Highly Effective Pastors Are Born Out of Highly Engaging Training Experiences
To build an engaging pastoral training experience that develops highly effective pastors, it needs to be captivating, progressive, and accessible.
Introduction
If you have ever been to a conference you know how engaging they can be. With the lights, smoke, excellent speakers, spiritually sensitive worship teams, and fun activities throughout the conference, those who attend end up with a memory that keeps them coming back year after year for the experience.
What can be forgotten from the conference after we arrive home and return to our offices and weekly schedules is the quality training and insightful information we received.
Most conferences I go to I walk away with a ton of notes, quotes, aha moments, and fresh ideas as a result of the engaging experience I had at the conference. I learn and grow so much when I attend a conference in the midst of the action and noise and busyness.
Now, if you were to invite me to fly across the country, stay in a hotel, and attend 10 lecture sessions over 2 days where I would be trained to be a better pastor and learn some important information, I may be less likely to attend. Going to a bunch of lectures isn’t very inviting, and being forced to learn a bunch of information when I have tons of ministry that I need to do doesn’t draw me the same way a conference does.
Unfortunately, for most of us who offer any sort of quality training experience to our pastoral staff, we approach it more like a series of lectures rather than the experience of a conference. This is why no one is excited about going through it.
Now, I am not saying you need to create a conference to train your pastoral staff, but I am saying that if you want to get your pastoral staff to approach it with a higher degree of excitement than they do a root canal, then you need to offer more than just a bunch of lectures for them to trudge through.
I am going to show you the process I have used for a decade to train and develop pastors and ministry leaders using an engaging experience that they will love and look forward to.
What Does an Engaging Experience Do?
Providing training is incredibly vital for your church and pastoral staff’s overall health, sustainability, and effectiveness. Not to mention, it is vital for you as the Lead Pastor as you seek out your Dream Life in Ministry. If you want to go deeper into the overall why you need a training experience for your pastoral staff, then you can check out my article here on that.
Here we want to answer, what does an engaging pastoral training experience do for you?
This isn’t asking what a training experience does, because that misses the important question. As pastors, though, we can do this all the time…miss the important questions by answering a lesser question.
For instance, we identify a problem such as “why do our greeters shake hands with people as they walk in without making eye contact?”. Once the answer is discovered, we then ask, “How do we fix this problem and get them to make eye contact more frequently?” Usually, we land on some sort of training experience. At that point, we set off and begin putting together some process or experience we feel is necessary to remedy the problem we have identified with the solution we have discovered.
Can you see the problem here? The entire process, from problem identification all the way to offering a training experience has been focused on one thing…what we want or think should happen. At no point have we asked questions like…
- Why do the greeters want to make eye contact with people as they walk in?
- What does making eye contact do for the greeter?
- How can we provide the teaching and training necessary in a way the greeters want it?
- What exciting experience can we offer the greeters while we train them to make eye contact?
Since we don’t ask questions centered around those we are training and only ask the ones centered on the problem we are trying to solve, then we end up with training experiences, events, services, and classes a small percentage of people attend. We end up frustrated that more people don’t attend, but from the very beginning of the process, everything was focused on the problem we were looking to solve rather than the people involved.
This is why we have to go one step further from creating a training experience for our pastoral staff. We have to ask, what would make the pastoral staff want to be trained. At the intersection of the information we want to share and the experience they want to have lies an engaging training experience your pastors are going to love.
So, back to the question…what does an engaging experience do?
#1 An Engaging Experience Deepens Your Culture
There is a lot of talk these days about the importance of culture. No doubt culture is important and determines whether or not a church is thriving or dying. In fact, in most churches I consult with, I can tell within a few minutes of experiencing a service what kind of culture a church has and whether or not the culture is helping the church grow or causing it to die.
In his foundational book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein says, “Cultural forces are powerful because they operate outside of our awareness.” By the time we see the cultural forces at work in our churches, they are already deeply entrenched and will take some hard work and a lot of time to redirect. This is why Lead Pastors must be cultural architects as early as possible with intentional actions and culture-building activities.
One such activity is the training and development of the pastoral staff. It isn’t just about whether or not they were trained, or even the depth they were trained to, but what was their experience. If the experience is a boring lecture, then the valuable information they are receiving gets lost in the boredom and monotony. At the same time, when the experience is engaging, evokes emotional responses, and comes with eye-opening application points, then the information comes alive for the pastors being trained and they take that excitement into their ministry application.
When your pastors are not only excited about ministry, but they are also well informed, well trained, and always improving as practitioners of ministry, then that excitement is infused deep into your church culture. It becomes infectious as the people working closest to your pastors start to catch the excitement and then it permeates all the way out of the rings into your community.
Building an engaging training experience is an intentional step for you as a pastor to become the architect of your church culture by being the designer of the training experience your pastors go through.
#2 An Engaging Experience Makes Management Easier
As pastors, we are constantly wearing two hats: the leadership hat and the management hat. Now, most of us love the leadership hat and we avoid the management hat. The leadership hat is fun, brings excitement, and often puts us on the positive side of the equation. The management hat often puts us on the negative side of the equation as we hold people accountable, keep up with work progress, oversee projects and deadlines, and ultimately make decisions about hiring and firing members of our team.
When we set up a training experience of some kind for our pastors, we know that we will have to hold them accountable for going through it, otherwise what’s the point of having it. If we have a training experience without accountability, we have created a formality that everyone recognizes and dismisses as not worth their time.
That defeats the whole purpose of having a training experience!!!
When you build an engaging training experience for your pastoral staff to go through, it makes it easier to manage them through the process. Instead of having to go to them to make sure they are making progress, learning what they need to, and growing, they are coming to you to ask questions to go deeper and find out more.
You are always going to run the risk of having a staff member or two who is disengaged and resistant to the training process, but for the most part, your team is going to embrace the process and love the experience of growing as pastors. This means you will have more leadership conversations about ministry, growth, and development and fewer management conversations about the lack of follow-through and the consequences that follow.
How to Make Your Pastoral Training Experience Engaging
This simple framework I have used for over a decade makes training your pastoral staff easier and has evolved and developed a lot over the last 10 years. What started as a printed manual and became a digital ebook can now be designed to be an experience your pastoral staff will not only enjoy going through but will likely become a pivotal point in their overall ministry development. You will have the opportunity to shape how they pastor the rest of their lives.
Step #1: Needs to be Captivating
Research in recent years has revealed that the attention span of most people is right around 8 seconds. This, disturbingly, is a shorter attention span than a goldfish.
Despite this reality, what is also being discovered is that successful blog writers who write articles of 2,000+ words get more traffic sent to them by Google and engage more people through their writing. (Article from Income School goes a little deeper into this.) So, which is it? Do people have short attention spans or are they engaging with long-form content?
The answer is…both.
What this tells me is that, even though the attention span of most people has diminished below the level of a fish who lives its whole life in a bowl, there is still value in quality, engaging content. This is why you can’t just create a training experience for your pastors to go through filled with lectures and content that doesn’t captivate them.
What they are really looking for is good, quality content that captivates them, draws them in, makes them think, and challenges them to be better practitioners of the craft as pastors.
Your pastors are inundated all the time with content that is aimed at entertaining them. It is full of cheap laughs, dumb stunts, and shallow material. But, since it offers at least some level of entertainment and brings a level of happiness to them, they will choose it over dry lecture-style content even if promises to change their life.
Here is the good news…as a Lead Pastor, you are already used to creating engaging content. Every Sunday you craft a sermon that draws your congregation in, brings a degree of entertainment, motivates them, challenges them, and leaves them with a point of application they can use for the coming week. If you can do this, you can create a training experience that is captivating and keeps your pastors’ attention as they go through it.
Step #2: Needs to be Progressive
In the 1970s Noel Burch presented to the world the Four Stages of Learning or competence. They are:
- Unconscious Incompetence: Unaware of the skill or lack of proficiency
- Conscious Incompetence: Aware of the skill but not yet proficient
- Conscious Competence: Have some profiency, but take focus and effort
- Unconscious Competence: Profiency in the skill is automatic and effortless
What this shows us is that there is a progression of learning we all have. As we move through these phases of learning, not only do we get better at the skill we are developing, but we are also moving through a natural process of awareness.
At the same time, most ministry skills are learned a progression of sequence and difficulty. Let me us preparing a sermon as an example. Now, I realize there are lots of ways to go about preparing a sermon, however, for the sake of this discussion I will use a relatively simple approach from our friends at Logos Bible Software. One approach to developing a sermon follows a progression that looks like this:
- Choose Your Sermon Topic (Idea or Scripture)
- Prepare Your Heart to Preach
- Explore the Topic Deeply for Yourself
- Review Original Languages
- Read Commentaries
- Build Your Outline
- Write With Your Audience in Mind
- Speak so Your Listeners Learn
As you can see here, there is a progression of development. If you were teaching someone how to preach a sermon based on this approach, you would want to teach them to learn in the order presented in increasing measure of proficiency.
This is how you need to build your training experience. You want your pastors to learn in a natural, progressive way that compliments how our brains function and how we become self-aware of our proficiency.
By creating a progressive training experience where building blocks are placed in order and enhanced by the blocks before them, then you pastors will learn more, faster, and with greater retention and application. This means they will quickly see the results of their learning and will be excited to learn more and apply things faster.
Step #3: Needs to Be Accessible
As a Lead Pastor, your time is valuable. There are many things that only you can do, and so when you begin to add other things that others can do but don’t, then you end up with a very full plate, not a lot of free time, and a sense of feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
This is why for many of us we feel like the idea of training our pastoral staff on a regular basis is just too much. When would we find time for all of that? At the same time, how would your pastoral staff have time for that in the midst of everything they are already doing?
One of the biggest hindrances to pastoral training is accessibility. Everyone is so busy and has a hard time fitting in the training.
However, they have plenty of time fitting in entertainment. Movies, video games, events, Netflix binging, and a whole host of other activities. This isn’t because these activities are better than being trained (though this can be the case if your training is lecture-style), but it is more because your pastors can do things at any time they want wherever they want. Most of the things they spend their time doing are not bound by a location or by a specific time.
Your training process needs to be the same way. Your pastors need to be able to learn and grow whenever it works into their schedules, and I don’t mean you need to be available for them whenever they need you to go through training.
No, instead, you need to create your amazing pastoral training experience online so they can access it whenever is convenient for them.
Online learning platforms allow you to create progressive and captivating learning experiences online for your pastors to go through. It can be as media-rich as you would like it to be, filled with video teachings, visual aids, quizzes, surveys, and whatever else you can imagine making the training experience engaging. My favorite online learning tool is Thinkific because of its versatility, ability to track the progress of each person, and web design tool that makes building a site easy for anyone.
When you use a tool like Thinkific and build an online training experience your pastors can access at any time, then you will see an incredible increase in the speed your pastors go through the process and the amount of information they retain and put into practice. Their level of productivity, effectiveness, and morale will go through the roof because they are able to access the information when they are in the right mindset to learn and grow.
Conclusion
You want a highly effective pastoral staff that can make an impact for the Kingdom of God, serve your faith community, and relieve you of some of the weight you carry as the Lead Pastor. It will revolutionize everything when your pastoral staff is growing, developing, increasing capacity, and expanding their influence. So, there is really no reason for you to not want a highly effective pastoral team.
Unfortunately, wanting it isn’t enough. You have to put in the work and effort necessary to build a training process capable of growing highly effective pastors. You have to be intentional about how it is built and put the time into designing it to engage those going through it.
If you build it to be captivating, progressive, and accessible then you will have an engaging training experience that your pastors will love, will keep coming back for more, and will attribute much of their ministry effectiveness to in the future.
Don’t wait, start building your engaging training experience today.
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