The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
The Risk Management Conversation Your Staff Isn't Having
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You're in the planning meeting and somebody throws up a really cool and a bold ministry idea. And before you can even think, there are immediately free voices jumping in with reasons like it won't work. What if people don't like it? What if we don't have enough volunteers? What if the leadership says no? And before you know it, what could have been a really cool thing, a really great idea, the idea's dead. It's not even on life support. She dead. And you're gonna go back to planning the same stuff you did last year just because you killed a really great idea. Does this sound familiar? Does this frustrate you sometimes? That's what we're gonna talk about today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I call it the risk allergy, and most church staff have developed this risk allergy, this allergy to risk, where every idea gets filtered through the worst case scenario. Every ministry experiment gets killed even before it gets started. And sometimes we've just trained ourselves over time to ask what could go wrong before we ask what could got. And if we break that down, here's what's really happening. Our wisdom has been replaced with fear. Over time, your wisdom gets replaced accidentally. We don't do this on purpose, but it gets replaced with fear. And your steam, your team, without even maybe realizing it, stops bringing creative ideas to the table, even in the first place, because they're just going to get shot down. They learn to self-edit before they even speak. And unfortunately, what happens is any kind of new ideas, any kind of innovation kind of dies in committee because someone always finds a reason to say no. And you end up with ministries that are completely safe, completely predictable, and yep, completely unforgettable. Meanwhile, life goes on. Your community is changing. The people that you're serving have real needs, and those needs are different than they were six months or even a year ago. But you're still offering them the same equivalent ministry of vanilla ice cream. Now listen, nobody's trying to be reckless. Your staff genuinely wants to be wise stewards. And you do too. You might be the culprit here as well. But there's a difference between wisdom and fear. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is try and recenter here. If this seems to be a problem in your church, try to recenter, okay? Wisdom will ask, how can we do this? Fear asks, should we even try this at all? Wisdom plans for these problems. Fear assumes that problems are inevitable and we just shouldn't even try. So start asking different questions in your planning meetings. Instead of asking, hey, what if this fails? Ask, what if this works? It's a glass half full, glass half empty question. Instead of asking, what if this fails, or what do we do when this fails, ask what if this works? You might have a different problem if it works. Instead of asking, do we have enough resources? Ask, how could we pilot this and start it small and maybe grow it if it works? Instead of asking, will people like this? asking, will this serve people well? Kind of have to do a little bit of a reality check here. Your people are taking risks in their businesses and their relationships and their parenting, and they're not looking for a church that's afraid of its own shadow, right? They're looking for a church that believes that God still shows up when his people step out in faith. So here's the bottom line for today. Risk-free ministry is actually the riskiest thing you can do. Let me rephrase that. Or not rephrase that. I want to keep the phrasing exactly the same, but let me repeat it for you, okay? Because it's profound. Risk-free ministry can actually be the riskiest thing you can do because you risk missing what God wants you to do next if you don't do it at all. So here's your challenge for this week. This week, I want you to resurrect one ministry idea that kind of got killed by the risk committee in the past year. Ask your team, what would it look like to try this small? Let's try a scale-backed version of this and let's be smart about it. But what would happen if we tried it? Give innovation a chance to breathe. Your ministry is supposed to require faith. And if you're a point at a point in your church and in your ministry where you have no faith, that's not a God-honoring ministry. If you can pull it off without God, it might not be worth doing. So keep going, keep dreaming, keep innovating, and squash those idea squashers. I hope this has been helpful. I enjoy our time together, even though we don't get to talk back and forth. Hopefully to enjoy spend some spending some time here with me on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I am here every day, so I hope you'll come back tomorrow. Subscribe wherever you're listening to this now so you can get notified, and that just helps us out as well. So we will be back here tomorrow again. And if there's any way that I can help you, I'm one of the co-founders over at Chemistry Staffing. So that's we help churches every day with staffing needs, healthy church staff. We've got our healthy church staff assessment report from 2025 that's going to release. Boy, I think it's coming out next week. I couldn't be more excited about that. We're going to start actually next week talking about that here on the podcast, and you'll want to keep listening so that you'll know how to get your free copy of that. Boy, it's going to be a little secret here. Nobody knows this, but you and me and one other person. This is a substantial report. It's going to be like 200 pages. If you are a church geek and like to geek out about what's happening in the church, oh, you're going to love it. If you're not a geek, you can read the first 20 pages and get the gist of it. All right. Thanks so much for joining me. Hope you'll join me again tomorrow, right here on the Healthy Church. Have a great day.
