Chris Collins teaches how we, as pastors and leaders, can use tasks to develop others into leaders. Rather than tasks becoming a nuisance and filling our schedule, they can actually be delegated to other people in order to grow them.
Here are a few of the main points:
Early on in my time at the Stone, I was sitting just completely overwhelmed with the amount of things I needed to get done. And I told our lead pastor at the time, we had like eight people on staff at the time so it was easy to get some time with our lead pastor, and he was walking by one day, and he said, “Hey man, how are you doing?” And I was honestly just like, “I don’t know if I’m gonna get all this stuff done. I feel like I am drowning with the way the church is growing, all the people that want to volunteer, all the issues going on. I just don’t know if I’m gonna make it.” And he walked into my office and he said, “Write everything that you do in a week on the board, and then when you’re done come get me.”
I was like, “That’s another thing to do! What are you talking about?” But it’s your lead pastor, so you do it, right? And I mean, I just filled the white board. I mean, it was just columns of stuff that, just on the regular, I did on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I had it all planned out, all this stuff, and I’m just overwhelmed looking at it.
I went and got him and said, “Well, come look at my list.” He didn’t even look at it. He didn’t even acknowledge it. He said, “Okay, now I want you to put someone else’s name next to everything.” And I was like, “Excuse me? You want me to, huh?” He said, “Write someone that you’re shepherding, write their name next to every single thing on your board.” And I was like, “That’s crazy talk. What are you talking about?”
This changed my perspective of ministry from that point on. He said, “Chris, don’t use people to get tasks done. Use tasks to get people done.” The first time I heard it, I was like, “huh?” But the more I dug into it, what he was trying to get me to do was to use my overwhelming task list to pastor people, to develop people, to disciple people, to call people to faithfulness.
And all of a sudden, I started going, “You know what? Carlton could totally do these six things. I just need to ask him to do it, and do it with the intent of growing him, like walking with him, calling him to faithfulness.” That changed everything.
So when I’m handed something from our executive staff, “Hey you need to do ‘x’,” I immediately think, “Who can I develop with that task?” Not, “Oh man, I gotta get this stuff done,” but, “Who can I get done with this task?” and it changed everything for us.
We have accomplished more, we have done more in our ministry, because, with the togetherness, we are inviting men and women to own our ministry as much as we own our ministry. We have the hard conversations when they’re unfaithful, and we have great celebrations when they are.
We see leaders continually growing because we’re giving them greater tasks. It’s very biblical. You’re faithful with a little, I’m going to give you a lot. We’re just raising the bar with leaders as they’re faithful with the smallest tasks. It takes the smallest tasks off you to think about, to dream about, and to lead the greater things. You can spend more of your time on pastoring and shepherding because you’re using those tasks to get your flock done.
