Welcome to your Transformational Resources Home Base!
If you desire lasting transformation in your parish, then you are in the right place! Here you can expect to find impactful resources to grow your leadership influence, transform both the organizational and spiritual health of your parish, and ultimately fulfill the commission Jesus has given you and your parish. Whether you are a pastor or parish leadership team member, we are grateful that you are a part of this movement. Now, let’s go transform our parishes together!
Start here: The heart of your work is the mission of evangelization. The Amazing Parish Movement recently gathered for an essential conversation around how we overcomplicate evangelization. Click here to check it out.
BECOME A BETTER LEADER
For pastors and PLT members who feel overwhelmed by the demands, responsibilities, and concerns of parish leadership.
Reflect and Commit
What concerns are draining my time and energy that I need to let go of?
How can I invest more time and energy on my circle of influence as a parish leader?
Make one concrete commitment to follow through on this week.
Related Models
For pastors and PLT members who want to purify their motive and focus more time and energy on the things only they can do as leaders.
Reflect and commit
What resonated with you from this video?
How can you make one small change this week to be a more responsibility-centered leader?
Related resources
For pastors and PLT members who are struggling to overcome fear, anxiety, and unhealthy habits in their leadership.
Reflect and renounce
What wounds do I think Jesus wants to heal in me?
What lies from the enemy are impacting how I lead?
Renounce those lies. In Jesus’ name, I renounce the lie that _________.
Go deeper
For pastors and PLT members who want to grow in self-awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses as a parish leader.
Reflect and commit
What virtue of a heroic parish leader do you struggle with the most?
What impact do your weaker virtues have on your team and your parish?
Make one concrete commitment to grow in a weak virtue this week.
Related model
Other Leadership Resources
For parish leaders who are feeling the pain of an unhealthy or joyless parish work culture. Especially for Parish Leadership Teams in their first several weeks – this is where to start!
Reflect and Commit
Related Resources
Do you understand the Culture of an AP and feel you’ve been working on it but still don’t have the desired result? You may need to identify and overcome the 5 Misconceptions of a PLT.
A testimony of using The Three Conversations to transform parish culture.
Keep it simple
Your parish culture should include evangelization and discipleship, but it doesn’t have to be sophisticated or complicated. It starts very simply with honest and vulnerable conversations and naturally grows and spreads from one person to another. Here’s a quick overview of the Three Conversations, which are easy exercises that can open the door to deepening the culture of discipleship at your parish.
Other Culture Resources
CREATE A CULTURE OF HEALTHY TEAMWORK
For Pastors or PLTs who experience dysfunction on their team that is impacting the team or the mission.
Reflect
How are you doing with the role of the leader in leading each behavior of a healthy team?
- Be vulnerable to build trust
- Mine for conflict to encourage healthy debate
- Force clarity and closure to ensure commitment and buy-in
- Confront difficult issues to hold people accountable
- Focus on collective outcomes to emphasize team wins
Related Resources
The most foundational of the Five Behaviors of a Team to develop are Trust and Healthy Conflict. If you are recognizing dysfunction on your team or staff, start here!
Assess yourself and your team
Build trust
Foster healthy conflict
Other Healthy Teamwork Resources
RUN GREAT WEEKLY PLT MEETINGS
For PLTs who are unclear on their priorities or lacking directional alignment.
Where to start
If you’re just getting started with a PLT (think the first 8-12 weeks), you’ll most likely want to spend time building the culture of prayer, teamwork, and discipleship on your team. If this is you, check out this relevant webinar and the various resource tabs above.
Of course, there are times when something else is truly more important, or you may have evidence that your PLT has a strong culture and is not sure where to focus next. If that’s you, check out these resources to establish your new PLT top priority.
Related resources
For PLTs who have a clear Top Priority (Thematic Goal) but want their weekly PLT meetings to be more engaging or effective.
Reflect and commit
Are our weekly PLT meetings engaging or boring? Are we focused on what’s truly most important in our weekly PLT meetings?
What is one change we need to make to our PLT meetings for them to be more engaging and effective in moving forward our top priority?
Related resources
Other Meetings Resources
Reflect
What is my strongest virtue of an Ideal Team Player? Weakest? What impact does this have on those I lead?
Do I have staff or PLT members who are seriously lacking in one of these virtues? How can I help them see the impact of this and help them grow?
What is the impact of hiring someone who is seriously lacking in humility, hunger, or people smarts?
For Pastors or PLTs leading their parish through a significant change and managing a variety of reactions.
Reflect and Commit
What is one big transition your parish, staff, or team are going through?
What are two concrete areas you need to focus on as a leader to effectively lead them through the change to new beginnings?
For PLTs or staffs who have a good foundation in The Five Behaviors of a Healthy Team but want to grow in understanding each other’s God-given working gifts and frustrations.
Reflect and Apply
Utilizing Working Genius on your team will only be effective if:
(1) you are operating with sufficient levels of trust and healthy conflict (see Healthy Teamwork tab)
(2) you have abundant clarity on what’s most important and are rallying around it with effective weekly meetings (see PLT Meetings tab)
Reflect on whether these two things are true, and be brutally honest with yourself. Once they are, check out the resources on Working Genius and ask: how can I utilize Working Genius with my PLT, staff, and key volunteers to help people feel less guilt and more fulfillment in their work?
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How do we overcome meeting soup?
Meetings are an essential part of working together as a team. Unfortunately, they are often frustrating and unproductive. Meeting soup happens when your team does’t know what is most important, people ramble and share things that are irrelevant, decisions don’t get made or the wrong ones get made, and everyone feels like their time has been wasted.
Great meetings don’t come easy. Your team must be united around what is most important and be disciplined enough to stay focused on that. It can be easy to get sidetracked by tangents, but a great meeting stays on track when the team shuts down rambling, pushes for decisions, and recognizes topics that should be set aside for specific strategic meetings.
How do I influence the parish office?
If you’re asking this question, be sure first that you have a strong culture as a team. Are you praying together regularly in different ways and not just during meetings? Are you sharing faith and personal life together regularly? Are you growing in trust, healthy conflict, clear commitment, and peer to peer accountability to achieve collective results?
You can only influence the parish office culture with culture that you already have yourselves. That said, we hope this audio conversation with Mark and Jake will empower you as leaders who have real influence on those who are paid to work in your parish.
Got more questions?
We will continue to add to these FAQs based on the questions and feedback we hear from you. If you have questions that we haven’t answered here, please let us know.