Author Spotlight: Ted Hull
By Ted Hull

Focusing Your Church Board: Using the Carver Policy Governance Model, just released. Running Up Front: Life Lessons from Stock Car Racing, to be released this fall. Before you ask, I have no idea why one author writes two books on totally diverse topics—at the same time.

So let’s start with the racing side of me. I’ve been a stock car racing fan as far back as I can recall, back to the late 1950s. This is due in large part to my dad’s involvement in racing. For seventeen years, my dad, my son Brian, and I annually attended a NASCAR race. That ritual came to an end when one of Dad’s fiercest competitors, Parkinson’s, ran him off the track—and into heaven.

The sounds of the track weren’t just noise for me; I could hear life lessons. For example, the importance of having a spotter and crew chief in my life, the need to make pit stops when my tires are badly worn, and the consequences of running on empty. And how do I respond to the major wrecks of life, some which I cause and others which I just get caught up in?

Someone challenged me, “If there was one project you could take on and complete that has nothing to do with your job, what would that be?” Running Up Front is the result of that challenge.

My day job is comprised of consulting with the boards of churches and mission organizations. I typically get involved because there’s a challenge, a conflict, or a crisis—or all three. I have a firm conviction (sometimes) that if you aren’t able to write something down, you don’t understand it. That conviction was shaken at times during the writing of Focusing Your Church Board, but I ended up combining the lessons of my twenty-one years on the staff of a church, the experiences and stories I’d gained from working with the boards of charities, and my training as a Policy Governance® consultant. I placed them with some semblance of order between the covers of this book.

My brain sometimes feels like one of those nearly obsolete pinball machines. Thoughts unpredictably bounce off idea bumpers and fall pathetically off the board before many points are accumulated. Writing is my way of tilting the machine so the balls bounce long enough to make the game look like there was a plan.

Thank you to Jen, Amy, Evan, and the rest of the team at Word Alive Press for tilting the machine in the right direction and shouting instructions (quietly) so that together we could wrack up enough points to make Running Up Front and Focusing Your Church Board worth the time and effort.

About this Contributor:

Ted Hull is a lifelong resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He married Lorna forty-three years ago, and that relationship has resulted in two children and four grandchildren. (Those aren’t their only achievements, but the ones of which they are most proud.) Ted is the President of Ted Hull Consulting and serves as a consultant with The Governance CoachTM.
Connect with him:
Facebook
Twitter
Website