Larry is someone who has become not just a friend but a brother to me.

I honor my brother Larry for being a great and tireless worker. If you work with Larry you will be assured that he would give more than 100% of his efforts and what is required of him. In Larry, I have a kids church pastor, a daily operations guy and a human resource one man department. The kids in Greenhills are blessed to have you as their pastor. Bro, just want to tell you how much I appreciate how you carry the load of the church with me. I think every pastor needs to have a LARRY. Somebody who relieves you of some of the work needed to make the church grow.

I honor you Larry for being a brother. I think you have redefined friendship. I will be forever grateful for being a listening ear, a punching bag, an eating partner, an exercise partner. You have taught me to value relationships more. You have exemplify brotherly love. The love you have shown to my family super exceeds any expectations I have from a friend. Thank you bro and happy birthday bro!!!

January 2008: After a month of church we decided to start talking about who do we really want to reach and how are we going to reach them. It was a good question that took us 8 hours to answer.

I was the only staff at that time and everyone was volunteering to make the dream happen.

Here are the results of the meeting:

And this is what we want to achieve:

We wanted the worship experience to be:

And the dream for leadership development:

Miss those days but looking forward for the BIG MOVE to VMALL.

Related post:

1. The Big move to Vmall

Shared a short word about the culture that I expect from our church staff ( or I call them team). I remember when we started our church in Greenhills, I went through the book FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM by Pat Lencioni with my one and only ( or only one) paid staff and a campus missionary plus all the volunteers who were helping me run the church. We dream of having a church where the team have a high level of trust.

Pat Lencioni in his book shares how the absence of trust is the root of dysfunction in a team/ organization. A team would cease to be in maximum effectiveness if there is a level of mistrust among its members.

After four years, we now have a pastoral staff of 4, 5 church admins and 3 campus missionaries. God has blessed me with a tremendous team and with every growth, the leader must learn to live out and teach the culture he wants the team to have.

One of the questions I ask myself every time I hire a new team member is if I could trust them. When the trust level is high – the team is not afraid to confront conflicts and problems, manage tensions and be accountable to each other.

An atmosphere of trust also makes your team members challenge some of your ideas the same way I challenge some of their ideas. The conflicts are never personal but it always contributes to the big picture.

I just want to honor the team in Greenhills. Thank you for the trust and the conflicts. I pray that we do have more as we continue to advance God’s kingdom in our city!!!

The reason I enjoy our Greenhills pastoral team is because of its diversity. Teams and staff meetings would be boring if everybody thinks alike.

I love the newest addition to our team – Pastor Jayson Lo who was a former businessman and one of the best motivational speaker in the business/ personal dev’t circuit. The reason I love having Jayson is because we don’t think the same. Yes we have the same heart and the same vision but we don’t think the same.

Imagine a team that always thinks the same. It is a scary thought. No conflict, no innovative ideas, no challenges. I might not last in that kind of an environment.

So I invite you to peek on the thoughts of this man, my minstry partner and discipleship pastor of Victory Greenhills, Pastor Jayson Lo. Check out his blogs and thoughts, click HERE

If you have a team of linchpins, innovators and leaders – you need to ask a very important question to them everytime you are in the verge of making a decision.

What’chu think?

Because they will tell you what they think. They are not afraid to tell you what is on their mind. That is what I love about our pastoral meetings. They tell me what they think. Sometimes I don’t even have to ask them what they think. They pounce on the ideas, block some of the ideas, debate on some ideas, think of new ideas.

Pastor Jayson – our discipleship pastor plays our devil’s advocate ( in a heavenly way). I love having Jayson on the team bacause he asks, questions and think of ways to challenge the prevailing ideas. At times the conversation heats up. Larry and Tito then joins and makes the conflict worse and healthy.

Sometimes I back off to listen to every idea or insight that the team has. A lot of times I smile and think ” Wow, I’ve got a great team who thinks.”

I would rather have a bad game plan that is well executed than a well thought plan not is not executed.

A bad game plan can be changed.

A plan that is executed shows you have what it takes to execute a game plan.

BUT not executing a well game plan shows something about our character.

So what’s your game plan? Are you executing it?

When something bad happens in church – take responsibility. Take the blame. When a volunteer messes up in public- take the blame but talk to the volunteer privately. When a staff did not come through – take the blame publicly, reprimand privately.

When something great happens – give the credit to your staff, leaders and volunteers. Never take the credit. When a staff does an amazing job – praise him/her publicly. Same thing with volunteers.

That is leadership. I learned that from the pastors who have mentored me and I have seen how they continue to live the same way.

The Youth Ministry has its own turf. The Kids ministry has their own turf. The Discipleship Ministry has its own turf and so on and so forth for every ministry in church. This usually happens to churches who have forgotten the BIG PICTURE of why they exists.

Instead of working towards a common goal, different ministries in the same church creates their own turf. So how do we rally towards a common goal and remove the turfs and silos we have created.

Create a rally cry. My family have been doing the rally cry since last year and it work wonders for us. We choose a thematic goal or our quarterly rally cry and focus all our energy to make it happen. Now it is no longer Thammie’s responsibility or my responsibility. We own it and we do everything to make it come to pass.

So work towards a common rally cry and get everybody on board. You will be surprised to see what a focus team can do.

On a local church note: Our rally cry for the whole year is RAISE ONE. We have challenged our existing small group leaders to RAISE ONE small group leader. That means by the end of the year we double our small group leader base which would help us catch the harvest.

Just finished our Monthly Strategic Meeting and finalized our Jan-March calendar for 2010. Really excited with the upcoming year. I am excited working with a great team serving a great God.

We have lots of things in store for 2010. Our primary focus for next year is our discipleship ministry. We currently have 50 active small group leaders and our goal is thay by next year we would be able to double that and have 100 small group leaders. By doing so, our goal of 80% of our people being part of a small group is achievable.

I am really privileged to be working with our discipleship pastor, Jayson Lo who is Mr. Ideas. His heart is really passionate to reach and disciple the city of San Juan.

We are also praying for a place where we could start our morning service. There has really been a clamor for us to have one but we haven’t found a venue till today when we got an idea to scout a place that could possibly hold our morning service. Do pray for us for that opening.

One side note for pastors. As much as I love planning for the whole year of 2010 and filling our calendars till December – it is way more effective to map out the year by quarters. What we did today was very productive. Cutting our planning for the next 3 months and pegging a date for every thing we would do from January and March got us more excited. Our strategic meeting hours were cut by around 30% and we end still having a sharp mind ( i hope so) even after the meeting.

Also if you want to listen to our leadership podcast we have uploaded episode 1 already and you can listen to it here

Tom Peters said in his book “Tolerance for failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture – and the lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won’t work.”- from the book In Search of Excellence

My mind is still cramped today. We had our team meeting this morning and my mind was just flying around after 2 intensive strategic meeting with the senior pastors of our Metro Manila churches. My mind was shouting – give me a break!

One thing that really impacted me during our Metro Manila strategic meeting is that nobody carried their badge of authority and said “Listen to me, I am seniority here and my ideas are the best because of my experience.” but there was this free flowing exchange of thoughts, ideas and philosophy of ministry.

There were hours of intense debate, heated discussions. Views from the pastors who have been in ministry since our church came into existence and ideas from the next generation pastors. I love meetings where healthy conflicts are encouraged or else there is nothing to meet about.

I have learned from our pastors how we must all tolerate failure to grow. Victory is here today because of the failures we have learned from the past. To our pastors I honor you for tolerating failure and for giving us room to fail and grow as well.