I WANT TO ENGAGE | pt.2

photo by Nancy Bates

The kids and I were heading to the store, while filling out church contact cards. We were laughing at the idea of pastoral engagement. For my kids engaging a pastor is an everyday thing. It's humorous to ask whether or not they want that engagement. It's assumed.

It's Critical to Get Engagement Right

Engagement is a critical thing to get right. Engagement with in an organization doesn't always happen. Here are three key components to create engagement within a team environment:

1) Buy-In: People must be able to, willing, and compelled to buy into what your asking them to engage in. Your vision needs to be clear and straight forward. It needs to be aimed at real action. The people you are calling to engage should be able to see the vision and tangibly have a vision for what it looks like for their life to begin interacting with this mission. 

2) Risk: Engagement implies risk. To move towards one thing, means we are spending less time on another. Sometimes people try to sell a vision by making it "risk free". Instead we should be concerned with the compelling nature of the engagement and ask questions about whether it is risky enough to be worth engaging in, in the first place. 

3) Responsibility: To engage means taking on responsibility. We are all leaders; some of us just don't have a clue where we are going. Calling people to engage means calling them into responsibility. We don't call them away from it; we lead them to God who calls them to take seriously the people and the world around them. When people response, responsibility happens.

Point: engagement should cost us something. Unless we have a high view of engagement - that calls them to tangibly get their hands dirty - then we're merely calling people to be bystanders to our own little parade. 

AB.

*written by Abraham Bates - photos by Nancy Bates Photography - Copyright AbrahamBates.com