Leadership Lessons I’m Learning from Buckhead Church

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I love Buckhead Church.  My entire family loves it.  Even my toddler, EZ, loves it and he’s not easily wooed!  But we love the church for a lot of unexpected reasons.  I already knew Andy Stanley was one of the best teachers in the world.  I expected the technology to make me go oooh and awww.  I anticipated amazing facilities with well designed curves and ingenious quirks.  All of those things didn’t disappoint, but Buckhead Church has surprised me.  In those surprises I have learned some priceless leadership lessons that I hope to take with me into our church plant as we launch in about five more months!  Over the course of the next few days I am going to share some of those lessons with you, but I encourage you to visit the church for yourself the first chance you get.  If you come to study as a pastor in need of ideas or a person in need of worship – you won’t be disappointed.

Leadership Lesson #1 – Be Willing to Change (In BIG Ways if Needed) to Fulfill Your Mission

The outside assumption about a "successful" church like Buckhead Church is that it has certain people and programs (and principles) in place that make it so successful and that if you put similar people and programs in place in your church that you will have success.  This is true to a great degree, but Buckhead Church does not act like a church that has arrived.  It is a living, ever-changing organism that experiments, takes risks, and is willing to change in big ways to fulfill its mission.  I say this because a church that became a carbon copy of Buckhead Church last year may find that the church has changed significantly since then. 

It’s not that what the church did last year is no longer any good (I’m sure it is), but Buckhead Church has shown me that they have an insatiable desire to have the very best answers for the people that they serve TODAY and hope to serve TOMORROW.  I have seen this play out in three practical and surprising ways.

• 7/22 has been a major part of the Buckhead Church/NorthPoint brand and movement for years.  It reaches thousands of single young adults from throughout Atlanta and is, by all visible standards, wildly successful and popular.  It is being temporarily shut down and retooled so that it can better fulfill the mission of the church.  This move showed amazing guts and determination to me because most of us hang on to what appears to be successful with a very tight grip.  The leadership team believes strongly that they can do better.  I believe them.

• My family attended several KidStuf services when we first began attending Buckhead Church and we were totally blown away.  It is a supercool, hilarious, engaging gathering for kids and their families to attend together for about 30 minutes after each Sunday morning service.  It’s been going on for years.  The church just announced major changes to the "very successful" format this past week.  Instead of being a weekly service, it is going to become a monthly service so that the staff can better respond to the parental demand for resources and guidance at home.  Why tinker with what works?  The answer is so that you can do something better.

• On the first Sunday we attended a morning service, my wife and I were shocked to see and hear a very good rapper open up the service.  This brother wasn’t some sorry guy that was trying to rap, he was really good.  As I looked around and saw the people sitting all around us, I had doubts that most of them listened to any hip-hop, but it hooked Rai and I right away.  Whether the intent was to hook people like us or to expose the congregation to other ways we can express our love for God, it immediately displayed for me that the church was interested in changing the way people think about church.

Is your church willing to change to fulfill its mission?  Have you created a culture where your team feels confident to critique and analyze everything – including any sacred cows you may have?