Hans Googer

I sometimes find myself frustrated. It’s a mild frustration—nothing most people see—but it is present nonetheless. The frustration could be at home, amongst church ministry, in a meeting or a conversation among friends.

Being frustrated is easy; knowing why you are frustrated is hard. Often, rather than try and diagnose why we are frustrated we simply assume our frustration because of something someone else did wrong (good place to start, right?, with what other people did wrong). We know, though, that there’s usually more to the story.

2020 has been a year for me to try and track down my own personal frustrations that show up in leadership and figure out what is going on. Here’s what I’m discovering:

Frustrations often come when your personal values clash with the personal values of another.

Further than that is the fact that these values might be expressing themselves in you positively or negatively—and you might now know what is going on in the moment unless you really think about it.

So that’s where this series will be going. I’ve spent some time trying to articulate my own personal values, how they operate day-today, and how they might help or hinder as I lead. Today, I’ll simply summarize those values and from there I’ll start showing the upside and downside to each one.

Continue reading “Your Values: How They Help and Hinder Your Leadership”

So COVID-19 has taken the world by storm and is uniquely addressing how we live life in Texas—as well as basically anywhere. The city is largely shutting down for at least two weeks as we all attempt to “flatten the curve” (most of us not knowing what that meant until recently).

Many churches have stopped meeting for a while—with the large majority of church gatherings exceeding the recently-established 50-person threshold, while all of them fail to keep people from being in “close contact” with others. Never fear, many churches have small group gatherings that meet in homes throughout the city. We got this . . . right?

Then, today happens. And social gatherings of 10 or more are encouraged to cease for at least the next 15 days. That’s a while. So how do we address this?

Continue reading “Leading Small Groups when Even Small Groups are Canceled”

There is a general principle in my house: if there is a significant game on for a team that we have a rooting interest in, we can stay up and watch it. School the next day? Doesn’t matter. Game goes past midnight? That’s fine. The kids (and parents) can go to sleep when they want, but they are free to watch until the end. Parenting—in large part—is about memory-making, and we love these memories.

One of my favorite memories (up until recently) was watching all of the 2017 World Series with my family. Game 7 is where the principle applied. We didn’t own a television at the time—I think we had Youtube TV or something like that and would watch the games on a secondary computer monitor on our kitchen counter. My oldest was the only one who had the stamina to watch until the end.

It was awesome. Until it wasn’t.

What we know now chances my perspective forever—and basically every sports fan’s perspective. As I’ve watched press conferences and player interviews and read commentary upon commentary I’ve tried to figure out where I landed with it all, and I think I figured it out:

The Astros should forfeit their World Series Trophy and Altuve should do the same with the MVP.

Let me explain . . .

Continue reading “Sign Stealing From a Sports Fan (and Pastor’s) Perspective: Forfeit”

I recently finished up ten years in pastoral ministry and I keep wishing I had a time machine. Not only would I tell the younger pastoral version of myself to emphasize faithfulness and to pray more, but I have a few more that are on my mind (scrawled on a piece of paper that as sitting in my car—which has since been lost in the roughly six months it has taken me to restart this series).

Any time you enter into a ministry job (I think this might generalize to other jobs, but I’m not sure) there is an (often) unstated expectation that you’ll start changing things around. “Where are we headed?” becomes a pretty normal question. Different people have different expectations for their church, and they want to know what you are going to do, and how you are going to do it. That’s all fine and good—I might be the same if the roles were reversed—but these questions put a unique pressure on ministry leaders to get something done and to get it done quickly.

However, discipleship doesn’t happen quickly.

Continue reading “To My Younger Self: Invest in a Few”