Did you know you’re twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine than you are by a shark?
Apparently, that’s true.
I’m guessing you’ve never thought about being killed by a vending machine, even though you see them all the time and maybe even use them regularly.
You likely have thought about shark attacks, even though odds are you’ve never seen a shark in the wild while swimming.
Life’s weird like that.
And so is church life.
But once you know something quirky is true, you can better deal with it (like making sure you don’t shake that vending machine trying to get your chocolate bar out).
There is nothing I am more committed to in leadership than the mission of the local church.
I love the local church. And the local church hands-down has the most important mission on the planet.
But we don’t always help ourselves. Sometimes we tolerate things we just shouldn’t because we don’t know how to deal with them.
In an earlier post, I wrote about five stupid things the church does that interfere with our mission.
Weird and the quirky things don’t help us advance the mission either. Some of them are things we do … some of them are things we encounter as leaders.
Hopefully by being able to recognize them and even—are you ready?—smile at them, we can move through them and make some progress.
1. The more off-tune someone is, the more they really, really want to be on the music team.
I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. Just ask any worship leader.
Why do worship leaders always need to be the people who tell someone the one thing no one else in a person’s life has ever had the courage to tell them?
Faced with crushing an aspiring musician’s heart, many church leaders decide instead to ignore the tough conversation and instead tell the sound guy to ‘just turn down his microphone.’
I outlined some solutions to this dilemma in this post on ‘why just turn down his microphone’ is a really bad strategy.
But in a nutshell, the best way to have these conversations is to affirm the intention but refocus the direction.
If you do that, the conversation will sound something like: “I’m so glad you want to serve. I’m not sure this is going to be the place for you. Let me help you find a great fit.”
