How to Take the Lid Off Your Church

How to Take the Lid Off Your Church

By Joshua Reich In every leadership book or at every leadership conference, you hear the mantra “Leaders are readers,” or “Growing leaders grow churches,” or something to that effect. In his book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber puts it another way: “The job of the leader is to know more than you do.”

If you aren’t careful, though, you can put a lid on your church and its potential for growth.

Now before you email me and tell me that Jesus grows the church, he does. Yes, the Holy Spirit can and will do what the Holy Spirit does, often even when we are trying to wreck things with our pride and sin.

At the same time, there are consistent things that churches that are growing, healthy and effective do that others do not. The same goes for their leaders.

I meet a lot of pastors who unknowingly are not allowing their churches to reach their full potential because they are not reaching their full potential. For a lead pastor, eventually your church will look like you, good or bad.

As we grow, I am seeing that I need to spend more and more time learning, stretching myself, getting alone with God trying to discern what is next and not getting comfortable in what we already “know.”

Here are a few questions I am constantly going through:

1. For Revolution to become twice the size we are now, what do I need to start doing? What do I need to stop doing? What things will keep us from getting there?
2. If we were twice the size we are now, what things would we do differently?
3. What things are we doing right now that need to be tweaked? What things need to go to a new level?
4. What new leaders do we need to raise up?
5. What leaders need to be challenged to go to a new level?