A psychologist recently told me, "When a couple comes to me and they have wrecked their marriage over the past 20 years, my goal is merely to help them improve their relationship by 5 percent. Why? Because as soon as someone sees 5-percent improvement, they get hope. The minute someone gets hope, anything is possible."
I realized that's equally applicable to leaders and the church.
Hope is powerful. A 5-percent rise in hope will fuel innovation and creativity in our churches. That's all it takes. When a church's hope level rises, the church begins to thrive. And how do we raise the level of our hope? By putting four factors into practice.
Recharge your batteries
Nobody dreams well, innovates well, or exudes hope when they're running on empty. Once I finally realized what drains me and what recharges me, my hope level improved. I began adjusting the way I approach draining experiences and maximizing the times of refreshment.
For instance, I used to meet with critics one-on-one. It was totally draining. Then a couple wrote saying, "We're concerned about the church finances, and we have concerns about the teaching ministry. Can we meet with you?" I knew they were coming with criticisms.
Hope is powerful. a 5-percent rise in hope will fuel innovation and creativity in our churches.
Previously I would have seen them privately. By myself. And afterward I would have been exhausted. So I changed that. I asked two of our other pastors to join us and two of our board members, specifically the financial oversight board member. As a team we were able to answer their questions and provide the answers they were seeking. The criticisms were baseless. I will never forget this, one of my favorite ministry moments: about 10 minutes into the meeting the husband turned to his wife and said, "Honey, I guess we don't have a clue what we're talking about."
I said, "Well I'm glad you brought this to our attention because obviously we need to communicate better in these two areas. Help us figure out how we could communicate to the church better." So rather than complaining to me about the church, they helped us develop a better way to get information to the church.
Not only do I have to remove things that are draining but I have to figure out how to regularly recharge my batteries. So my wife and I, either every Friday or every Saturday, go out on a date with some other couples. When my kids were growing up, we had daddy/daughter date nights. These kinds of things recharge me because I am an extrovert. You may find something else recharges you, like reading a good book or taking a long walk. It is those times of recharging that prove valuable to cultivating hope.
At Bayside Church we have trained our whole staff on this idea of building times of recharging into your life. We say: divert daily, withdraw weekly, abandon annually. In other words, don't work every hour of every day, take your day off each week, and take all of your vacation each year. We actually changed our policy, we don't let anybody roll over vacation because we want them to use it.
Raise expectations
You begin to create hope by raising your expectations. Steve Jobs showed us the importance of raising expectations. Jobs believed that impossible things were possible. His employees called this belief his "reality distortion field." Jobs said: "Have you ever seen one of those concept cars at a car show and you look at that car and say, 'That car rocks.' You see it four years later when it comes out and you say, 'That car sucks.' What happened between the vision and the reality? The finance department said we can't do that, an engineer said we can't do that, and everyone else said we can't do that." Instead of setting high dreams and expectations, the dream car declined every step of the way through production. Jobs said, "They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory."
Don't work every hour of every day, take your day off each week, and take all of your vacation each year.
Jobs's own story about the development of Gorilla glass reveals his ability to raise expectations. He wanted a new glass for the iPhone but everyone said it was impossible. Jobs told the head of the glass company, "This is possible." So the head of the glass company said, "We'll try." In six months they had all the glass they needed.
It dawned on me that the secular world has now started operating on the principle that impossible things are possible, while much of the Christian world has stopped believing that. No wonder churches are in decline and some of these businesses are rising so fast. A church without expectations, or whose expectations are low, usually receives what is expected.
One of my mentors passed away about a year ago. His name was Glen Cole, the founding pastor of Capital Christian Center in Sacramento. Glen told me a story about this: "When I moved to Sacramento, I took a job at this church. Everybody told me, 'Don't change anything for a year.' But 30 days after I arrived, the church called a congregational meeting and voted to change the name of the church, voted to sell the current church property, and voted to move to 60 acres out on Highway 50."
"How did you get away with that?" I asked.
He said, "My third day there a businessman came to see me and said, 'I think this church needs to move. I have 60 acres out on Highway 50, the best land in town. I'd be willing to sell it to the church at a discount.'"
Glen said, "I looked at him and said, 'You should give it to the church. Free.'" The businessman didn't say anything. He just got up, walked out, and closed the door. Glen thought, I just turned off the number one giver in our church. But three days later the businessman called Glen and said, "God has been all over me. All 60 acres are yours for free."
At the congregational meeting, Glen told what happened. "The vote to move was unanimous because nobody ever votes against a miracle." Then Glen, as only a 78-year-old fired-up preacher can do, started preaching me a sermon, "That's what's wrong with Christians these days. We need to get the church back to where we will pray, trusting and believing that God actually has some great things in our futures. We need to see some miracles happening. It is time for the Christian church to get back to the days where God was the One working in our churches." Part of what made Glen so hopeful was that his expectations were high.
Refocus on the future
When I'm with a leader, one of the first questions I ask is, "What are the next things you're going to do?" If those "next things" don't spill out fast, then I worry about that leader's organization. A future vision tends to create forward motion. But when somebody doesn't have a God-sized vision for the future, you start thinking, This church is already in decline. Many churches have as their main goal for the future to bring back the past, and that is never going to happen.
When people ask me, "What's the secret to your church?" I always respond, "We have two days a year that are our most important days for the church." On those two days, we shut down our church and office, and I gather together our pastors, our board, and our key lay leaders. The focus of those two days is prayer and asking four future questions:
1. What's God telling us to do in the next 12-18 months to reach our own community for Christ?
2. What's God telling us to do in the next 12-18 months to grow our people deeper spiritually?
3. What's God calling us to do to unleash compassion in our community and around the world?
4. And we're supposed to equip the saints, so what is God calling us to do to develop leaders now and for the future?
We pray, ideas go on walls, and our goal is not to walk out of there with less than 5-7 good answers to those questions. That discipline has kept our church focused on future visions rather than past or present discouragement.
I really don't care if we bat 1.000 or not. I am far more concerned if we don't have future visions. I recently heard a story about an 88-year-old lady who died. She was one class away from getting her college degree. Somebody said to me, "Isn't that sad?" Are you kidding me? That's awesome! I mean, wouldn't you rather die with some unfinished dreams?
Cast the problem before the vision
A final factor for building hope is not casting vision but casting the problem you're wanting to solve. By casting the problem you create urgency as well as hope that the issue can be addressed. This is a Nehemiah 2 outlook.
The vote was unanimous because nobody ever votes against a miracle.
Nehemiah says, "You see the disgrace, the walls broken down and the gates are burned with fire, what a mess" (Neh. 2:17-18). It was pretty easy for him to say, "Hey, why don't you build a wall." What I began to realize is I can get up and try to cast a vision, but people can feel like they're being manipulated or I as the pastor am trying to be a fundraiser. The reason: They don't see the need for it. But when you cast a problem, the need is clear, and the solution is fairly simple. Then people are on board because they understand the rationale.
Recently at Bayside we launched a north campus. One of our goals for that north campus is to put people on every junior high and high school campus who will reach teenagers before it's too late. We told our church, "Here are the statistics on teenagers in this area, and they are in real trouble. We are not just launching a new church. We are launching a church because teenagers here need a place they can flock to before they get into the kind of stuff that wrecks lives and ruins their future. We've got to reach these kids earlier." By showing the church the problem, they were excited to develop plans and a vision to reach the students.
Hope in action
When those four factors come together, the church is hopeful, and when a church is hopeful amazing things happen.
Bayside recently finished a Compassion First Capital Campaign. By being "compassion first," we decided to give away the first 33 percent that came in for our goal to major causes around the world. Experts told me not to do it, because "people won't give capital dollars if you're going to divert them to other causes, even compassion causes." I didn't want to believe them, because if that's true, that's a sad picture of our churches. Christians are going to be known as people with really great buildings but shrunken hearts. We decided to do it anyway. Happily, we reached our goal and almost doubled it. Amazing!
Wouldn't you rather die with some unfinished dreams?
Then shortly before Christmas, I received a call from a friend who works with a ministry in Cambodia. Over the years they've built houses for girls rescued out of sex trafficking. My friend told me, "A government official that heads up the effort against sex trafficking for Cambodia met with me and said in a certain area the cops are so corrupt that they cannot arrest anybody. Every time they do a raid, everyone is gone. The government would like to create an independent SWAT team." The government official said, "We will actually make some real arrests and put some really bad people in jail and free some girls. The problem is we don't have any money, and there are costs. Do you know where you could find that money?"
So my friend called Bayside, and I said, "Send me a proposal." He sent me a proposal. I'd never seen anything like it. Usually people are asking for Bibles and basketballs. This request was for bulletproof vests, buttonhole surveillance cameras, and bullets … for Jesus. I'm looking at this proposal and at the bottom I see the price—$250,000. We had just finished our multi-million dollar capital campaign. I was scared and discouraged, afraid to ask the congregation for $250,000 more, right at Christmas. I emailed my friend, "If I went to my church right now with this proposal, I'm afraid they would throw me out."
It was providential, though, that three days later I was writing on the topic of fear. I'd heard the phrase, "Fear is the darkroom where negativity is developed." I realized I'd just made a fear-based decision with my friend in Cambodia, not a hope-based decision. I felt like God was saying to me, "You've just written on fear, and you're now letting fear drive a decision."
So I met with our leaders and said, "Here's the situation. What do you think?" They all, in unison, said, "Are you kidding? Let's try it."
So on Sunday morning I told the congregation, "Here's why I'm afraid to bring this up. I'm sorry to say this again, but my friend in Cambodia just wrote me. I can turn him down, or we can go after this." We decided, as a church, to help this group out. We used our Christmas Eve services and took a special offering at the door on the way out.
Our church didn't give $250,000. They gave over $400,000. The next weekend we told our church what happened, and people broke out in applause. And I almost missed the whole thing for one reason: fear. But the hope of our church trumped my personal fear!
We need churches today that are fueled not only by faith and love but also hope. The church becomes a place that people run to instead of away from when these three are all working together. When the church is focused on Christ and fueled by hope, it is the most powerful force in the world. By creating hope the church believes that God does have better days ahead. But what is amazing about hope is that it doesn't stop with the church. When a church is fueled by hope it releases hope into the community around it. Hope's reach is so wide that once you raise hope you will never be the same.
Five years ago my daughter, Leslie, came home from school, she was taking a leadership class, she said, "They've assigned us a paper and we have to write on a leader and I picked you." I thought that was pretty cool until she said, "I have 20 questions and you have to answer all of them." We talked for two hours but her last question was the best question. She asked, "What's the most important thing you do as the pastor of Bayside and president of Thrive leadership?" I looked at her and said, "Honey, that's easy, the single most important thing I do as a leader is make sure I stay encouraged. If I'm not encouraged I will never be the leader God wants me to be, I will never be the communicator that God wants me to be. The last thing America needs is discouraged pastors."
Many of us don't think about that, but the single most important thing any human being does is make sure they stay encouraged. Why? Because encouraged people are hopeful people. And without hope, we can't be innovative and creative, and we cannot effectively lead the church.
Pace the Innovations
There is one danger in relation to hope and innovation. Many pastors, myself included, over-innovate. Over-innovating creates a mindset in the church that thinks, Oh no, I hope our pastor doesn't read another book or go to another conference. Because every time that happens they kill off everything we love. No pastor wants their church to think that.
One important factor is timing. If I am casting problems every week, we are in trouble. If it always thunders, nobody notices. You can't be doing this constantly. There has to be a rhythm and a season.
Recently, I had a battle with over-innovation. A church of about 1,100 in Nevada wanted to become a Bayside church. They went to their board and the board said, "There's no bay here so just the name itself doesn't make sense." And I thought, We have a name that is site-specific, because our church is in Granite Bay, California.
We have a Thrive conference that we put on once a year at Bayside. So based on this church wanting to join Bayside I wanted to change the name of our church to Thrive Church. I brought that idea to our senior leadership team and said, "This makes sense in every way, let's go for it." They all said, "This is a bad idea. We're doing so much change in other areas right now we think our people that love us would go on tilt." So I said, "Well, either not now or never." I would have changed the name but there wasn't enough consensus in the room. The timing wasn't right.
By finding the right balance between the absence of innovation and over-innovating we have creative churches that are effective. —R.J.
Ray Johnston is the founding pastor of Bayside Church and the author of The Hope Quotient: Measure It. Raise It. You'll Never Be the Same.
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