Killing Cockroaches (Thoughts)

I just wanted to weigh in on a couple of thoughts from the seminar I went to last Tuesday with Tony Morgan, author of Killing Cockroaches.

First, what a brilliant idea he had: take a several week family vacation and each week make a stop at a church for a half day seminar based on his book. Sweet! Tour the country with your family and get others to help pay for it; now, that is using the thing between your ears for something other than a hat rack!

Seriously, the cost of the event was more than reasonable. Believe me, I go to conferences and receive invites and promo pieces all the time. Most get pricey very quick. Not without reason, but they can become expensive. On that note, kudos to Tony for not having books to sell and turning it into a marketing event.

Now to the meat. I have already posted my notes so I won't rehash any of that here.

I love the basic premise that Tony is presenting in his book, his blog, and this tour: keep the main thing the main thing. In other words, don't do what you should have someone else doing. Or at least, don't do that thing any longer than it takes to raise up someone else to do it. This of course applies to leaders and specifically the leader in the given context: pastor, ministry leader, etc. We all need to evaluate and make sure that we are staying on task with what we have been called to do, not just what seems to be needed in the moment.

No seminar or conference is worth the time and effort at any price if you don't walk away with some action steps or ideas to implement or changes that need to made. These usually start with you the individual, but should also transfer into the entity, organization, or ministry you lead.

Without going into too much detail (for many reasons), here are a couple of things I walked away with that we will be looking at here at Capital City:

• Putting more effort into raising leaders of leaders and not just filling holes to get tasks done
• We will be evaluating all of our forms of communication to make sure we are sending out one message. We will also be looking at frequency of our communications and make sure that we are going for effectiveness and not "noise."
• We will always ask the question: does this ministry/event add value to people's lives?
• No announcements will be made from the platform that are not truly whole church and vision specific. We will leverage our other mediums to get word out to those who need it for all other things.

By the way, I do recommend Tony's book from what I have read so far.