How To Take A Vacation? pt. 7

Train somebody else to do your job.

Develop people around you so that you can take a real vacation. I'm convinced that when you don't take the time to properly train people, you can't have a real vacation because your mind is constantly bombarded with wondering if the under trained people are actually getting the job done. That's a horrible feeling! As a matter of fact, many people don't take full vacations, truly unplugging and relaxing, because they haven't trained and developed others properly.

One of the things that has helped me tremendously is I have developed people at our church who can speak and lead. We have 5 other people on our staff that can preach at PC when I need a speaking break. My goal is to get 2 or 3 of these people to a level were they can hit a triple or a home run every time they speak. Some of them are well on their way. Here is a list of things I do to help develop other communicators:

1. I help them put together their sermon by giving them resources.

2. I help them put together their message by looking over their sermon notes and asking lots of questions and by giving lots of feedback.

3. Sometimes, I have them preach the message to me and our staff a couple of times before they actually preach to the church. I give them tons of feedback regarding their content, transitions and delivery of the message.

4. I let them speak. I am a firm believer that you get better at speaking by speaking. I am not the same preacher I was 5, 10 or 15 years ago because I have grown tons by actually speaking. There is no substitute for experience.

This year 4 other staff members will speak in our Sunday morning experiences. This development process allows me to raise up other gifted communicators and to be able to take vacations and speaking breaks.