Hero Maker

by Dave Ferguson

  RECOGNIZE IT.

  The fifth step in creating a culture of hero makers is to recognize it. In the words of Ken Blanchard, “Catch people doing it right.” Most people live in environments and work in organizations in which they are constantly being told what they are doing wrong and how they need to get it right. There is a place for correction, but we need to be intentional about specific praise and letting people know that we see their efforts to be a hero maker. Remember, leader: what gets rewarded gets repeated. You can recognize hero-making efforts privately in hallway conversations or by sending a note, a text, an email, or a good old-fashioned letter that can be kept and reread. You can also recognize them publicly at staff meetings, at leadership gatherings, in teaching illustrations, through video, or via any of your social media platforms.

  Another way to recognize hero-making efforts was covered in chapter 9: by encouraging every leader to use the simple scoreboard tool (see chapter 9). The reminder from the leader that efforts count is critical to culture creation. Whether you oversee a group, ministry, church, network, or denomination, a regularly updated dashboard that keeps kingdom stats is important to creating a hero-making culture. By the time you get to this fifth step in the process, making sure you recognize what you have declared, done, branded, and taught is vital.

  REPEAT IT.

  This sixth step may be the hardest of them all, and that is to take a look at what you have done to create a hero-making culture and repeat it. I promise that you will get bored with some of this. You will not want to even say the phrase hero maker again, because you are so sick of it (for the moment). You may also decide that others who have heard it a hundred times are also bored and sick of it. Not true! It is just about the time when you are sick of it that it is starting to sink in and change the culture.

  So don’t stop repeating it over and over again. When it comes to creating culture, boredom is your enemy, and intentional repetition is your ally. Repeat it. Repeat it. Repeat it. (I think you get the idea.)

  INSTITUTIONALIZE IT.

  The last step of creating a hero-making culture is to institutionalize it. Knowing when a value has moved from being a good idea to being a part of the institution is hard to tell, but once it is written permanently on the wall, once it finds its way onto the annual calendar, once people rearrange their lives to experience it, you can be sure it is seeping into your DNA. The following are three examples of how to institutionalize hero making: leadership path, leadership community, and leadership residents.

  Leadership Path

  When you walk into our Leadership Training Center, what will immediately grab your attention is a few large graphics and other items permanently displayed on the wall, which include 2 Timothy 2:2, a replica of the original dream napkin with a napkin dispenser for leaders to write out their own dream, and our leadership path.

  FIGURE 12.2

  Often when I meet with an emerging leader who is excited about expanding his or her influence, I will find a scrap of paper and write out the leadership path in Figure 12.2. Then I will explain how someone can travel this path of expanding influence, using one of hundreds of examples, such as Patrick O’Connell.

  When Patrick took his first step on this leadership path, by this world’s standards he was a success: he was rising in the corporate world, happily married, and starting a family. But something was missing. His wife, Nancy, had gotten involved in a small group at Community Christian and found her way back to God. His first time attending Community was “just to be supportive” of his wife, who was being baptized. That began his journey of finding what was missing: Jesus. He started attending and joined a small group. It was there that he made a commitment to Christ and was baptized.

  Seconds after Patrick was baptized, Scott, the leader of his small group, said, “Patrick, I see in you lots of leadership potential, and I want you to think about being my apprentice leader.” Patrick said yes and took the next step on the leadership path.

  Within a year, Patrick had gone through the five steps of apprenticeship (see chapter 7) and felt prepared to lead the group. Scott affirmed that step, and Patrick started leading a new group. Over the next couple years, Patrick did with others what Scott had done with him, and developed other leaders.

  Having reproduced other leaders, Patrick took another step on the leadership path and began coaching them. But Patrick was just getting started.

  Patrick explains, “I took a giant step forward in my leadership when Troy McMahon invited my family and me to move to Kansas City to plant a reproducing church. Troy had a big dream of starting a network of multiplying churches, and I wanted to be a part of it! I quit my job in wealth management, raised my own salary, and joined him. I have no regrets!” Troy, Patrick, and the team started Restore Church, which has grown to about one thousand in attendance at three locations while helping to start forty-one new churches so far.

  Meanwhile, NewThing had grown from a few churches to a few hundred, and it needed someone who would be the day-to-day director while I helped provide the vision. With a hero maker’s disposition, Troy told me that he knew Patrick could do the job and asked me to strongly consider his recommendation. After much prayer and conversation, Patrick took his most recent step on the leadership path and jumped from being a church planter to overseeing a whole network of churches. Patrick says, “I have this incredible opportunity to multiply disciple multipliers!”

  Just a decade ago, Patrick O’Connell had yet to make Jesus Lord of his life. Today he is the global director of NewThing, giving direction to more than twelve hundred churches.

  After sharing Patrick’s (or another leader’s) story, I will tell the emerging leader I am meeting with, “If you want to expand your influence in a similar way, I will be glad to help you.” The leadership path helps create a hero-making culture in three ways.

  • The leadership path offers vision. When I write out and share this leadership path with an aspiring leader, oftentimes their eyes light up and they say, “Yes, this is what I want to do, but I didn’t know whether there was a way to do it.” The leadership path is specific enough that it helps them see the future but generic enough that various leaders in different ministries can relate to it.

  • The leadership path gives clarity. The leadership path also makes clear what the next step is in growing a person’s leadership. Someone coaching that person can easily identify where they are, where they want to go, and what step they need to take next.

  • The leadership path is affirming. Simply sharing the leadership path with a leader is an affirming exercise because you are explicitly saying, as Jesus did with his followers, “I see even greater things in you.”

  The leadership path started as an experience of a few leaders sincerely wanting to expand their influence to reach more people. We began to share their stories with other leaders. As we did, we found a simple way to illustrate their journey and share it with groups. In time, the leadership path became so important to our hero-making culture that we made a graphic and put it on the wall for all to see. That is the first of three ways to institutionalize hero making.

  Leadership Community

  As we were planting Community Christian Church, before we ever started a worship service, we first started small groups and a monthly event we called “leadership community.” Leadership community has been a permanent part of our calendar, happening once a month (with July off) since before our beginning. Leadership community has become institutionalized.

  A simple way to explain what we do at this monthly gathering of all our leaders (adult, student, children, and arts) is to think of it in terms of the global positioning system (GPS). Most of us use GPS every day to help us know where we are, where we are going, and how to get there. You can understand the components of our leadership community by thinking GPS, as follows.

  • G—Goal. Leadership community is a once-a-month gathering that allows the senior leadership to share the vision and goals with all the leaders from ever
y ministry. This can be a clear and compelling articulation of the next hill we are going to take, an explanation of the values we hold, or a platform opportunity for catching leaders doing it right. Vision fades, and leaders need an inspiring reminder of the mission and the goals before us.

  • P—Peers. Leadership community is also a great time to break up into peer group huddles. Coaches meeting with leaders and apprentice leaders should facilitate the peer group huddle. During the huddle, the coach can simply use three questions: “Where are we winning?” “What are your challenges?” and “How can I pray for you?” These peer huddles are an important time of encouragement and support.

  • S—Skill. A monthly leadership community is also a great time to offer skills training. At first you may offer various skills that all your leaders can use. As your leadership community grows, you may offer training that is ministry specific. For adult small group leaders, you might offer “How to facilitate a discussion,” and for student ministry leaders, you might offer “Partnering with parents for spiritual growth in teens.” Or you could take an elective approach and offer three or four skills that all leaders would benefit from, like “How to develop an apprentice leader” or “How to ask questions that develop leaders.” Whatever skills you offer, from tips on developing a better prayer life to guidance on how to create community in your group, the emphasis is always biblical and extremely practical.52

  Ask yourself, “Does my group, ministry, or church know the mission and goals that God has for us? Are we creating space for leaders to support and encourage one another? Do we offer the training that leaders need to grow their gift? How well do we perform each of these GPS functions for our leaders, both volunteer and paid staff?” Leaders need all three to move forward. And leadership community will help you institutionalize hero making.

  Leadership Residents

  I love our leadership path and leadership community, but if I had to pick only one way to institutionalize hero making, it would be through leadership residency. This is by far the best way for a church to accelerate the development of a hero-making culture! That may seem like a bold claim, but it also seems squarely to be the model of Jesus. He spent the majority of his ministry hours focused on what might be called a leadership residency for the Twelve. Those twelve took the culture they learned and experienced under Jesus—the multiplication thinking, the permission giving, the disciple multiplying, the gift activating, the kingdom building—and, as the book of Acts describes, they filled Jerusalem with their teaching about Jesus (Acts 5:28). As the number of believers continued to grow, churches multiplied to the point where the gospel reached you and me today.

  If I had to pick only one way to institutionalize hero making, it would be through leadership residency.

  Internships and residencies are not a class you teach in which the goal is to fill a notebook or get a diploma. Nor are they a strategy you use to hire a bunch of people to assist you in personally doing ministry. Rather they are a way to institutionalize a system of leadership multiplication. They’re designed for people who are shifting from disciple to disciple maker, from caregiver to maker of other caregivers, and from minister to minister maker.

  As we institutionalized a culture of apprenticeship across Community Christian Church, it was a natural extension to create opportunities for people who wanted an even more intensely focused approach to growing in these practices. Churches use all kinds of language for these programs, such as apprenticeships, mentorships, fellowships, or internships. We quickly gravitated to the term residency, as in church-planting residency. It was similar to the medical world, in which doctors in training hone their craft under the tutelage of seasoned physicians.

  We used residencies both for those in training to plant locations of Community Christian and for those planting a church beyond Community Christian: a nine- to twelve-month residency is now an expectation for any emerging leader who wants to start a church in NewThing. It’s standard operating procedure for all new church planters. NewThing’s slogan today is “One resident per site per year.” As we institutionalize that value, the multiplication potential will reach exponential proportions!

  What distinguishes a top residency program? My coauthor, Warren Bird, conducted Leadership Network research on more than three hundred churches that offer residencies (free download at www.leadnet.org/intern). Then he interviewed more than fifty program leaders to discern the best practices among top residency programs. Here’s his take on ten qualities that make a great residency program.

  • Committed to multiplication. Residencies replicate the DNA of the sponsor church, and the best residencies are built around what the church does best. If the church champions multiplication, the residents will also.

  • Focused on full-time ministry. Residents enter the program with clarity on specific ministry outcome (example: “God is calling me to plant a church overseas”) versus a more general goal of becoming more effective in ministry.

  • Already seasoned. Residents are generally older, with ministry experience, versus being college age or in their early twenties.

  • Top team oversight. The senior pastor regularly interacts with residents, while another paid staff member owns the program’s day-to-day management.

  • Trained trainers. The sponsoring church also invests time and energy in developing and supporting the staff, volunteers, or outside resource people who will be training the residents.

  • Support raising. Most residents raise some or all of their financial support. This cultivates their ability to do fundraising and makes sure they have skin in the game.

  • Hands-on emphasis. A majority of the residency time involves hands-on ministry and consistent feedback. The classroom time does not exceed one-third of the program.

  • Leadership development. Most churches indicate that leadership development is the top reason why they’re offering the internship or residency program.

  • Multiple pathways. The sponsor church offers multiple levels of internship (which goes by various names), with the highest level being residency (but not always using that name), and multiple tracks for each level.

  • Next-stop overlap. The best residencies transfer seamlessly from the end of the residency to the next ministry for the resident; there has even been intentional overlap and preparation. So if a resident has a call to plant a church, the residency helps with all elements, down to selecting a location, developing a core group, and planning the initial launch day.

  What would I do different in ministry if I could start again? I would have a leadership resident from day one, mentoring someone to start a new church. And I’d expand that into a leadership training center—a full leadership pathway institutionalized as part of how we do church.

  At Community Christian Church, it took us nine years to start a second site, and nine more years to have our first full-time church-planting resident. That’s unacceptable for being a multiplying, reproducing church.

  If after reading through this book, you have concluded that Community Christian is a church that has it all together—a place teeming with Level 5 leaders, experiencing constant success in multiplication, having smoothly running systems in place at every level, and cultivating a waiting line of prospective residents—then I’ve mislead you. We are anything but the perfect model, and few days end without problems at some level. But if there’s any structure we’re betting the farm on, it’s our investment in developing a healthy system of church-planting residents—and helping other churches do likewise.

  One of the fifty people Warren interviewed was Gabe Kolstadt, pastor of a turnaround congregation named Westside Community Church, in Portland, Oregon. What got Gabe thinking about leadership residency was reading the book Exponential that my brother Jon and I wrote. As he told Warren, “We started building a culture of apprentices, and this demanded that we take it farther. We don’t think we’ll be faithful to Jesus if we don’t develop leaders on a bigger scale.”

  As their cul
ture of apprenticeship grew, people at Westside started saying, “I think I should be in ministry, but I haven’t a clue where to begin or what to do.” They didn’t see themselves leaving their current life to be in seminary, but they could imagine spending part of their working hours with more involvement in their church.

  The church was tight on funds, but that didn’t stop them. As Gabe says, “We took the approach that we can engage bivocational people now. We’re so glad we didn’t wait. I tell everyone that you too can begin very small, and start now.” When they launched, they followed a simple plan: “All the staff and lay leaders simply invested time. We let our interns and residents see behind the scenes, sit in meetings, and shadow us for the day, even on a Sunday.” But church staff also gave out a number of assignments: create a podcast, run multiple groups, tackle the parking flow issue, and more. “They weren’t to be just doers, but leaders who develop other leaders,” he says. “That’s how our residency program has become a culture-setting piece.”

  What does it look like when you have gone through those seven steps of culture creation? You will see people around you move from striving to be the hero to desiring to become hero makers. Sometimes those people do it consciously and sometimes they do it unconsciously. When you have a strong culture, you will develop and attract hero makers, as in the following stories of Doug and Matt.

  The Seven Culture-Creating Steps Develop Hero Makers

  Doug was the guy who came to a Saturday night service and picked a seat closest to the outside aisle so he could easily escape after the closing prayer without talking to anyone. Doug had gone to church growing up but always felt like he was on the outside looking in. And he liked it that way. But Doug’s anonymity came to an end at a neighborhood picnic when my wife, Sue, invited him and his wife, Mary, to a small group we were leading on parenting. Mary said yes for both of them. Wanting to stay happily married, Doug agreed and came along with Mary to our first group meeting. Doug so disliked the idea of going to a small group that he would always call it a “class.” My hunch is that he was hoping that, as with a class, he would graduate and be done with us.