Our staff is pumped today. We could run through a brick wall right now. We would probably break some bones, but we could do it.

Ron Carpenter, Pastor at Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, came and met with us. He just came, out of the kindness of his heart, to pour into our staff for a whole afternoon. What a good guy. Not many pastors of churches with 10,000 members would do that. Any of you who know who he is and have something bad to say about him, don’t say it in front of me. I’ll jack your jaw. I’m serious. I appreciate and honor people who make time to bless my leadership team.

He helped us work through how the Biblical concept of spiritual authority translates into the context of a church in the suburbs of South Charlotte, where we worship independence and don’t want anyone to tell us what to do.

We talked through the layers of leadership. We talked through the task of funneling the vision of the church through the pipeline of the entire leadership team, until every volunteer gets it and everybody is saying and doing the same thing for the same reason. Until everything is seamlessly connected, from the top down.

You know, I’m learning that there are a lot of leadership styles that God will bless. But all of the effective ones have on thing in common: everyone at every level of the organization is saying the same thing about the main things.

Pastor Ron shared that the success of the church hinges on transitioning well.
This reaffirmed something I’ve been teaching from the very beginning of our core group development:

When we’re faced with the opportunity to go to the next level, we must shift.
If we don’t shift, we’ll stall.
If we don’t shift well, we’ll implode.

If we shift confidently and smoothly, just ahead of the actual transition, we will grow and morph and refine ourselves.

Our next transition at Elevation is structuring for 2,000 people.

I don’t know exactly what this looks like, but I have a good idea, and we’ll all figure it out together.

And we will shift.