by Nick Blevins | Feb 18, 2019 | Leadership, Posts
Rethink Leadership is an event for senior leaders in the church that's designed by senior leaders. Carey Nieuwhof helped create the event, along with the team at Orange, and it runs alongside The Orange Conference. The fact that Carey Nieuwhof is behind it is all you...
by Nick Blevins | May 15, 2017 | Leadership
Most productivity advice is written for solo knowledge workers with predictable schedules and clear task boundaries. You are not that person. You're a leader. Your calendar is interrupted. Your inbox never empties. People need things from you constantly. You switch...
by Nick Blevins | Aug 22, 2016 | Leadership
In ministry, it's important to plan for growth in order for growth to be possible. However, the challenges of ministry are so great and so demanding it makes it hard to do anything but focus on managing the present. Maybe you haven't experienced that, but I sure have....
by Nick Blevins | Jun 29, 2016 | Leadership
How To Delegate In Episode 4 of the Family Ministry Podcast, I talked with Jim Wideman. In the midst of our conversation, Jim referenced the book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell (my affiliate link). He said you could read the first law (Law of the...
by Nick Blevins | Jun 6, 2016 | Leadership
You might be frustrating people and not even knowing it. Especially if you're in leadership. The gap between what you think you're communicating and what your team actually hears is wider than you believe. You're trying to lead well. You're trying to move people...
by Nick Blevins | May 18, 2016 | Leadership, Strategy
Have you ever been confused by the terms mission, vision, strategy, and values? Join the club. In the first post in this series, I introduced this topic and wrote about Mission. In the second post, I wrote about Vision and the role it plays. In the third post, I wrote...
by Nick Blevins | May 11, 2016 | Leadership, Strategy
Have you ever been confused by the terms mission, vision, strategy, and values? Join the club. In the first post in this series, I introduced this topic and wrote about Mission. In this post, we'll talk about Vision. Many leaders are understandably confused between...
by Nick Blevins | May 9, 2016 | Leadership, Strategy
Have you ever been confused by the terms mission, vision, strategy, and values? Join the club. I'm certainly no expert on the subject. But, in this series of posts, I'll share my thoughts on each one along with their distinctions and how they can be used in our family...
by Nick Blevins | Apr 20, 2016 | Leadership
The 5 Whys is a technique designed to help someone get to the root cause of a problem or issue. It was formally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used in the Toyota Motor Corporation. By asking “Why?” 5 times, they believed the nature of a problem would...
by Nick Blevins | Mar 14, 2016 | Leadership
In a previous post, I talked about the importance of being a habitual learner in relation to leading a growing family ministry. It is the most common attribute I see in great leaders. One of the ways I wrote that we can become habitual learners is to build it into our...
by Nick Blevins | Mar 7, 2016 | Family Ministry, Leadership
As everyone who works in ministry knows, it's hard. You never get it all done and every week there are urgent things that have to be balanced with the important things. In the midst of it all it's easy to fall into the trap of simply managing what we have going and...
by Nick Blevins | Jan 21, 2016 | Family Ministry, Leadership
In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of establishing a volunteer leadership pipeline in our ministries. Leadership pipelines provide a clear leadership path and a structure the entire ministry can be built on. As I network and work with other churches I'm...
by Nick Blevins | Nov 19, 2015 | Family Ministry, Leadership
Every ministry leader wants more volunteers, but what if we are a barrier to making that happen? Moses was a barrier to leading the Israelites until his father-in-law offered wise counsel. The disciples neglected their primary responsibilities until they shared...
by Nick Blevins | Sep 7, 2015 | Family Ministry, Leadership, Systems
Previously, I wrote about how we try to keep a finger on the pulse of our environments in order to monitor quality and consistency. That's always a challenge in family ministry, where children and student ministries both function like churches themselves with their...
by Nick Blevins | Aug 31, 2015 | Leadership, Strategy
A couple of weeks ago, I shared two posts about what I had learned from time spent with two churches (Connexus | Browncroft). My time spent with both of them was during the week with their staff, not on a Sunday experiencing their services. Last month I visited...
