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Is This the Hidden Factor that Hinders Change in your Church?
In my 35 plus years in ministry, change management has been one of the most challenging tasks I’ve faced. Most pastors would probably agree. Recently I learned an insight about how people’s brains work...
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How the Brain Stifles Church Change
If you want your church to thrive you can’t avoid church change. Yet it is seldom easy, even though we leaders see the benefits of change before others see them. One hidden reason that makes it so...
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Motivate your Teams with these 4 Neuroscience Keys
Motivating staff and volunteers in your church is often as elusive as nailing Jell-O to a tree. Yet to move our churches from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ we must motivate those around us. Often pastors use...
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7 Neuroscience Keys to Effective Performance Reviews
Annually in my 35 years in ministry I spend hours preparing and delivering multiple staff performance reviews. I was shocked to learn that I may have been wasting my time. In a meta-study (a study of...
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8 Ways to Make Church Change Run Smoother
In your church you’re probably trying to bring change in some way or are contemplating it. Unfortunately, change in our churches often doesn’t go well. In fact, we’re not alone. In the business world...
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Neuro-diversity in Your Church: Why it Matters
Diversity in the church is big today. With greater globalization and the desire to melt racial barriers, many pastors want their churches to become ethnically diverse. Many pastors intentionally seek...
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6 Brain Barriers to Healthy Church Change
Healthy change is necessary for any church, ministry, or business to thrive. However, leaders often run into invisible brain barriers when they attempt change. Ignoring them can slow or stonewall a...
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When Leaders Get Hooked on Being Right
You’ve been wrestling with a ministry challenge and you believe you’ve found the right answer. At the next board meeting you share your idea and one board member begins to voice opposition. Because you...
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Are you a Bogie or a Birdie Leader?
I must confess upfront that I don’t play golf. I’ve only played it once, unless you count dinosaur carpet golf our family often played while on vacation. However, several years ago my father-in-law...
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3 Ways to Defeat Leadership Discouragement
Discouragement comes with the territory for ministry leaders. Unmet goals, putting out fires, staff issues, displeasing people, and general tiredness all contribute to discouragement. When it weighs us...
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5 Signs that you Need to Quit Something
Quitters never win and winners never quit was drilled into my mind at an early age. I believed it. I practiced it. I lived it. I only quit one thing in my life before age 18, my high school football...
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5 Reasons Why Every Church Needs a Staff-Board Conflict Resolution Strategy
The board meetings have begun to sour. Increasingly the pastor and his board have heated conversations about the church’s direction. The conflict has bled into every meeting for months. Emotions are...
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5 Ways to Make Brainstorming More Creative
Brainstorming sessions have become standard fare for ministry teams that seek solutions to problems. The two key rules are to generate as many ideas as possible and don’t criticize the ideas. These...
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5 Brain Biases that Limit Leaders
Leaders would like to think that they lead in unbiased ways. However that’s easier said than done. The fall of man affected every part of who we are, including our thinking. Brain biases abound. A...
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Avoiding Ministry Failure: 5 Questions to Ask when you do a Ministry Pre-mortem
Ministry initiatives in the church often fail. A simple planning tool called the pre-mortem, however, can minimize ministry failure. In my last post I suggested 7 good reasons to conduct the...
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Familiarity Blindness in your Church: 7 Ways to Cure It
Familiarity blindness is a malady that infects us all. It happens when we become so familiar with something that we no longer consciously see it. In fact, the brain does this all the time so it doesn’t...
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Data Overload: Is Your Church Guilty of Infobesity?
In today’s world we’re bombarded with information overload. One author coined this problem infobesity (Pearrow, 2012) to describe this data overload. When we get too much data our thinking brain shuts...
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5 Ways to Build Trust with your Team
Without trust, a church staff or ministry team simply won’t function at its best. In a recent Harvard Business Review blog the author quoted some dismal statistics about the workplace which probably...
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5 Telling Questions to Ask at Your Next Staff Meeting
Some time ago I read Andy Stanley’s book Deep and Wide. It’s a must-read for every ministry leader. In one chapter he poses 5 questions that are deeply telling about a church’s direction and impact. At...
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8 Reasons Why Church Change is so Difficult
Wise leaders and pastors understand that lasting change requires individuals to change first before an organization will change. Your change won’t last or will disrupt your church unless those in your...
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