The heat has finally broken here in Mariposa County. I’ll be the first to admit that I had no understanding just how hot it was going to get here from early July until late August. It was the kind of heat where you wake up thinking it won’t be too bad but by 2 o’clock you just want to hide in the house.
(more…)Tag: change
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Risky Business
It’s late. Maybe it’s still February 26th? Maybe it’s the early morning hours of February 27th. I can’t remember. But I’m awake. Jackson is snoring next to me. Megan is tossing and turning in the next bed over.
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Fear of Success
I find the biggest thing that holds people back from experiencing success in their lives is an inability to manage their fear. Rather than overcoming their fear they just get stuck.
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Tilt Your Perspective to See Things Differently
Tilt your perspective to see things differently.
Pakistan to Siberia in a straight line without touching land. I had to watch that video 3 times to get how it’s possible.
Left on its normal axis you’d never see it. But tilt the globe a little and you start to see things you never saw before.
Axiom: Step away from your challenges long enough to gain a fresh perspective.
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The Bloodless Revolution
In the 4 years that we’ve lived in San Diego I’ve learned to love bodyboarding. It’s one of my favorite Sabbath activities. And while I’m not great at it I love trying.
The concept of bodyboarding is fairly simple.
- You swim out past the break point of the waves. (Just past where they are cresting) Most often for me this isn’t really swimming as you can still touch the bottom. I’m kind of a wimp so I don’t like to go out past where I can touch the bottom.
- You bob around going over small waves and diving under bigger ones, waiting for the right wave to come along that you’d like to ride.
- When you see a wave you’d like to ride, you position yourself by paddling or pushing off the bottom so that you and your board are on the shore side of the wave… then go.
- When you are on the wave you are kind of at the mercy of it. You can steer a little and you can decide when to hop off. But riding a wave is done with the understanding that the wave is really in control and you’re just along for the ride.
When it goes perfect is exhilarating. But when you do it wrong you get beat up, held under water, flipped, and dumped off where the little kids play near the shore. It’s humiliating and painful to get it wrong.
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Pushing Past the Pain of Change
This weekend, at Open, I heard a few things. Some were from attendees, some speakers, and others from the Holy Spirit.
Most of the thoughts that stuck are along the lines of change. People are ready for change. They are hungry for it. And the pain of continuing this cycle of depreciating returns is too depressing– finally overcoming the reality that making some levels of foundation shifting change is worth the cost.
Thoughts like this…
- how we as a tribe gathers needs to change
- how we gather teenagers needs to change
- how we disciple teenagers needs to change.
- how we think of ourselves needs to change.
- how we fund the movement of ministering to adolescents needs to change.
With declining numbers in all of the categories that seem to matter, the reality is that there are so few winners and far too many losers.
We all need things in our life and vocation to change. And we are in the position to do something about it.
People, like you and me, are beginning to realize that it is up to us to make these changes instead of waiting for someone else. (Cough, be a leader. Cough, cough. Entropy. Cough, cough. I KNOW! Cough, cough.)
The Pain of Change
Actually changing things will cost you something. It might make people hate you. It will be messy. It might lead to your organization losing money or even closing. There’s a pretty good chance that you could get fired.
But I want to encourage you as you think about change. When you lead towards what you feel God is calling you to move towards… it’s always scary. It’s always full of fear. It’s always brought with some pain.
Sometimes in Scripture we need to read between the lines a little bit. I think of people like Noah going home and telling his wife he needed to build an ark and gather animals. I’m guessing he and his wife didn’t see eye to eye on that at first blush, something tells me he slept on the coach, and maybe it was a little while until she accepted the lunacy of her husbands vision. Rest assured… building an ark isn’t good for your sex life. Or I think about the Centurion in Acts… I’m sure it went well when his boss in Rome found out he and his entire house converted to the religion he was paid to squelch. I don’t think that guy got a raise. Or I think about the Peter on the day of Pentecost… I’m sure that his message of Jesus as the Christ went over like a pile of bricks. Remember, most of the people in the audience walked away saying he was drunk.
So this is what I know. Not just from the Bible but from my own life: Until you suck it up, accept that the changes you know you need to make will involve some pain, you’re just going to keep doing nothing.
No sir. Not for me. I want to sleep at night. The word regret will not be on my tombstone.
Things will change because they must. Pain will be overcome because its just pain. And the vision and dreams God has laid on our hearts should scare the hell out of us.
But fear of pain preventing me or you from the leaders we can be?
May we never sink so far.
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Be Kind, Not Nice
I think Christians are too nice.
Go to church, any church, and everyone is nice. Big smiles and hand shakes for everyone. Some churches hug a lot. Perfect strangers hugging. Lots of perfect strangers hugging.
They kind of mash all of the fruits of the Spirit into one thing… being nice.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
I think many Christians confuse nice with kindness.
- Kindness speaks the truth even if it hurts a lot, nice just lets you keep living a lie in hopes you’ll figure it out.
- Kindness sits you down and listens to your pain, nice adds you to the prayer list or gives an empathetic response with no follow-up.
- Kindness invests in a young leader for the long haul, nice smiles as you fail.
- Kindness invites you over for dinner, nice says, “Good to see you.”
- Kindness tells you when your idea sucks, nice wishes you well without believing in you.
- Kindness gives you space to grow, nice expects you to gloss over the yucky parts.
This list could go on for a while but the point is clear: Nice isn’t a biblical virtue, kindness is.
When I describe a neighbor as “nice” it really means that I don’t know them all that well. “Oh, they’re nice…” That means they smile and say hello as I walk by with my dog. Or that means that they turn their light on at Halloween.
I’ve found that my best friends aren’t always nice, but they are kind to me. They tell me the truth no matter what. They listen when I’m hurting. They invest in me beyond what I can do for them. They make time for me. They tell me when my ideas suck instead of letting me fail. They expect me to grow and give room/time for that to happen.
But people in my life who I’m just nice with? Yeah, none of that is consistently true.
As I reread the Gospels this summer I was overcome by this reality: Jesus wasn’t all that nice, but he was deeply kind.
There’s a difference. Nice rips a whole in the Gospel and backfills it with religious jargon and feel good sand. Kindness stops you in your tracks, bandages your wounds, heals your dysfunction, pisses you off with its truth, confronts the lies of those in charge, and charges forward towards a new Kingdom reality.
Oh, that we would be a people of kindness!
Prayer: Lord, make us Christ followers who are kind. Help us forsake the nice for the full power of the Gospel in our lives, families, and ministries. Amen.
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Lessons from the Cloud
I have a fundamental belief that the problems we experience in church leadership are technologically based. It’s not that we have the wrong mission or wrong people, it’s often that we are working on the wrong technologies. (Programs, agendas, projects)
You might not see the connections between this presentation and your church. But the parallels are stunning.
- Just like at this company, there are lots of committees and their agendas at play.
- Just like this company, we have legacy programs which are expensive to maintain.
- Just like this company, there are people who work at your church doing things deemed mission critical that aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.
A grocery store company isn’t in the IT business any more than a church is in the building maintenance business. Contextualize that for your church. There are lots of things that each church does which are deemed mission critical but aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.
Yet, when we talk about foundational changes in the church, getting back to the core mission, there’s tons of fear internally. Fear is what stops all change. Fear is what stops all dreaming.
Here’s what we learn from this talk that transfers right into the church.
- Different people buy into change for different reasons. The CFO wants to hear you’ll save money. The user wants to know you’re making their life better. Fiefdom owners want to know their fiefs are respected.
- End-users are wondering what’s taking you so long.
- The hardest shift is within the staff, it’s all about control.
- Continuous improvement is an expectation of the end user, even old people. And it changes the culture of the staff.
- Spend the time not on making changes but on change management. The changes themselves can happen quite quickly.
- Real-time collaboration is a better learning and leadership tool than presentations. (Though presentations still have a place.)
- Changing the focus back to our core mission helps the whole organization dream about new ways to live out the mission. Thousands of brains and hearts focused on the same thing is so much more powerful than a handful of leaders guiding the mission.
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Who will rise?
- That’s just the way it is.
- I don’t have the power in my organization to do anything about it.
- We make changes incrementally, it takes time.
- We aren’t ready for that.
- That’s on the agenda to do, just not something we can address right now.
These are the excuses of people who value the status quo more than they want to see change occur in their midst. At the end of the day they’d rather lose their job in an attempt to protect it or see the church close it’s doors or continue to see their church reach the same saved people year after year than take the risk to lean into the calling God has for them.
Then they whine when they lose their job. They point to their job description but miss the point. Someone paid them to be a leader and they didn’t lead their churches anywhere. You can do all of the tasks perfectly– but if you fail to lead than you aren’t a leader!
In the end, the people of your church will always decide they don’t need a “leader “who will take them where they already have been. They need a leader who will take them where they don’t want to go. (Or are afraid to go, or don’t even know exists.)
I’m sick of the excuses. I have a feeling you are, too.
It’s like Genesis 18. God is on the hunt for one person. One. ANYONE who your people where they need to go instead of placating them for another budget cycle. Fire & sulphur are on order. This world will be destroyed. Is anyone going to lead people to safety? Anyone?
God is looking for one person to rise up, take control, and lead His people where they are unwilling to go on their own.
Are you that person? Will you lead today?
The bell has rung. The crowd is looking in your corner. Are you going to rise to the challenge?
Or will you sit through another staff meeting, silent– lamenting– and wishing you had the power to change things?
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5 Ways to Get Change Moving
“You are crazy enough to think you can change the world.”
This was the negative criticism of my ministry nearly 10 years ago by an elder. I took it as a compliment.
When I read Revelation 2-3 I see that Jesus will not judge individual churches or communities of faith. That’s not what John saw. (Revelation 1:19) Instead,I see Jesus judging entire towns based on both what they’ve done and where their hearts are collectively.As we look forward to that future judgment, we as church leaders in each community cannot be satisfied with reaching 5%-10% of the population. A logical conclusion would be that how we are doing things will only result in reaching 5%-10% of the population going forward. Simply put, f we want to reach exponentially more we, collectively, must change.Most people realize that. But they don’t actually know how to make change happen.Here are 5 ways I make change happen:
- Present the facts, repeat them often, write them on the walls. Do your homework, get behind the evidence.
- Persistence. Be a bulldog. Don’t let the issue die. No isn’t an answer, it’s an opportunity to try a different approach.
- Stop the presses. If something is really important you need to stop everything else, at all cost. We can’t go on like this.
- Tell a great story. Remember, a well-told story is your most powerful weapon.
- Outwork everyone else. Know why everyone says hard work pays off? Because it does. You can’t ignore hard work.