Presby-Musings

I recently attended the Drive Conference at Northpoint Church in Atlanta.  During one of the breakout sessions---on planning engaging sermon series---I learned that Andy Stanley , the senior pastor of Northpoint holds an annual two-day workshop with about 25 of his staff members to plan the sermons for the entire year.  The Northpoint staffer leading the workshop told us that the purpose of doing the planning sessions collaboratively rather than just leaving them up to Andy was fairly simple:  meeting congregational needs.  When more people were involved in the process, she told us, they were better able to determine what the congregation needed to hear, and where God might be leading the church. The moment that I heard this, I instantly wanted to try it.  The only problem was I didn't get a really good sense of how Northpoint conducted these two-day planning sessions, except for the fact that the participants were all staff members. I don't have 350 sta...

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups To Build A Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright; Harper Collins Business, 2008.  Tribal Leadership is one of the more effective "how-to" books on tribalism in the workplace and marketplace that I have recently read.  Like Seth Godin's groundbreaking Tribes , Tribal Leadership casts a vision for leadership that reflects the new open-source, niche-oriented, localized and nimble business-model that is emerging from the Great Recession and into the 21st Century.  Unlike Tribes,   Tribal Leadership digs in to the nuts and bolts of what this looks like, based on data, countless interviews, and the insight of three authors, all of whom are experts in respective fields and all of whom are part of CultureSync . CultureSync is an innovative consulting firm that assists businesses and business leaders create vibrant strategies for the new marketplace. Tribal Leadership asserts that there are 5...

I was unable to reflect on Day 3 of the Drive Leadership Conference at Northpoint Church because I left immediately afterward and drove 7 hours straight home.  When I left to attend the conference on Monday I left all of my toiletries and medications (I say medications like an old man) on the bathroom counter.  So I was feeling pretty rotten by the time I got home. But I've had some time to think about the last day of the conference and so I thought I would share them--in no real order: I attended two workshops before the last Main Session:  A workshop for Senior Pastors and a workshop on Connecting Adults to Small Groups.  The Senior pastor workshop was basically a Q&A Session with Northpoint's lead pastor Andy Stanley, his wife and his executive assistant.  For the record, my wife is a lot hotter than his.  And my wife also said I was a lot cuter than Andy.  So at least I have that.  I was envious of his assistant, though.  He's l...

So at the end of Day 2 of the Drive Conference at Northpoint Community Church I have a few thoughts. First, the people at Northpoint are freakishly nice.  And I mean more than most people.  I don't think I have ever experienced a group of church volunteers and staff that were more committed to hospitality.  At some point someone went and bought THOUSANDS of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and the Northpoint pastors and staff donned Krispy Kreme paper hats and walked around giving them away.  Whenever I asked for directions to a room or to a building the volunteer or staffer would actually walk me to it.  It was pretty dang sweet.  Second, it's apparent to me that the culture at Northpoint-- a culture of hospitality and openness as well as a commitment to the overall vision of the church--is one that flows from the leadership to staff and then to everyone else.  I've been a pretty harsh critic of mega churches in the past.  I have been an even harsher ...