8.  Decide what's crucial.  Be willing to compromise on the rest.
I remember having a conversation with another then-deacon of 3ABC, right in the middle of the reform there, in which we agreed that we just might vote against our own proposed constitution, and recommend that the entire church do so as well.  It wasn't that we didn't like the finished product we'd proposed, and it wasn't that we'd changed our minds.  It was that there had arisen a possibility that something we considered crucial to the church's well-being would be changed.  And we decided that it was actually better for the church's well-being to send the constitution down in flames than to allow the reform to proceed on those terms.

Bull-headed?  Uncompromising?  Yea, I suppose so.  But that's not always bad in a leader, at least not when your motives are right.

Of course, that's not always the case, either.  Anybody who's ever spent time and sweat thinking through and developing something---whether a business plan or a church constitution---knows that there's a natural tendency to take inordinate ownership of every line of it, to impute some mystic, poetic beauty to the whole and think your opus is being marred if anyone tries to change anything.  Natural or not, though, that's a tendency that deserves to be fought against, because it's just not true.

A constitution is not a work of art.  Every line of it is not equally important, and you'll save yourself some heartache if you spend some time thinking about which parts of your plan are truly non-negotiable, and which could be given up without doing any real harm to the church.  So in our case, for example, we decided that one crucial matter for the church's well-being was that new elder nominations should be made by the existing elders, and not from the floor of the church (maybe that'll be another post later).  That requirement caused no small amount of conversation among the church, and we decided that if the church finally voted to amend that section, we simply couldn't support the adoption of the constitution.  It was a crucial matter, we thought---a deal-breaker even.

But there were all kinds of other matters that weren't crucial, even matters that were important.   And in the interest of protecting those things that were crucial, we found ourselves compromising on things we thought might be important, even wise.  Don't make "wise" your criterion for non-negotiability.  For one thing, if you wrote the thing, you're likely to think all of it is wise.  And besides, "wise" is very often a sliding scale.  You may not think a certain idea is as wise as your original one, but if you're a good leader, you'll realize that "less wise" is not necessarily "wrong," and that it is imminently worth it to give in to one or two points of less wise in order to preserve the crucial.

Two things are at stake here:  On the one hand, by defending those issues you truly think are crucial for the good of the church, you show strong leadership and deep care for the church.  But on the other hand, by being willing to compromise on alot---even most---of your plan, you show that you're not just being bull-headed and territorial.

The overarching point here is to keep the goal in sight.  Your goal isn't to push your particular plan through so you can get your name on a pew; it's to establish a structure that will tend to the church's good.  Some parts of your plan will be absolutely crucial to that goal.  Most parts won't.  Your job is to pray the Lord would help you to know the difference.