Welcome to “Wednesday Words,” a weekly quote or insight I hope will encourage you and provide you a thought or illustration for preaching or teaching this week. Today’s quote is from Carey Nieuwhof on evaluating opposition to change in the church:
The loudest people affected by a proposed change are those who are most opposed. The more opposed people are, the louder they tend to become. The problem arises because the noise of opponents to any change will make you a bad mathematician.
You will confuse loud with large. And you will confuse volume with velocity. You will begin to believe that because opponents are loud, they are many, and because they have volume, they have momentum.
Those are the two traps almost every leader falls into at some point. We simply assume loud means large, and that volume signals velocity. But loud does not equal large. And volume does not equal velocity. Just because a voice is loud doesn’t mean you should listen to it most.
Nieuwhof, Carey. Leading Change Without Losing It: Five Strategies That Can Revolutionize How You Lead Change When Facing Opposition (The Change Trilogy) . The reThink Group. Kindle Edition.
