“I need an Executive Guy”
At Elevation Church we have developed relationships with a lot of the up-and-coming church plants around the country. One of the shifts that is quite common is the Pastor leading the staff through an Executive Pastor. This is something near and dear to me because this is what I do at Elevation Church.
First of all, I didn’t go to Executive Pastor School, seminary or even business school. Pastor Furtick pulled me out of the church planting hotbed field of physical therapy. I spend 8 years treating back and neck pain in preparation for leading Elevation Church—which may have been better since I came in with no preconceived notion of what my role was supposed to look like.
The point of this post is to describe the relationship that I have with Pastor and explain to church planters that finding the right guy for the job is important. In fact, you better be able to identify talent and calling in someone, and if you don’t develop them, it’s a formula for frustration.
We’ve got a pretty good dynamic right now at Elevation. But I can assure you that it didn’t start that way. When people observe the structure at Elevation, these are the things they don’t see:
Pastor and I were best friends for years. Before Elevation, we never did “ministry” together but we vacationed with our families and invested money together. We never served on church staff together, but we ate together at the Golden Corral many Saturdays (early staff meetings). We didn’t read church planting books together, but we did tear real estate books in half and each read a half at a time.
Does this mean that you have to hire your best friend to be your “executive guy”? No, but you better trust him. In fact, most guys would have a problem transitioning from friend to employee honoring and some Pastors may not be able to make the shift. But if you can’t trust your right-hand guy then you’ve got problems. And if you lead through a team, you better trust those guys with your kids and with your social security number.
Other things that aren’t seen in our relationship are the constant tweaks. We work through things that are uncomfortable, things that are often awkward but things that always make us stronger and thus Elevation stronger. Honestly, we make some adjustments that are as hard on Pastor as they are on me but the point is that he is very active in my development. He never avoids confronting me even if he knows it is going to hurt a little.
If you want an “executive guy” to excel in his role and not frustrate you, you better be able to develop him. I didn’t exactly come in here knocking it out of the park and rightfully Pastor didn’t expect me to. But he has never sat in the bleachers and watched me. He has been there constantly nudging me in the right direction, helping me know how he thinks and getting me around the right people to learn from. And if I do something he doesn’t like, he tells me. He doesn’t let me frustrate him. It’s then up to me to make the adjustment. From there my competence can be measured. If you wait for them to change on their own, get a comfortable chair or get busy helping make them better.
In the end, my point is that it’s not just a Pastor’s job to identify talent in someone he trusts as his “executive guy”. That’s only half of it. Pastor Furtick would have been sorely disappointed in my abilities had he not invested in me. Finding your guy is not the magic pill to having your problems go away. If your Executive Pastor isn’t working out or your lead team is dysfunctional, maybe they’re in the wrong seat. Or maybe you’re not doing your part to lead and develop them.