Cynicism in your leadership team effects every part of your church family and can cause a negative environment for everyone.
From making it harder to gain volunteers to not making any new changes to grow your church, cynicism is a serious issue.
When you deal with it effectively, you create a stronger leadership team to serve as the foundation of your growing church family.
Uncover The Cause
Cynicism in your leadership team comes from a variety of sources. It could be a major project a leader was spearheading where nearly all the volunteers let them down. Perhaps a leader lost their significant other to illness or an accident. Whatever the cause, it’s vital to ask your cynical leaders what’s wrong.
Until you know the cause, it’s difficult to help them. Talk to them and offer your support. If they want talk to you, talk with their friends and family to figure out what’s wrong and how you can help.
Offer Time To Gain A New Perspective
Sometimes, your leaders just need to take a step back to focus on their own needs. Cynicism makes it difficult to be there for others. Instead, encourage your leaders to take some time off to go on a vacation, spend more time with their loved ones, take a spiritual trip or anything else that will help them gain a new perspective.
You might suggest inspiring Christian leaders for them to listen to or see speak in person. You may even ask them to work in a different church temporarily if something within their home church caused the cynicism.
Help Them Move Past Failures
Failure is more than enough to cause cynicism in your leadership team. For instance, a leader who is often busy in the church may feel like they’re failing their family when they miss a school event, like a game or concert.
Leaders might feel like failures when they don’t meet their goals for bringing in new members or increasing online tithing. However, failure happens to everyone and it’s important to remind them of that. Take the time to point out their successes and how much you appreciate everything they’ve done for the church.
Encourage New Learning
Sometimes, cynicism in your leadership team comes from boredom. Nothing new ever seems to happen. Growth becomes stale and your leaders become cynical. This is the time to encourage new learning. Send them to a fun leadership or Christian leader conference.
Switch up roles to encourage them to learn something new. The idea is to spark their natural curiosity again. Once you do that, they’re less cynical and feel more like their old selves.
Get Them Involved In New Projects
In the spirit of giving your cynical leaders a fresh perspective and discouraging boredom, get them involved in new projects. Give them something completely different than what they’ve worked on in the past. This means they’ll work with new people as well, which always helps to give your leaders a different view on the world.
Ask them what they’re passionate about or what they wish they could change in the world. Use their answer as the basis for the new project. Don’t forget that you can partner with other churches to help your leaders branch out more.
A popular option is to get them more involved with online ministry. Let them blog, create inspiring church graphics, talk with people on social media or lead online prayer groups.
Remind Them Of Their Passion
The most important thing to do when you have cynicism in your leadership team is to remind them of their passion. Take them back to that moment where they knew they were meant to lead others in their Christian journeys. Sometimes it helps to gather their closest friends and family and have everyone talk about why they’re passionate about their faith and how much the leader means to them. After all, everyone needs that remind from time to time.
Need a new project for your leaders? Start by asking them to help manage different areas of your church website so they can help grow your church online.
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