Who’s Your GCD Person?
Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by Steve Swisher in Leadership
This past week I read a post by Steven Furtick about the most important person a church planter will bring on staff in the early days of the church. He calles it the GCD: Getting Crap Done minister.
Notice I didn’t advocate a Minister of GTT (Getting Thoughts Thunk) or HLM (Having Lunch Meetings). The most important thing a senior pastor needs in the earliest days of starting a church is a support person that will enable him to fly at a high altitude. A good GCD Pastor is willing to be your children’s pastor, administrative assistant, executive director, and custodian. In the same day. A natural born CGD (Crap Getter Done) will learn to live for the thrill of freeing up the leader to do what only the leader can do. And the vision will flourish… The more limited the budget, the more important it is to fire the show horses and hire folks who know how to execute. Someone who specializes in follow through. Someone who’s not afraid to get his/her hands dirty, and can morph into whatever is needed from moment to moment. [Minister of GCD, 9/30/09]
For me, I don’t think the GCD has to even be a “minister” per se. Just having one person on staff that will just GCD without grumbling and is reliable is extremely important for a church plant. For me, my GCD has been our church administrator. She was here from the start and is the type of person that doesn’t know what the word procrastination means because it’s not in her vocabulary. In addition to keeping track of our finances with excellence, she also runs our children’s ministry, coordinates our special events, and does every vital, monotonous task that needs to be done every week.
Who’s your GCD? If you’re the pastor and the GCD you’re going to burn out and you won’t have the freedom to cast vision and invest in people. I have found that a good GCD makes delegating tasks easy. Perhaps the reason you’re not delegating is because the people you have around you aren’t the GCD type. If you have to ask them more than once, they’re not a GCD. If you have to go behind them and fix, tweak, or finish what you give them, they’re not a GCD. Considering that in the first few years of a church plant you will only have a budget that will allow for one or two part-time people to help you, if those one or two aren’t a GCD type of person, you as a church planter are going to burn out quickly.
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