3. Your behaviors and practices
This is where the proverbial “rubber meets the road.” You can have perfect values and a great narrative, but if your behaviors and practices are inconsistent with the story you tell, you’ll struggle. How you act will always be self-correcting and align to your real values and story.
At my friend Dan Smith’s Momentum Christian Church, people continually hear about the scorecard of sending and naturally begin to ask themselves what it would look like for them to be sent. The church’s language and practices naturally help people transition from “if” to “when” as they take ownership for the cause.
I encourage you to deliberately and frequently pause to assess whether the things you’re doing are congruent with the values you espouse and the narrative you tell. Then proactively look for and find stories, metaphors and language that reinforce whom you want to be.
For example, if you value personal evangelism, be careful how you applaud the results of direct-mail marketing campaigns. Rather than celebrating this automated action and the resulting people showing up at church, find and celebrate stories of church members who used the direct-mail card to invite their neighbor to church. Same action, different narrative. Consider creating a schedule of similar powerful stories that bring to life how your core values translate into action
Language and narratives help the “outsider” who experiences your church become an “insider,” easily taking ownership of the process and then bringing along others on the journey. The cycle easily repeats when the language and the practices are tightly integrated.
Once we align our values, narrative and behaviors with God’s call to multiply, the culture of our church shifts. Your sending capacity might be your best asset, and your sending results could ultimately be your primary legacy as a leader.
IT STARTS WITH YOU
Culture change starts with the leader. Level 5 multiplication must be led by Level 5 leaders who are passionate about creating and maintaining a biblical culture of multiplication. We desperately need Level 5 leaders to emerge who can catalyze movements of Level 5 multiplying churches.
We’re calling these leaders “hero-makers.” When you shift from being simply the hero of your church to helping others become the heroes, you provide the future mentors your church will need on the journey toward starting and sustaining a Level 5 multiplying culture. In fact, Level 5 multiplier Ralph Moore is the first to say that multiplication lives and dies on leaders who are willing to pass the baton and empower others to lead.
The personal scorecards of hero-makers are measured not by what they do, but rather by how they release the potential in others. When our conviction to be leaders who multiply others so perfectly lines up with our values, narrative and practices, God’s response is multiplication. It becomes the inevitable outcome. How can you move from being the addition hero of your story to a multiplication hero-maker in God’s story?
Todd Wilson is co-founder and director of Exponential. Visit Exponential.org to learn more about leading a Level 5 multiplication culture in Exponential’s new free ebook, Multipliers: Leading Beyond Addition and at the upcoming Exponential East conference in Orlando, Florida (Feb. 26-March 1, 2018).