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Punctuality Begins With Arriving Early

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When I started out as a young youth pastor, I was told by my Senior Pastor that I had to show up at least one hour before the Sunday morning worship service. I have experienced the value of this advice many times and followed the practice in preparation for other meetings and events as well. I have found that there have been many times when that extra hour has been beneficial.

1. Arriving early ensures I am on time.

It may seem like it goes without saying, but if you plan to be an hour early, you will most likely be on time. If you have a flat tire on the way, you may even have time to change it and still arrive on time.

2. Arriving early protects my integrity.

When you are on time and start events on time you maintain integrity, but when you are late, or start things late, people aren’t sure they can trust you when you announce the start time for an event. And when you don’t follow through on start times, it may affect people’s sense of your overall integrity. You want to be on time and ready to go for your event so that you can keep your word on when you will start.

3. Arriving early gives me time for last minute adjustments.

Often there have been issues to iron out before the service. You have time to photocopy anything you forgot, or to change that one PowerPoint slide. It gives you time to make sure all the technology is up and running. There have been days when I have needed all the time to make sure I fixed something or did a final tweak.

4. Arriving early prevents rushing.

When you are rushed you are not in the best frame of mind. Being rushed often gets our frustrations up and means we may miss something in our final arrangements prior to the event. When we have time, we can be more relaxed and work through our last-minute preparations with time to spare.

5. Arriving early gets me focused.

Everyone knows how life happens and sometimes we are distracted by what we dealt with earlier that day. If you get to your event with time to spare, you can go over the agenda and get your mind cleared and focused. You have time to pause and pray to ask God to help you focus on the moment and leave the distractions with him.

6. Arriving early helps me ensure all volunteers are ready.

When you are early, you will have time to check in with your volunteers to make sure thy are ready to go. I like to give people a heads-up about when their turn is in the service or event. When everybody knows their role, the event will go smoothly.

7. Arriving early gives me time for people.

When you are early, and ready for your event early, you have time to greet people as they arrive. There are often a few people who arrive early. I have had some significant conversations with people because I had time to slow down greet them before the service.

You may think arriving an hour early for a worship service is over the top, but I would encourage you to try it. I’m sure if you try it five or six times, you will begin to experience the benefits and establish this as your own habit. There is value in punctuality, and arriving early ensures your punctuality.

Keep looking up,

Andy Wiebe

Good Vision Work Requires Time and Patience

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Every organization and every church benefits from having a clear vision describing their purpose and how they will focus their efforts. A vision helps determine if certain programs in the church will be helpful or not. If something does not help move the vision forward, then it is wasted effort or worse – detrimental to your organization or church. Develop a clear vision to give direction to all you do.

Realistically, the vision creating process takes time. Those involved need to be able to mull over different ideas in order to come up with the best ones. Most people in volunteer board/committee roles do not have the same time to commit to this process as those leading it, so we have to go slower than we think we should. It is no use pushing ahead if that means we lose people along the way. Consider those on your team and provide appropriate time and space they need to work alongside you as you lead the process.

Time and patience also are needed as we pray about the vision. Our church is currently doing 40 Days of Prayer and Fasting, with part of that time specifically focused on asking God for vision and direction for the church. This is best done over time too. Don’t think one short prayer will be enough. The more time we spend in conversation with God, the more likely we will hear clearly from Him. As we patiently take our time, we will be better off in the end.

As I work with my church to create our vision, we started with identifying three core values. This took time, too. We gathered for one six-hour session with this outcome. While there was a lot of conversation around the whole process that will continue to contribute to the vision, our end result was three core values. Since then, we had a second five-hour session where we now came up with a possible two-word mission statement. Again, there was a lot of conversation that will continue to speak into the ongoing vision discussion, but didn’t result in a finished vision.

All of that to say, it takes time, patience, and a lot of conversation to come up with a meaningful vision to give direction to the leadership team and the church as a whole.

Our next step is to share with the congregation what we have come up with so far, inviting them to speak into the process and tell us how what we have so far connects or doesn’t connect with them.

Some leaders say that good vision creating can take months if not years. My contract with them will be ending in a few months, so we are trying to get to a point where they can easily continue to build on the work being done now with the next pastor. So we are working on this with purpose, but patience. We want to keep the vision work moving along, but not rush it and miss out on important conversations along the way. Hopefully we will determine a vision with enough clarity to guide us in creating a practical strategy for how to work toward accomplishing this vision.

Take time for the important work of vision defining so that everyone knows exactly what you are committed to doing and how you will do it. Ask God to walk with you in the whole process so your end product is a vision that reveals God’s heart and resonates with the church. And then, as you begin to work out the vision, you will all be on the same page and moving ahead together.

Keep looking up,

Andy Wiebe