GETTING DOWN TO WORK
Personally, I think the best thing I have done is surround myself with people who are high in creativity and high in trust. Let’s be honest. You have to have some level of confidence to walk up those five steps every weekend and turn around and face thousands of people and have something to say that’s worth hearing. That’s not arrogance. It’s living in your area of giftedness.
Having said that, I honestly think I have pretty good ideas. But what I have discovered is that, when I share those good ideas with a small group of creative, trusted people, it usually leads to better ideas than my original ones. Sometimes, very different. Sometimes, a little tweak here or there. But almost always better.
Second, consistency. I think if you were to poll my staff or even the church, they would say, “Jim is the same at home, in the office, in staff meetings, out with his buddies, hiking in the woods …and on stage. That is very freeing. It is so exhausting walking into a room or into a new space and trying to figure out, Who am I supposed to be here? I’m done with that. My illustrations are from my life. My life is spent with my family, hiking in the mountains, shooting guns at targets (and other stuff), hanging out with my friends, going to the gym, SCUBA diving and going on several overseas mission trips every year. My best illustrations aren’t from some book I read by some expert or dead philosopher … they’ve come from sitting under a tree in South Sudan with a bunch of Dinka tribesmen, digging a well in Afghanistan or SCUBA diving with my dive buddy on a coral reef.
Finally, I have really, really high expectations of myself and my staff. I expect that every time we do anything, it’s the best thing we can do. I’m not saying it always works or is successful, but if it’s our best try at something and we learn it won’t work, at least we gave it 100 percent.
The sidebar to this is that we don’t do lots of “activities.” We have just four or five mission partners, but we are very engaged with them. We do only a few churchwide events per year. I’ve been in some churches where most weeks out of the year are pretty standard stuff. Then, for Easter, they take everything up a notch. Our Easter and Christmas services aren’t much different than a “normal” weekly service, which we pour 100 percent into every week. Why would we want to bait and switch our largest visitor weekend with a “special” week, then have them come back to something the following week that is very, very different (worse)? I think the week following holiday weekends is even more important if you want people to stick. See, it wasn’t a fluke. We do this every week.
So we work really, really hard, and I expect our staff to play really, really hard. As a staff, we do a three-day staff retreat where we do nothing but play. No meetings or planning. Just celebration. We go whitewater rafting together once a year and have a day where we water ski on the lake. And we have a really, really nice Christmas party for staff and spouses/significant others. We have devotions together once a week. We tell stories about the weekend and any ministry events from the past week. We laugh a lot, we worship together and share prayer needs—not about the church, but about what is going on in our lives and the lives of our families. Usually, there are tears, but it’s OK. It’s a “safe” room. No outside visitors or non-staff members allowed in devotions. It’s “our time.”
Finally, I try to guard young families. We pay them as much as we can, we give them awesome health benefits and we enforce days off and vacation time. I struggled for many years as a poor youth pastor and didn’t have a lot of guidance in my financial world. The elders of our church and I are on the same page when it comes to supporting our staff as best we can … financially, spiritually, relationally and guarding all areas of health. Flatirons is important. Family is more important. Because of that, it’s possible to lose your ministry position at Flatirons because your family needs you more … but I’m committed that no staff person will lose their family because Flatirons has taken them away from the most important thing.
FLATIRONS COMMUNITY CHURCH Lafayette, Colo.
Website: FlatironsChurch.com
Twitter: @FlatironsChurch
Founded: 1983
Affiliation: Nondenominational
Locations: 1
Attendance: 15,495
Growth in 2012: +1,874 (14%)
Fastest-Growing: 49
Largest: 23
