Leadership and criticism go together like owning a car and spending money to keep it working. No one likes the hassle that goes along with handling repairs, but we resign ourselves to the fact that repair costs are a necessary part of ownership. If you want to “repair proof” your life, you’d need to sell your car and walk everywhere.
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A set of tools to get things done so you’re freed up to do what matters most.
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The same is true with ministry leadership and criticism. Within the last five weeks, I (Matt) have received criticism from three different families on three different issues. Today we’ll present a few brief snapshot of their complaints and tomorrow and Thursday, we’ll explore a few ideas for responding wisely to criticism.
CONCERNED MOTHER
A mother emailed me directly to let me know that our weekly meeting time wasn’t working for her family. Her daughter has quit going to church regularly and has connected to a para-church organization thru her high school in order to grow spiritually. Her email was passionate, but it wasn’t critical or abusive.
DISAPPOINTED STUDENT
A student emailed me because we decided to cancel a 3 day local missions trip. I had explained the reasoning for this change at our weekly meeting: we needed to make some other more important changes, and while the event would have created a lot of excitement, it wouldn’t create the momentum we needed to move forward. Unfortunately, this student wasn’t at the meeting, (so she heard secondhand) and her email was a mixture of passion and confusion.
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A set of tools to get things done so you’re freed up to do what matters most.
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HUNGRY DAD
We had a great weekend planned out: a Saturday spent caring for the local homeless, a brand new service on Sunday morning, and a family BBQ following the service—a great weekend. For the BBQ, we ordered more food than we thought we would need, but we ran out of food and a hungry and disappointed dad reacted via email. He suggested that we order more food the next time we invited people to a BBQ. His email was passionate and seemingly condescending.