Tim King Leadership

The Leader sets the culture. Whether we like it or not the Senior Leader of a church is the one that should be tasked with setting the cultural tone of the church, its vision mission and core values are all paramount to this. What is church culture? Church Culture is the outworking of the Senior Leaders vision and philosophy on how to move the church forward and accomplish what they feel is God’s mandate for that particular church and community. I have said before that I have a Holistic view of leadership. I believe that ministry builds people but leadership grows churches. I believe that the leader of a church should have a calling, a vocation, a vision and a ministry an ability to lead. But I also believe that a leader should have a stable home life a supportive wife/husband and family. That the leader should stay fit through regular exercise, they should eat healthy foods and last but not least they should have a fresh and vibrant spiritual life. Therefore a large overwei...

Stress is not Burnout. Very recently I found myself having coffee with some church leaders and discussing stress and burnout. There appeared to be the idea that stress and burnout was one and the same thing. Let me say right here right now they are not. In talking with these church leaders I could also detect signs of burnout in each and every one of them, though thankfully none of them were in my opinion burnt out.   We all experience stress; it is possible to live a life without stress. There is such a thing as good stress – a sense of joy and fulfilment, that feeling of achievement. There is also bad stress (distress) those extreme negative pressures that intrude into our lives -the illness of a loved one, financial stress, the stresses that our children put us through- especially in their teenage years. The stress of running and building a large church has its own particular types of stresses. I believe that the vast majority of great church leaders I have met who ha...

This week I would like to give some insight into two areas that can be the making or the breaking of a church, delegation and decision making. These two things go alongside the need to rise up young effective leaders in our churches. Poor attitudes in these three areas are responsible for the lack of growth and the ineffectiveness of countless churches throughout the world. Delegation. When churches grow there is a need to begin to delegate responsibilities –those responsibilities that have for so long been kept close to the senior leaders chest. Delegation is not an easy thing to do. Leaders can often feel that they can do the job better that giving up a particular area, that they   may feel could be too much for the subordinate to handle. Leaders can often feel insecure; the feeling that subordinates can do or will do a better job. Leaders may feel that their own weaknesses will be exposed or that they are not showing the congregation that they are earning their keep. ...

I sometimes hate the word communication. “I know what I mean, why should I have to express it differently to others.” Unfortunately not everybody knows how you work or operate, hence the need to communicate accurately and succinctly not only in language and theory but understanding as well. Communication has just as much to do with speaking, as it does to understanding the perception of the listener. In other words people do not just listen to what we say but respond to how we feel about them. When you read the war time speeches of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, you can see that he expressed in his words the feelings of the British people. He used words that epitomised how everybody viewed Mr Hitler. He did not only speak to his listeners minds, but to whom they were- the unconquerable British people. I think that I am a great communicator, my wife thinks differently, sometimes we will discuss a point for hours only to come to the conclusion that we both agree o...