Another thing that I've learned as a church planter/Lead Pastor is that you need to figure out what it is that you NEED to do, and spend the majority of your time doing that. For me that would be Vision casting, General leadership of the church and more specifically my staff, and Preaching on Sunday mornings.
This has not always been the case. In the early days, by necessity, I not only did these things but I drove the trailer to the High School, helped with set-up and tear-down, counseled people, performed the weddings and funerals, tried my best to be there in people's time of need, ran errands, met with lots of people, etc.
As we grew I selected people to lead some of these things. As we continued to grow, we added staff that I could delegate more of these responsibilities.
Many Pastors never seem to be able to grow their churches beyond a certain point. My guess is that they have never embraced the art of delegation. They feel like they need to know everything that's going on, and thus by their unwillingness to hand-off some of their responsibilities, they become the bottleneck to the church's growth.
Recently I have been studying Moses and some of his leadership tendencies. In his early days he felt like he needed to be involved in every detail of his congregation. Fortunately for him he had a wise Father-in-law with the gift of leadership that challenged him to begin to delegate. The story is found in Exodus 18. If you are struggling with delegation I would strongly recommend you read it.
I believe that there are 3 lies that we believe that prevent us from delegating:
1) I am the only capable of doing this.
2) No one can do it as well as me
3) It would be faster to just do it myself
I'm not going to elaborate on these 3, but I will say that they are not true. There are other people that can do it--maybe better than you, and in the long run it will save lots of time to train someone to do something now and then let them do it in the future.
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