Experiences at Mars Hill Church

Working for the religion you subscribe to. I never saw that one coming. Also the high character expectation they hold for employees. It's one of the few places on the planet someone will call you out for not using a humble enough tone in an email.

My co-worker Preston used ctrl + scroll forward on my Apple laptop to screen zoom all the way in on my mouse. I had never used an Apple before as my main work computer so I didn't understand what had happened. I thought my laptop was broken. I brought it to him and had to ask him if he could fix it... I was the Director of I.T. and I couldn't fix a laptop! Humiliating & hilarious all at the same time....

Jamie Munson, the church executive, asked me to work for him. I think I turned him down. Then he asked me again. I said yes. The rest is what you might call history.

Don't burn out. It's really easy to do and it sneaks up on you. You won't notice you are burned out until it's too late. That's the problem with non-profit jobs. People can literally love their jobs to death.

The big lesson: Be humble!

1. Character growth. I learned more about leadership here than just about anywhere else.
2. It's a family. Truly.
3. Counseling people and watching their lives change. I don't know if that will happen anywhere else I'll ever work.

Getting volunteers to engage in projects with us. It was a very hard nut to crack. There were a lot of hurdles. To volunteer with us a church goer had to be; 1. A member, 2. Have 2 months of evenings and weekends free for training, 3. Be able to commit to a specific project until completion. 4. Be willing to physically meet us 1 - 2 nights a week in Seattle or Bellevue to do project work.

We had to make it easier to engage us. We brought in meals since people were typically coming straight from work. Our development teams started to make it possible to VPN in and work from home. Our infrastructure teams needed specific projects with all the necessary tools there for them to either rack servers, pull cable, terminate wall plates, etc....

Keeping all the trains on their respective tracks. There's 1 main organization with 3 sub organizations (Acts29Network, The Resurgence, and The Capstone Institute) all of them have projects, some of them have multiple projects. Sometimes the tyranny of the urgent prevailed over planning and task management....

I make it my job to be a servant leader. I make sure everyone on my team has everything they need to be sucessful and give them enough creative space to surprise me with their talents. Everyone there brings a lot of desire to do great work with them to the objectives of the organization. If we are deploying a new campus it was my job to get the place cabled, wi-fi'ed, bring in the T1's and connect it to our network. There are a lot of obstacles and details to take care of so the team doesn't get bogged down calling on vendors and such. I'd set the budgets, write policies and chart the course for the team....

Showing up and working until someone offers you a job. The details have a way of filling themselves in once you have been there for a while.