The Real Skills

by Dave Miller

I get accused of quoting Seth Godin too often. So, with that as a context…

In Seth Godin’s (and best) latest book “The Song of Significance” he rants about the new skills, the skills he calls “real.” He’s strumming Lp’s chord and I love it.

A decade ago I did a series of roundtable lunches with senior leaders of churches. I asked them two questions:

What are you looking for in your next hire?

Why did you, or your executive pastor, have to fire someone on your staff?

After speaking with about 80 leaders across denominations, and from churches of all sizes we landed at about 150 general answers. I took this spreadsheet and had it printed at Fed Ex Kinkos (it was quite large) and hung one copy on a co-worker’s wall, and hung one copy on my office wall. At the time we were all working at a small college (it’s for sale…if you are in the market).

The goal was to boil down this list into a common set of core competencies or soft skills. I wanted to boil this off to five. Smart people on the team got it down to 20. These skills are still our focus of coaching at Lp.

There are probably a thousand competencies to doing ministry this is not meant to be exhaustive (so please no hate mail about Biblical training and discipleship) keep in mind that this list assumes a lot.

For one, it assumes theological education is handled elsewhere for those that want to preach and teach. It also assumes that most of the core issues of personal spiritual growth are handled as well.

We were assuming a lot, but we landed on this list for a few reasons:

First, this is what church leaders told us. After all, what is needed in the field is a question that the Church owns. Not colleges, consultants, or seminaries. This is their question to answer.

Secondly, the landfills are full of discipleship materials. There are plenty of people on that topic.

At the end of the day, the Kingdom is spending billions on education and discipleship, and I’ve always tried to get at the core issue of why aren’t there enough leaders, and why are we still under-preparing the ones we do have?

Third, we were seeking to answer the question: Why do people get fired? And what ends ministry careers early at churches? In other words, where are the gaps in the skill preparation of how we are preparing people for ministry?

The gap does not appear to be in theological education.  We're good there. Our seminaries are full, and there's a ton of content online. It’s free. It gets cheaper and more accessible every year.

The gap does not appear to be in discipleship. You may argue that there aren't many disciples and that's fine, but I'll point you to this week's list of books and resources, and last year's landfills. 

So where is the gap?

Over a decade ago, my co-worker Andy Dykhouse boiled this list down (below), and we’ve been tweaking/running on this list since we began in 2017. It's a long list, and this is why we need two years of residency just to address the topics and coach through them. It’s driven through developmental conversations. These are the chapters of the Guidebooks. One for the supervisor and one for the resident.

Self Care

Teachable

Failing Forward

Time Management

Managing Details

Communication

Initiative

Self-Awareness

Flexible

Work Ethic

Personable

Decision-Making

Influence

Continual Growth

Conflict Management

Leading a Meeting

Leading a Team

Delegation

Developing Others

Networking