We were grabbing dinner at the local open-air restaurant on a hot Tanzanian night. My Swedish friend across the table wondered aloud why the waiter had left her bottle top on our table after having opened her coke, wasn’t that rude? While a smile on his face, our Tanzanian friend nicely rested the bottle top back over the opening of her coke bottle and replied, “because now you can cover your coke and keep the bugs out.” Touché.

With the expansion of globalization and rapid advancements in technology, cross-cultural interactions around the globe are at an all-time high. No longer are cultures bound by their geographic borders. Local developments be they technological, political, social, economic or environmental can now have instantaneous global impact. With news available 24-7 around the world, people are more aware than ever before of what is happening globally, and businesses and organizations are affected more quickly than ever before by events in far reaching places. Take the 2008 economic crisis in the United States for example, its impact was felt way beyond the United States’ geographical borders.

As the cultural managers of their churches, there are three timeless and placeless attributes of leaders who successfully foster cultures in which people eagerly participate in the ideation, development, and implementation of new ideas. Part 3 of this 4-part series covered the first two: risk-taking and trust-building.

In the first part of this 4-part series, we looked at why millions of people worldwide are leaving our churches and Christianity as they know it, but also how Jesus eliminated all the barriers to the Gospel. In the second part, we looked at the role church leaders play in fostering innovative church cultures that provide significant positive change in people’s lives. And the three timeless and placeless attributes of leaders who successfully foster cultures in which people eagerly participate in the ideation, development, and implementation of new ideas!

In Part 1 of this 4-Part series, we looked at why millions of people worldwide are leaving our churches and Christianity as they know it. We also saw how Jesus eliminated all the barriers to the Gospel and that the same needs to be said of our churches today. So what role do church leaders play in fostering innovative church cultures that provide significant positive change in people’s lives?

As Christ-followers, we dream of being part of a Gospel movement that not only transforms people’s lives but the world around us. And yet, the world over, ministries are shrinking, and church attendance is declining. From the inside looking out, it appears that there are more time-consuming, inferior activities than ever creating overloaded schedules and leaving us increasingly frustrated with the demands of contemporary culture.

s your system for change costing you? When change is necessary, does it feel more painful implementing change then it does just leaving things the way they are? Letting problems stay the same longer than necessary could be costing your organization immensely. And making changes in the wrong order could be as well.

How it is that some organizations have diverse leadership teams while others seem to only have leaders who look, act, and talk the same? I once heard an executive leader of a 25,000-person organization located in a very diverse metro area in the U.S. say that while they believed in women in leadership, they couldn’t find any qualified enough in their organization. Somehow, I highly doubt that to be entirely true.

Making a difference in the world isn’t just a passion for many people, it’s becoming the pursuit of more organizations and businesses. More businesses and organizations than ever before are becoming socially conscious as more and more people demand it, inside and outside their organizations, the world over.

What does failure do to you? Does it stop you in your tracks, make you walk back 2 steps, or invite you to lean in and learn? When things don’t turn out the way we expect, and we ‘fail,’ if we turn this inward and believe that we are therefore a failure, we ultimately hold ourselves back from everything we were created to be and do in our generation. And we certainly will never embrace ‘failures’ as the necessary element of sustained success that they are.

Let’s get a little nerdy today and dive into servant leadership. I’ve heard too many off the wall things said about it that I know many of you will appreciate some clarity. Servant leadership is not a preference thing like ice cream or cookies, it is a specific leadership model with specific behaviors associated with it. I’ve literally had to refrain myself from running up to a stage to take the mic when hearing servant leadership being encouraged as a means for keeping people from leaving a particular organization. It couldn’t have been further from the essence of servant leadership, which is all about serving others for their sake, not the organization’s (in fact, a servant leader would encourage someone to leave if their current assignment wasn’t the best fit for them). So, let’s dive in.

How much are ill-equipped team members costing you? Are you overwhelmed and frustrated by constantly needing to find and train new people? As a leader, it can be hard to know where to prioritize your time and resources. You want to be leading a team with high morale, people who are committed to the mission, and you’re not constantly stuck filling vacancies (let alone having to motivate people all the time). But how do you know if you’re investing in the right things?

Does it feel like things fall apart when that one person isn’t there? Or do you have plenty of people that can fill-in? Do you know if the strength of your leadership bench is costing you?

Conflict, do you have a love or hate relationship with it? For most people, it depends on the families they grew up in and how conflict was viewed. If you’re from the Midwest (or Bold North as I prefer), you likely grew up in a culture where passive-aggressive responses reign and conflict is swept under the rug. The reality though is that conflict is essential for growth, personally and professionally. Let me demystify conflict for you and dare I say, even encourage you to promote it?

From chaotic schedules to needing to swoop in to “save the day” to rogue goals and strategies by others, one culprit is behind them all: values. Whether a soloprenuer or leading a non-profit or Fortune 500, when the values in use are not clear, neither is anything else.

Our dreams for our organizations, products, and services go long into the future. Whether or not we get there depends in large part on what we do with feedback. Being around for the long haul means we must, as my dad would say, continually meet or exceed our customers’ expectations. The last thing we want to do is over-promise and under-deliver. Nothing is more aggravating to customers than feeling like they were not told the whole truth (be it about costs, timelines, quality, etc.).

Without leadership development, visionaries can bulldoze the very people they have a heart for, as seen by the early lives of Joseph and Moses. Joseph is an excellent example of the visionary leader Baldoni writes about in his book Great Communications Secrets of Great Leaders. In their research, Taylor et al. found that with their ability to create and communicate their visions, visionary leaders can energize their organizations by "providing meaning and purpose to the work."

Churches in American Metropolitan areas see entirely too much turnover, not only of their staff but also of their congregation. For staff, one of the main reasons people leave is because they do not feel invested in and equipped to fulfill their role on staff. The top two reasons congregants leave churches are because they do not feel connected to others in the church or they do not feel like there is a place for them to serve at the church.

The difference between our churches reaching new believers and seeing a decline in membership might just be our mindsets as leaders. You are a pastor, yes, but you are also a leader if you plan to use your influence to help people in your church community work together towards a common goal (like the Great Commission, or the Great Commandments, or…fill in the blank with the vision God put on your heart). When it comes to reaching new people with the Good News of Jesus, our efforts might be falling short if we think we can reach people the same way we did 10 years ago. Our mindset, what we believe to be true about today or the future, is critical to our leadership efforts as pastors.