CECL Session #5 Day 2

I was pretty critical about yesterday’s sessions because I was expecting something different than what was actually delivered. Today’s sessions were much better in the sense that my expectations for the day were actually surpassed by the sessions themselves.

There were two basic things that happened today. Danny Wallen (from Every Man Ministries) came to help us think through some issues of leadership development, and Lori was back again to help us work through a sample in public of the sermon review process that all the peer teams will be doing privately.

Our only assignment for this week was to bring a videotape of a recent sermon of ours, and we will be going through those videotapes in our peer groups to offer each other some constructive comments about our messages.

During the first morning session and during the afternoon session, we went through the process as a whole CECL group (all 80 of us). A lady named Karen was put on the hot seat (“warm” seat, they keep telling us). We watched her sermon from last Sunday’s service, and then we went through the process with her.

The Sermon Review Process

The process they have recommended to us really seems like a good one, and I’m thinking that I need to use this process on a more regular basis to help me get better in my preaching, but in a nutshell, here are the basic steps of the process:

1. PRAYER—the person in the warm seat is prayed over and the process is prayed over before anything else happens.
2. CONTEXT—the person on the hot seat is given the opportunity to explain the context of the message, whether it is part of a larger series, what things are going on in the church, etc.
3. VIEW VIDEO (as a parishioner)—the team views the video attempting as much as possible to put themselves into the position of a member of the congregation just listening to the sermon for personal spiritual growth and not for the purposes of critique.
4. QUIET REFLECTION—everybody takes some time to reflect on the experience of the video before anything is shared.
5. SHARE PERSPECTIVES—the person on the warm seat goes first to share his or her perspectives of the sermon, then the team is called upon to share their perspectives particularly with the goal of considering themselves in the role of one of the parishioners responding to the pastor after a sermon but actually saying what people usually only think.
6. DISCUSSION OF UNIQUE EXCELLENCE—the purpose of all the discussion is to identify the specific unique excellence or strength not of the particular sermon but of the preacher in general. What generalizations could possibly be made based on the viewing of this one message that could be called a unique excellence of the person’s sermon communication?
7. BRAINSTORM RELATED GOAL POSSIBILITIES—the individual and the team work together to come up with some ideas for goals that the preacher could set for himself or herself to maximize their unique excellence. (Nothing is mentioned about improving a weakness.)
8. PRAY ABOUT THE GOALS

I’m not going to take the time here to go into the details of the message we heard or the conclusions that were drawn out for Karen (the woman on the warm seat), but I will say that I thought it was pretty fun. In fact, I honestly think this is a really neat model for sermon review and feedback. It is designed to be an affirming experience. I’m actually pretty excited to go through it with my peer team this week.

The Best Peer Team

Incidentally, I am on the best peer team of all. Each time we get together, we laugh until we cry. We eat and talk and share things in our lives and ministries, and it’s really a lot of fun. Lori came up to us at one point today and asked us why it is that we always seem to be having so much fun.

I’ll give you just an example of what our team is like. We aren’t scheduled to actually begin our sermon video reviews until tomorrow afternoon, but because we have seven in our team, we decided that it would be good to get a head start and just do one tonight anyway.

Well, there was just one minor problem with that. During dinnertime tonight, a major storm blew through this area and knocked out the power. It’s still out right now, but I’m typing this into my PowerBook running on battery juice.

Well, we didn’t want to let a little thing like no electricity prevent us from watching our video, and Ron just happened to have a gas generator in his car. He rummaged around the maintenance shed here and found an extension cord, got the generator running, and we had an electric lamp and the TV running for about 15 minutes before the generator died.

We gave the generator a few more tries, and then I pulled my car over because I happen to have a power inverter that can handle 100 watts at 120 volts—far enough to power a TV/VCR if not the lamp too. However, it drew too much power from the car, and I think it blew a fuse in my car.

So Ron, went and found some better gas for the generator and we tried that again, but it wasn’t enough for the TV/VCR, so we just hung out and talked while the little lamp was flickering in the corner.

Leadership Development

Danny Wallen really got the short end of the stick today. He only made it through about half of his material during his first session of the day, but then there was no electricity by the time we got to his second session, so he only had about 45 minutes to cover the rest of Session 1 and Session 2. Needless to say, we didn’t finish Session 2.

(By the way, Danny is a pretty good basketball player. I got out on the court today, and if it weren’t for him, we would have lost both games instead of winning one.)

His sessions were really good, though. During the first session, there were three things that really stuck out to me.

The first thing was a quote from Richard Clinton in his book, Selecting and Developing Leaders.

Effective leaders recognize that leadership selection and development is a priority function.

I would venture to guess that nearly every leader that I have ever met would agree with this statement. However, when asked what they were doing about it, I doubt that very many leaders intentionally set about selecting, training and developing new leaders. Most leaders will set about the task of identifying, training and developing new leaders only when they are pressed to do so by the demands of the ministry around them.

That seems to be true for me.

The second thing that stood out to me from the first session was his description of his experience as camp director at Ponderosa Lodge. He basically said, not in so many words, that if he focused his energies on developing leaders, everything else that needed to happen would happen naturally.

Finally, he said that from the most common perspective, the camp had leaders for the sake of ministering to the kids, but from another perspective, the reason the camp had kids there was so that leaders could be developed.

Then, he also said some profound things in the second session of the day:

• Potential leaders may be born, but effective leaders are made according to the following formula: (Time + Experience) * Response = Growth, but the only thing that we have any control or influence over is the Response. Therefore, in leadership development, the focus should be on how the potential leader is responding to their time and experiences.
• Leadership development follows three stages (associated with a person’s leadership maturity and also with a person’s age).
  • Spiritual formation—deals with the leader’s character and inner life.
  • Ministerial formation—learning ministry skills
  • Strategic formation—philosophy and values in the leader’s life and ministry.

Spiritual formation should be the focal point for a leader in the early years of life and/or maturity, Ministerial formation, for the middle years, and Strategic formation for the later years.

There was one more thing that Danny talked about that I thought was really significant, and that is a story of one time when someone invested in his life to develop him as a leader. When he was in Oakland at First Covenant Church, he was working under a youth pastor who was really gifted at developing leaders. That youth pastor intentionally followed this process:

• I do, you watch.
• I do, you help.
• We do together.
• You do, I help.
• You do, I coach.
• You do, somebody else watches.

I’ve heard that framework before, but never with that final piece. “You do, somebody else watches” is the piece that brings it full circle.

So here’s the bottom line, I want to be a pastor who can not only preach effectively, but who can develop other people into leaders.

My Action Points

• By the end of September, I will select a model for leadership development and begin to implement it in my current situation.
• Before the end of this week, I will go through the sermon review process with my peer team.