: 18:53

Other people can take care of these things. I'm just a ministry manager. He never said that. Instead, he said, I'm going to delegate a lot of the responsibility for these areas of our church to other people, but I'm going to always make sure that I'm modeling the mission of our church and that people are seeing me doing personal things to make a difference. Now, I'd say another thing that comes out of this, number two, is allocate resources both in the organization and personally to the mission.

Jeff Iorg: 19:27

Now I've made it a habit, for example, of always giving above and beyond my tithe in addition to that, to the organization I lead particularly for its the accomplishment of its mission. And I've carried this over here to the executive committee. Last year in December, I had saved money during my first nine months of working here at the EC, set aside a little bit every month. And in December, I wrote checks. They weren't large checks, but I wrote checks to all Southern Baptist ministry and mission entities.

Jeff Iorg: 19:57

So I sent a check to Southern Seminary and a check to the Women's Missionary Union, a check to the International Mission Board. I sent something to everyone with a letter that said, I want you to know that I am personally invested in your mission, and that as a facilitator that's trying to lead others to be a part of what you're doing, I want you to know that I'm also personally invested in what you're doing. I'm simply trying to say that I'm invested in these ways both professionally and personally by allocating some resource directly to the mission. And then also, part of this is, of course, personnel resources, meaning yourself and others, but allocating the resources under your control to the mission. So number one, staying mission focused, I want you to model your mission by aligning your leadership lifestyle with your organization or your church's mission.

Jeff Iorg: 20:48

People need to see you doing the mission. Not all of it, to be sure, but at least some of it so that they see you modeling that, which you're calling them to give their lives to as well. Then secondarily, I want you to lead in allocating resources, meaning yourself allocating resources, but also allocating not only your money but your time to your mission, and then leading the organization to allocate money and personnel to the mission. You know, it's amazing how much money and time we're spending hiring people to give us comfort instead of hiring people to keep us on mission. A few years ago, a young pastor said to me, oh, doctor Orge, our church has been growing and I'm so grateful.

Jeff Iorg: 21:32

We're finally gonna be able to hire an associate pastor. I said, that's great. What are you gonna have the associate pastor do? And he said, oh, I'm gonna have him take over stuff that I just don't like doing and stuff that I'm not that good at. Just take a load off of me.

Jeff Iorg: 21:45

Now I knew this guy, I could be a little snarky. I said, I hope you fail at that.

Jeff Iorg: 21:50

He said, excuse me? So I spoke slower. I hope you fail at that.

Jeff Iorg: 21:57

He said, I don't understand. I said, well, now that I got your attention, come on now. You don't want

Jeff Iorg: 22:02

to hire somebody to take all the dirty work. You want

Jeff Iorg: 22:04

to hire somebody to multiply your work, not take over your work. In other words, you don't want to hire somebody to take over things you don't want to do. You want to hire somebody to do the things that need to

Jeff Iorg: 22:15

be done to advance your mission to multiply your ministry. Wow, he thought. That's a different perspective.

Jeff Iorg: 22:22

I said, look, I understand. There are always things about ministry that we don't like doing, but before you allocate money and people to just making your life easier, why don't you spend that money to allocate money and people to getting more of your mission accomplished? Listen. Staying mission disciplined means that we allocate money and resources, our own and our organizations, but that we allocate it not for our comfort, but we allocate it for the mission.

Jeff Iorg: 22:51

Third, another thing you can do to help keep your organization mission disciplined is to communicate openly, often, and repeatedly about your mission. I'm not sure that you can talk enough about your mission. Now, here's what you're thinking.

Jeff Iorg: 23:11

Yeah, but people get tired of hearing that. No, they don't. You get tired of saying it. That's a different thing. Here's what I've learned as a leader.

Jeff Iorg: 23:19

I'm always talking about the mission of the organization I lead, and I think because I'm always talking about it, everyone's always listening to me, but they're not. They're just simply not. People are busy. They're busy with their own lives, their own concerns, their own families, their own issues. When you speak about the mission, a few people are going to hear you.

Jeff Iorg: 23:41

Then tomorrow when you speak about it again, a few different people are going to hear you. The next day when you speak about it again, a few different people are going to hear you. You say, but I'm a pastor and I preach every Sunday, and your crowd's not the same every Sunday. Every week different people hear you. So you have to always be on point in speaking about your mission.

Jeff Iorg: 24:01

This means sermons, studies, but it also means speeches, blogs, social media posts, church newsletter articles. Any place that you're communicating, you have to make sure that what you're communicating is about your mission. And as you are a person in leadership, people

Jeff Iorg: 24:21

automatically assume whatever you talk about, that's what's important to

Jeff Iorg: 24:26

you right now, and that's what ought to be important in your organization. That's why it's so important that you discipline what comes out of your mouth and what comes out of your fingertips and what comes off of

Jeff Iorg: 24:34

your pen as you speak, type, and write so that people are always hearing about the mission. I'll go on to say this. This also includes to what I call informal venues. It's the after the meeting

Jeff Iorg: 24:49

conversation. For example, when I was a seminary president, I would go into faculty meeting, and I would report on different issues related to our mission, and then I'd go out

Jeff Iorg: 24:58

in the hallway and I'd talk more about the same thing.

Jeff Iorg: 25:02

Developing the discipline of always talking about the mission. Not mission in the meeting and then gossip in the hallway. Not mission in the meeting and then other issues in the hallway. No. It's mission, mission, mission, mission everywhere.

Jeff Iorg: 25:21

Now you might

Jeff Iorg: 25:22

be thinking, yeah, well, when do I vent? Or when do I talk about my problems? Or when do I talk about the struggles or issues I'm having? Well, find a friend, a colleague, a mentor, and do that. But don't do

Jeff Iorg: 25:37

it in meetings, don't do it in public communications, don't do it in your blog, don't do it in the hallways. Everywhere you go all the time, be thinking about and talking about and writing about and speaking about mission, the mission of your organization and how it's going to be fulfilled by the work you're doing together. Align your leadership lifestyle, allocate resources personally and professionally, and then discipline yourselves to communicate openly, often, and repeatedly about your mission so that every time you open your mouth, what comes out is mission, mission, mission, mission, mission. Whatever the mission is of your church organization, that's what you ought to be talking about all the time. Now, number four,

Jeff Iorg: 26:23

as I said earlier, allow mission to drive decision making. Be intentional about this.

Jeff Iorg: 26:30

Bring a piece of paper with your mission statement written on

Jeff Iorg: 26:33

it to leadership meetings and say, here's what we're going to decide based on this statement. Now one of

Jeff Iorg: 26:39

the earliest examples I had of this was really kind of humbling because it it really cut across, so much of what I thought of my own self importance in

Jeff Iorg: 26:47

the moment. Back when I was a church planter,

Jeff Iorg: 26:51

I had a lot of new people coming to Christ and younger Christians joining our church that really didn't have a lot of experience in church matters. So by the second second year that we were working as a church, I knew that we were preparing our third budget, and I needed to get some other people involved in this. Up until then, I'd basically been the budget officer, but we really needed to start getting more people involved and spreading out this responsibility and delegating it somewhat. So I recruited a small team of five people to be a budget development committee, and the leader was a young man, about 26 years old, a young businessman, manager of a retail store in our area. He was a Christian, been to a Christian university.

Jeff Iorg: 27:27

I had some confidence in him, also knew he needed to grow a lot, and I thought this would be a great opportunity for him. So I called this team together, I trained them for about an hour on how to develop a church budget.

Jeff Iorg: 27:39

I said at the end of my speech,

Jeff Iorg: 27:42

Now I'm going to turn you guys loose and let you work on it for a couple of months, then I'll get back with you and we'll see where we are. I fully expected to have to, of course, fix their trauma at that point. A little arrogance bleeding through there, don't you think? Well, after I finished my speech, this young man said, Well, pastor, that's

Jeff Iorg: 28:00

not how I thought we would do it. I remember thinking, Oh, brother. Here we go. He said, Here's what

Jeff Iorg: 28:05

I thought we would do. In our new member training, you've taught us the mission of our church, and I thought what we would do is ask all the ministry leaders to tell us what they think they need for this next year in terms of financial support to fulfill the mission of our church. And whatever they gave us that really lines up with the mission, we'd put it in the budget. Whatever they didn't they gave us that didn't line up with the budget, we'd

Jeff Iorg: 28:26

just drop that out. I sat there humbled but also excited because I was finally starting to see that, yes, other people are owning the mission.

Jeff Iorg: 28:36

And I said, why don't we try it your way then? That's what we did. We developed He developed a budget with a lot of input from a lot of people, and they put into the budget what we needed and took out what was not necessary to the mission. And then he came back with a 22 budget increase year over year, and I thought, this will never work. But he got up and presented it, and it was voted in by the church, and I thought, well, I won't let this get us in trouble.

Jeff Iorg: 28:58

I'll only spend the money we actually take in, not this unbelievably inflated budget, and you know what happened. The next year, people gave that amount of money and we had plenty of money

Jeff Iorg: 29:07

to fund all of it.

Jeff Iorg: 29:09

Humbling, my friends, because I saw what really happens when people believe in a mission and they have it clearly communicated to them and their peers start talking about it even more than the leader is and then they start giving to meet that mission. Well, the last thing I'll say, practical process is root out whatever's not contributing to the mission. This is hard, but you have to terminate programs, decline opportunities, say no to proposals, whatever it takes to say, that's not our mission, we're not gonna do that. Leaders have to make those hard choices. So let me say today, we're talking about the first part of this mission discipline two part podcast.

Jeff Iorg: 29:52

Mission discipline begins by identifying your mission, a one sentence statement of God's purpose for your organization, your reason to exist, your mission. It'll help you in decision making and provide unity for you. How do you maintain that, the discipline of maintaining it? Well, model it personally, allocate resources accordingly, communicate frequently and repetitively and often about your mission, allow your mission to drive decision making even in things like budgeting, like I just illustrated, and then finally, root out anything that's contradicting the mission. That may take a little while and it may be painful, but be willing to say no to things that really aren't the mission assignment that you've been given.

Jeff Iorg: 30:39

Mission discipline is a significant responsibility and challenge for ministry leaders. Put these principles into practice today as you lead on.