Clarity: a crucial behavior for transformation
People doubted his ability to lead the church off a plateau. He doubted himself when it came to transformational leadership.
He was promoted to the lead pastor position, having served as the youth pastor for several years, of a church that had languished for decades. The interim pastor did his best to clean things up, but the church was still a mess. The high water mark of 900-plus at Sunday worship was a distant, 40-year-old memory. Stagnation, befuddlement and lack of direction were all that most of the members knew.
He stepped into the lead position of a church rife with trouble. Discord smoldered among the staff. Lean finances made upkeep on an aging facility extremely difficult. However, in spite of his waning self-confidence and doubt, the church managed to maintain status quo for six years. In time, he grew weary of the battle. He wondered aloud if it was time to give someone else a chance to turn things around.
Then, something amazing changed everything.
The church began to grow. Non-believers were coming to faith in Jesus. Gospel-receptive groups responded to the ministry and started attending worship services. Finances flooded in.
The church grew 44 percent in the next two years—about half was conversion growth.
What happened?
How did this pastor traverse the gap between being a status quo manager to a turnaround leader?
Hallmarks of transformational leadership
The answer to that question lies buried in a groundbreaking study that was published in 2016. In Pastor Unique we unveiled the results of our attempt to answer one important question:
Why are some pastors skilled at leading church turnarounds while most are not?
Rather than follow the case study method, we adopted a more scientifically rigorous approach. We identified a random group of pastors and asked them to first fill out a pastoral leadership survey. The survey gathered data about the previous five years of their ministry. We sorted the subjects into two categories. “Turnaround Pastors” were those whose churches had experienced a minimum of 2.5 percent annual growth per year for five consecutive years. “Non-turnaround Pastors” were those whose churches saw less than the 2.5 percent growth per year.
We then administered The Birkman Method™ profile to each subject. The list of subjects and test results were submitted to a psychometric statistician who examined the data to identify statistically significant differences between the two categories of pastors.
The analysis indicated that there were seven scales where the high (Turnaround Pastors) and low (Non-turnaround Pastors) groups differed. The differences between the two groups results could not be attributed to chance.
In other words, these differences pinpoint why turnaround pastors are skilled at revitalizing stagnant or dying churches and why the rest are not.
Transformational leadership behaviors leading to church revitalization
Clarity is one of seven crucial distinction between maintenance pastors and turnaround pastors. “authority” is the term Birkman has been using to describe this behavior. [1]
Instead of “authority” I used “clarity” because it sheds connotations which—in a Christian or church environment—may be wrongly perceived as negative. The gist of it is this: clarity is your tendency to speak up and express your opinions openly and forcefully.
Forcefully does not mean harsh, dictatorial or ungracious. It means that when you’re finished speaking, people know exactly what you mean and exactly what you expect. It is clarity in communication that eliminates the likelihood that you will be misunderstood.
A year or so before the church began to turn around, the pastor took the Birkman profile and engaged a mentor who helped him focus on the best leadership practices for turnaround pastors. Clarity in communication was among the professional development objectives the mentor identified.
Together they worked to first clarify his ministry objectives and a plan to help him achieve greater clarity when leading staff and the church. This included dealing a few personal issues and setting aside unhelpful “second chair” behaviors he had acquired in more than a decade of ministry as a youth pastor.
As he acquired and mastered this new skill he gained personal clarity about his mission and, more important, he projected clarity to the staff and the congregation. They hungrily embraced his new found leadership authority; they had been waiting decades for a passionate, mission focused Pastor who gave clear direction.
Clarity is key in transformational leadership
Church revitalization is a multi-faceted process that requires the Pastor to master best leadership practices and best ministry practices that are proven to result in church revitalization. Clarity in communication when leading others is one of those critical skills.
The pastor in this true story developed a number of new transformational leadership skills. Clarity wasn’t the only component he worked on, but it is the one everyone else saw and responded to with open arms.
If you’re the Pastor who desperately longs to revitalize a stagnant church, then one of the things you need to focus on is being clear, bold, and assertive in expressing your opinions and giving directions.
Chances are eight out of 10 that this is hard for you to do. However, with the right kind of mentor and the right information, you can do it!
I know because I’ve seen it happen time after time.
[1] In the new Birkman lexicon this component will be referred to as “Assertiveness.”
 | Bud Brown is an experienced ministry leader, writer and educator. He is co-founder of Turnaround Pastors and co-author of the ground-breaking Pastor Unique: Becoming A Turnaround Leader. He brings special expertise to change leadership in the local church, mentoring pastors to become revitalization leaders, training churches how to find and recruit the best talent, and training leadership teams how to achieve their shared goals. Learn More » |
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