NATILIE Moments

On summer vacation I read a book by Jim Collins called, The Meaning of a Life. He introduces a simple concept he calls NATILIE moments. The acronym stands for: Not All Time In Life Is Equal. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says, “There is an appointed time in life for everything.” And Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “God has made everything appropriate for its time.”

Understanding our season or the moment we are in gives us clarity about the assignments God has given us and what we are asked to do as leaders. Over the next few “Tom’s Takes,” I want to drill down into how we can understand the time given to us so we can make the biggest impact.

In this blog we will begin to understand the general season our parish or ministry enjoys or suffers. Then we will look at knowing the time in the year. In the final one we will look at understanding our time on a weekly and daily basis.

Understanding our time begins with an understanding of the general season. Below are possible seasons your parish or ministry area might be going through. As you read each description, decide if it is a “yes” or “no” or “maybe.” You might be in a combination of seasons. Just as you can have warm days in winter and cold days in summer, parish or ministry seasons are not all clean and neat.

Season of Sowing

This is a season in which you are sowing seeds by planning or starting new initiatives. You reap what you sow. If there are areas where you don’t have what you need, you need to be in a season of sowing. If you are in a stable community, weekend attendance doesn’t just grow; you have to sow seeds by improving the music, the preaching, the hospitality. Volunteers don’t just come forward. You have to sow seeds. Money doesn’t just come in the door. You have to sow seeds by teaching people about giving and generosity. Sometimes the ground is very soft and you can start sowing. Sometimes you have dig out rocks first or soften the soil. But this is a season in which you are preparing for growth.

Season of Growth/Season of Momentum

This is when you are seeing the fruit of sowing. You have planted some seeds. You have watered the seeds or just waited and now you start to see growth. This when you see giving and offertory increase. More people step up to serve. People start coming to church.

We could also call this a season of opportunity and momentum. Things are moving and going forward. When I look back at our story of Nativity, one example of tremendous momentum came in a six-month period. In December 2005, we held Christmas Eve Mass at a large building on the campus of the nearby Timonium Fairgrounds for the first time. Thousands of people showed up. Then for Lent, just a couple of months later, we launched small groups to the whole parish. A thousand people joined. It is kind of breathtaking what we did, but we had momentum and we had energy for the work. If you have momentum, don’t wait. Don’t stop. Keep pushing forward.

Season of Consolidation and Consistency

After some growth, you often need a season in which you consolidate your growth and build consistency. You invest in some infrastructure and you keep doing what you are doing. After we launched small groups, we realized we needed to keep creating content and needed a plan for it. We created the plan and kept doing small groups over and over again.

In this season you also see that what you are doing is working; you just need to keep doing it over and over again. You make improvements and tweaks along the way but the basic program or efforts and activities remain the same. Things are going well but you keep tweaking and improving so that it gets better and doesn’t get stale and, as best you can, you avoid the season no one wants to be in.

Season of Malaise

This is the season you don’t want to be in. Things are somber, stale, or stuck. There is no energy. You might have accidentally drifted there or the season might have already been there because you are succeeding someone who let it get there. This was the story of Nativity when Father Michael arrived. It was a sleepy and stagnant parish.

Season of Pruning

It’s time to cut back. The organization has become too bloated. I was talking to a couple of great leaders recently. Terry Sawyer who serves as president of Loyola University shared his pruning process. He found departments that had 25 to 50 percent larger staffs than universities of a similar size. He skillfully went through the process of cutting back the staff. My friend Mike Boyle leads the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He recognized that, for the good of the mission, the organization needed to trim its staff size as well.

You could be doing some pruning with the number of ministries you have going on in your church. You might have too much on the calendar and you need to cut back events so you can focus on your weekend experience. Pruning doesn’t always feel good, but we need to prune for future growth.

Season of Transitions

This is a time of change. If you are new to your parish as a pastor or a leader, it is a time of transition as you learn the new parish. You probably don’t want to make major changes right away but instead spend time getting to know the community. If a bunch of staff have left, then you are in a time of change and transition. We went through this change at Nativity about three years ago when within six months half the leadership team left for varying reasons.

Season of Crisis

There are times or moments that you are in a crisis. These are moments that severely threaten your parish or organization. As leaders we need to acknowledge and focus all our energy and efforts to get through them. We want to make these seasons as short as possible while doing what needs to be done.

If you are always in a crisis that might mean you are always looking for one rather than doing the mundane, day-to-day work that is required of you. I have found that some people like crises and will create them. That’s not a healthy place to be. We have to lead through crisis but managing and leading by crisis does not create a successful, healthy organization of high impact.

Those are the seasons as I see them. Which one or ones resonate with you? What do you think this season of leadership is requiring of you? It will help you know how your year will play out and how to spend your time week to week. We will look at that topic in the next couple of “Tom’s Takes.”

Rooting for you,
Tom