PART II

Chris asks (and also wins the award for run on sentence of the week):

“What does Dressing for the Wedding look like when you are 300-400 people and the offerings are low and you are the only paid staff even though I have 10 committed staff people that work a min. of 20 hours a week not including Sunday????”

Whew… breathe, man.
First off, good question. Secondly, a little review:
Dress for the Wedding, Not the Gas Station is our little analogy to illustrate the importance of structuring for where you want to go, not for where you are.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, I’ve blogged about it here and we recorded an audio blog about it as well. Since we’ve already devoted so much time to explaining the general principle, I’ll use this opportunity to address Chris’ specific scenario.

Chris, situations like yours are not the exception to the Dress for the Wedding principle, they are the very reason behind it. And according to your details, it sounds like you’re already a pretty good dresser. 10 staff is a good start.
Dress for the Wedding is the most important when you’re the smallest. That’s also the time when it’s the hardest. But that’s not a valid excuse.

For example, I had 6 staff members that I treated like full time staff members before we ever launched. None of them were paid. But we still had weekly staff meetings. Now, the meetings had to happen at night, and were very inconvenient because half of my staff lived an hour and fifteen minutes outside of Charlotte. But we made it happen.
Sometimes I had to adjust my short term expectations to match our reality, but I always tried to keep our long term vision pure and uncompromised.

There will always be a logistical limitation on how much you can over-structure.
(You can’t go to the bank for a loan on a 100,000 square feet facility with a $100,000 a year budget. They don’t care how big your vision is.)
But start where you can. Create a skeleton of the structure you want to see, and as more resources begin to flow, God will cover the skeleton with flesh and blood.
Another metaphor: Go ahead and draw up the blueprint, whether or not you can afford to start construction right away.
Your greatest innovation is usually born out of your greatest limitation.

PART 1

Dottie B. wants to know:
How about something re: other pastors in your church? What makes them such a great team?

Dottie, I could type for days and still not scratch the surface of all the things I love about the team God has built here at Elevation. I won’t even try to be exhaustive. Let’s just hit a few highlights… in random order:

-I really like my team. They make me laugh. They think Brother Barry is funny. And Black Bond, too. That’s important to me. I don’t get the opportunity to just hang out much with these folks, and I’ve never understood the doing life together phraseology. But when we do get together, we appreciate one another’s uniqueness, and we have a pretty special chemistry.
You should actually check out some of the other staff blogs, featured on my sidebar. You’ll get a lot of insight into the amalgamation of silliness and seriousness that make our culture what it is.

-I think our team as a whole is much greater than the sum of our parts.
Some teams consist of All-Stars who are all super experienced and super talented… yet their collective performance is mediocre: phenomenal players who somehow coalesce to form an average team.
Although the guys and gals around here are talented…
I think we’re even better as a team than we are as individuals.

-We’re fiercely loyal. They’re loyal to me, and I’m loyal to them. Period. We’re almost psycho about it. We’ve talked before about getting Elevation tattoos together, and everyone was pretty much game. At least they lied to me and told me they were. (We haven’t really asked our wives yet.)
The predominate mentality of our staff isn’t: this job will make a great stepping stone to bigger and better things.
For the most part, we’re trying to approach every day like this is the biggest and best thing we could ever hope to be a part of.

I love my team. I think my primary strength as a leader is the ability to pull potential out of people that they didn’t know existed. I have no higher ambition in my life than to see everyone around me become more than they ever believed they could be.
My team makes me better too. They’re strong where I’m weak. They expose my assets and cover my liabilities.

The best part is, it’s not just our paid staff driving this ministry to new levels.
God has drawn some profoundly passionate people to Elevation to serve at a volunteer level. I’m so grateful for this army of sacrificial men and women who make it happen.

I consider it a higher honor than the presidency of the U.S. to be associated with my team.

Hope that helped Dottie!!!

I asked you to send me some topics to blog about and man, did you come through. Thanks so much.
Not only are there a lot of them, a lot of them are actually very good.

I’ll be hammering out some answers for the rest of the week, and some of the questions that I can’t get to, I’ll send on to the staff to be posted on our Access blog.

Check back soon for the first installment. And thanks for playing along at home.

Eat the Fish, Leave the Bones, that’s the title of this week’s audio blog on Elevation Church Best Practices. You really never know what you’re going to get in one of these things..and neither do we. We sit down with a direction of where we’d like to take the conversation and let the tape roll.

Typically each audio blog runs 15-30 minutes and is a true, unedited experience (if you can call it that) for our listeners. You’ll find a lot you can take and some that you may leave behind…eat the fish, leave the bones. Enjoy.