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Archives For November 30, 1999

A Baby Girl, a House, a Sales Rep and a Coach

Charles Kiser —  October 1, 2009 — 4 Comments

The last month has been a flurry of transition. We have many changes – good ones – sitting on the horizon of our life.

The most fun is that in the next couple days we’ll welcome little baby Chloe into the world.

We’ve painted the nursery (= a wall of the master bedroom), put up the crib and changing table, and been showered with many pink gifts.

Chloe was the name of a house church leader in Corinth, Greece back in Paul’s day (cf. 1 Cor. 1:11). She had such clout that some from her household communicated with Paul about problems in the Corinth house church network and he responded by writing what is now known as 1 Corinthians.

We hope that our Chloe will carry on the legacy of kingdom leadership embedded in her name.

I’ll blog again when I have pictures and updates. Your prayers are appreciated.

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Our family expansion has called for us to transition to a more suitable nest – one that will have room for Chloe (other than a closet) and poise Ryan for good education.

We are, therefore, in the process of closing on a handsome little house in east Dallas/Lakewood, about 10 minutes from the city center.

We’re looking forward to the way this new location will help us to connect more with the young families in Dallas and experiment with more organic structures for children’s spiritual formation. It’s an exciting part of Storyline’s future growth and development.

My wife has endured almost eight years and eight moves chasing our dreams in the kingdom of God. God bless the woman. I know she’s looking forward to this transition into a more permanent dwelling space.

We’ll probably not move in until January after we’re able to do some minor renovations.

Please pray for us as we transition to a new place.

———–

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Ryan and I decided to pursue part-time jobs to replace part of our salaries from Storyline. For two reasons: 1) it allows us to model what it looks like for ‘normal, working people’ to lead house churches and live on mission; 2) it relieves some of Storyline’s financial burden in our transition to financial sustainability.

At the end of August I took on a part-time sales job with a friend’s start-up company.

The job is very flexible. I can work my 10-15 hours/week from just about anywhere.

And, I don’t have to sell anything to my peers here in Uptown – which is the only way I could see myself doing sales. I was wary of the kind of relational dynamics it might create if I was sales rep / church planter to some of my disconnected friends.

So far, I’ve really enjoyed the challenge. I’m wired to talk to people and to persuade, so in some ways it’s a natural fit.

The job does have its share of ups and down. I’ve had to develop patience and deal with disappointment when things don’t go the way I hope they will. I’m learning to push through rejection and cranky responses. In those ways I suppose it’s similar to other work I’m currently doing.

My main concern initially was that the sales job would drain energies I would otherwise use for the work of church planting.

Not so. Turns out I am indeed extroverted. Talking to people energizes me, no matter what it’s about.

Perhaps the greatest thing about this job is that the sales cycle ends in December. If I do great, that’s great. If I’m terrible and don’t end up liking it, the sales cycle ends in December. I can move on to other things.

Please pray for my co-worker, Ryan, as he begins to look for part-time job opportunities as well.

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I’m currently going through a coaching certification track with Mission Alive and CoachNet.

Turns out it’s perfect timing.

We’re working toward starting the fourth house church in the Storyline Community later this month. The first Storyline house church (Tribeca) has a new leadership team of which neither the Porches or the Kisers are part. Our church planter in residence, Micah Lewis, is working with us until next August. A seminary student at Dallas Theological Seminary is joining us as an intern over the next several months. We hope to start a couple more house churches beyond the fourth by February 2009.

In the midst of all this development in the community, I’ve sensed God calling me into more of a coaching role. Rather than spend a lot of my time as an on-the-ground house church leader, I’ll come alongside and support other on-the-ground house church leaders.

I’m thrilled about it.

I just finished reading a fantastic book, Coaching 101, by Bob Logan and Sherilyn Carlton.

I’ll post a review of the book soon, as well as what I learn in my Coaching Lab on October 9-10.

Pray for me as I develop as a coach – that God will have mercy on the poor souls that I coach, and that I’ll grow as a listener and encourager.

Finally, praise God this long post made it to the blog! I wrote this exact post a week ago and it was deleted somehow as I posted it. I hadn’t saved it. It took me a week to work up the resolve to write it again.

In Family, House Churches, Leadership, Mentoring, Sustainability
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Best Practices of Leadership Development

Charles Kiser —  July 9, 2009 — 3 Comments

Neil Cole’s book Organic Leadership came at a good time for me. We have been wading through some leadership conundrums and are on the cusp of the next wave of new house churches, so leadership is on my mind.

Section four of Organic Leadership, “The Side by Side Kingdom”, includes Cole’s best practices for leadership development in his ministry. I found these chapters extremely helpful as I prepare to make the transition from on-the-ground house church leadership to coaching on-the-ground house church planters / leaders.

Let me mention a few takeaways:

  • Holistic development: Most leadership training models I’ve been exposed to and participated in are “head heavy.” In other words, they operate out of the assumption that if you just increase the knowledge base of a leader, through classes and books, then he/she will become a better leader. Cole confronts this idea, declaring that many of the church’s leaders are “educated beyond obedience.” Cole doesn’t deny the cognitive or knowledge element of leadership development but instead wants to expand the emphasis of development to character and skills. Knowing must be accompanied by being and doing. Perhaps the most neglected in terms of my own formal education is the character element. How are we learning to be better people? What intentional processes are in place to fashion leaders into people of integrity? Storyline’s formation groups and formation retreats are part of our attempt to develop character in leaders.
  • One-on-one mentoring: Ever since reading Greg Ogden’s Transforming Discipleship, I’ve moved toward thinking of leadership development in groups of 3-4 rather than one-on-one. Cole, however, makes a good case for one-on-one mentoring. Every leader is at a different place in their leadership journey; every leader has a different learning style. As I thought about it, I’m benefiting immensely from one-one-one mentoring in my coaching relationship with Harold Shank. At the same time, I have very formative experiences with other leaders every month at the Mission Alive Church Planters’ Forum. I’m beginning to think that coaching structures for leadership development in the Storyline Community should include both a one-on-one and a forum element. Perhaps leaders gather monthly with other leaders for sharpening sessions, and between those times, as needed, they meet one-on-one with a coach.
  • Mentoring skills: Cole says there are two indispensable tools for one-on-one mentoring. And, surprisingly – or not so surprisingly – they are not a Master’s degree and a minimum of 10 years of experience in ministry. They are: 1) active listening; and 2) asking good questions. I’ve learned a lot from Tod Vogt at Mission Alive in this regard. Coaching is not telling someone what to do and how to do it. It is rather listening and asking good questions in such a way that the developing leader learns to think for him/herself.  Active listening and question-asking assume that leaders have all the resources they need within themselves (especially the presence of the Holy Spirit) to take the next step forward in their own development. I enjoy Cole’s coaching worksheet in the book that has three columns and three rows to facilitate mentoring. The three columns are: 1) active listening; 2) asking questions; and 3) action items. The three rows align his values for ministry with the three columns: 1) divine truth; 2) nurturing relationships; and 3) apostolic mission.
  • Mentoring principles: Cole lists several mentoring gold nuggets that I’ll just list here. You can buy the book and read more if you’d like.
  1. Start with the most obvious area of challenge in a leader’s life (rather than following a curriculum).
  2. Focus on one development item at a time.
  3. Look ahead and anticipate what the next step in development is for the leader.
  4. Never coach a new skill until the previous skill has been learned.
  5. Mentor according to the learning style of the leader (e.g., visual, audio, kinetic, or verbal).
  6. A skill is never truly learned until it is taught to another – which assumes the developing leader is mentoring another developing leader.
  7. Mentoring process: a) Model (I do; you watch); b) Assist (we do together); c) Watch (you do; I watch); d) Leave (you do; someone new watches – the process begins again).
  8. Leadership cannot be learned in a classroom. Leadership is learned as one leads.

Given #8, I’m excited to put some of these skills to practice in the context of coaching others. I’ll be learning leadership myself at a new level.

By the way, my review of Organic Leadership for the Christian Chronicle should be posted soon to this link.

In Leadership, Reproduction
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What are Leaders?

Charles Kiser —  February 4, 2009 — 7 Comments

I attended Leadership Network’s Innovation3 Conference last week in Carrollton.

I had the opportunity to share a table with Neil Cole at a luncheon he was hosting to talk about his book Organic Church.

The basic premise of the book is that church is most the church when it is small and highly reproductive. Cole focuses on making disciples who make disciples and start new churches – even in the confines of people’s homes or in coffee shops.

Cole is a part of a resource network called Church Multiplication Associates (CMA) and calculates that CMA on average sees two new churches planted every day (that’s right, it adds up to 730/year).

We’ve been facing leadership development challenges in the Storyline Community — in a good way. More people are participating than we have leaders to lead.

So, wondering what might be ahead for us, I asked Mr. Cole: “How long does it take before a person becomes a disciple and is able to lead and care for a house church?”

Cole said, “Well, that’s easy: 3 years, 6 months, 29 days, 8 hours, 22 seconds.”

And he stared at me.

Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know I’m making fun of you, right?”

I said, “Yeah, I got that.”

He went on to say that there’s no formula or identical pattern for developing leaders.

Then he said something very profound that I’ve been chewing on this week.

“In the institutional paradigm, leadership development is about getting people to do something for you (e.g., lead a group, teach a class, preach a sermon, develop curriculum, etc.).

“In an organic paradigm, leadership development is discipleship. Leadership is about following Jesus so closely that other people want to follow you because they think by doing so they might also be able to follow Jesus more closely. Skills and logistics flow out of a disciple’s relationship with Jesus.”

Then he put in a plug for his new book, Organic Leadership.

He’s right. The easy part is teaching people the skills of event planning, conversation facilitation and connecting with people.

The hard part is seeing passion for God cultivated in people such that it’s contagious and other people follow because they want that passion.

It challenges me as a leader, too. Am I contagious? Are people following because they see a passion for God in me that they want? Am I a person of character?

Those are much deeper questions than “Can I run a leadership development group well?”

I thanked Neil Cole for being patient with me. I’m still deprogramming from institutional ways of envisioning leadership.

In Leadership
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God’s Surprises

Charles Kiser —  October 23, 2008 — Leave a comment

I’ve been reflecting in the last couple weeks about God’s surprises for Storyline since we’ve started—situations where things have taken shape, by God’s Spirit, differently than we expected.

Example #1

We expected that we’d be facilitating a weekly worship gathering starting in September 2008. We realized that such a timeline would allow us only four months before the worship gathering began to nurture a community of house churches—which to us are the foundation and heartbeat of the Storyline Community.

Gailyn Van Rheenen, one of our mentors and leader of Mission Alive, asked us why we were in such a hurry to start a weekly gathering. We weren’t sure why. So we shifted our expectations and planned for a weekly worship gathering in February 2009.

We began to wonder if a weekly worship gathering at any point in the early life of Storyline would distract and drain our resources away from what we saw to be most important (house church ministry). So now we’re expecting to launch a monthly, rather than weekly, worship gathering in December 2008.

Who knows, the day may come when we move to bi-weekly or weekly community worship gatherings. For now, we’ve sensed it will be better to “build out” incrementally than to front-load a bunch of programming we might later have to deprogram.

I believe it was God who surprised us with these developments.

Example #2

We expected that Storyline’s house church gatherings would consist almost exclusively of young adult professional types. We also expected that Storyline would be a community that cared about justice—loving the poor, caring for the marginalized, helping the helpless.

And then we started befriending and serving the poor. Many of our young professional friends began inviting their poor neighbors to our house church gatherings.

At first I was uncomfortable with this. Would it scare other Uptown young professionals away from Storyline to encounter our poor friends in our gatherings?

Larry James, a prophet who leads Central Dallas Ministries, said, “You should read James.” So we read James, especially the second chapter, and were reminded that it’s a sin to show favoritism to the rich and neglect the poor.

My instincts were wrong. So we’ve taken on a posture of full embrace toward all who desire to be a part of our community.

God surprised us by who he drew into our gatherings.

The Takeaway

God will undoubtedly continue to surprise us—hopefully whether we cooperate or not. We can only seek to be attentive to his leading.

I’m reminded of one of the Proverbs: “In their hearts human beings plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps” (16:9).

We have a very limited view of what paths we’ll actually take. We plan the best we can—and we trust that God, who is infinitely creative in the way he oversees the unfolding of our lives, will establish our steps.

Earl Creps says there are at least three theories on how to plant churches: 1) the big bang theory—start a big gathering and draw the community; 2) the evolution theory—grow relationally at the grassroots level; and 3) the intelligent design theory—whether big bang or evolution, God is the one orchestrating the process.

I like that. Regardless of the model, I want God to be Storyline’s designer.

In Adaptability, Church Planting, Leadership
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Creating Margin

Charles Kiser —  March 24, 2008 — 6 Comments

One of the rhythms we’ve been developing in our early weeks in Uptown concerns space for reflection and evaluation. Andy Stanley and company, in 7 Effective Practices of Ministry, call this rhythm creating margin—space carved out of the calendar for the purpose of evaluation, planning and celebration.

My suspicion is that, if you’re like me, there’s not usually a whole lot of margin in your life. The activities take up all the space on the page. We keep pretty busy; things are hectic; we don’t have time for much more than crashing in front of the TV for a little while at the end of a long day.

Porche and I are trying to make deliberate calendar decisions in our church starting work that will provide moments of margin along the way. We’re convinced it will make us more fruitful and less crazy in the long haul.

Margin moments occur when we evaluate what’s happened in the past: how did the Prayer Walk go? What were the strengths and limitations of that worship gathering? What went well in that hospitality event? What progress are we making toward achieving our goals?

Margin can also be used for future planning and generating new ideas. Maybe it’s reading a book on a subject of interest and sharing its best concepts. Maybe it’s a retreat experience for the sake of planning sermons for a year.

Probably one of the most neglected uses of margin is celebration: rejoicing in our successes, saying thank you, encouraging each other to keep up the good work. How weird would it be if a baseball team forgot to celebrate after winning the World Series? It would never happen. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in the busyness of life and ministry that we forget to celebrate our victories with each other.

This margin idea is not really new at all. The Israelites’ word for margin was Sabbath. God started the Sabbath rhythm after creating the cosmos. What did God do for Sabbath? God evaluated/celebrated (“God saw all that he had made and it was very good”) and he rested.

One concrete way Porche and I have put the margin principle to work is through the development of our own annual personal growth plans. In short, we’ve created a document that puts together all the ways we’ll seek to create margin in the following year—from vacation dates and conferences, to monthly mentoring and coaching appointments, to monthly personal mini-retreats, to daily times of solitude and spiritual habit. I’m invigorated just thinking about how I’ll be invigorated in these times of margin.

Where do you find margin in your life?

In Books, Leadership, Spiritual Formation
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