More About My Staff

In my last post I mentioned that how much you enjoy ministry depends on who you’re doing ministry with. Let me share with you seven traits that I see in my staff that are blessings I dare not take for granted:

1) Loyalty. These wonderful people are not just loyal to me. They love the church and they love one another. They cover each other back to back.

2) Growing spiritually. Their spiritual growth is my primary concern. It is so easy for those in full-time ministry to seek God for others instead of seeking God for ourselves. We've got to do ministry out of the overflow of what God is doing in our lives! That is why I begin every staff meeting with what the Lord has been speaking to them and I go away every time awed by what I hear them share.

3) Positive attitude. Attitude really is everything. The staff have such great attitude. I haven’t heard a complaint in so long. I haven’t felt a negative climate in the office even in very stressful seasons.

4) Verbalize rather than internalize. I enjoy a staff culture where people can have tough conversations about tough topics. Life is too short to hold a grudge. So if you walk into our Staff Meetings or the Question & Contribution sessions, you will often hear strong opposing views. Sometimes a few sparks will fly. But what the staff have learnt is that while it is okay to disagree, it is never okay to disengage. John 1:14 is a good philosophy for conflict. Jesus was full of grace and full of truth. Truth means I'm going to be honest no matter what. Grace means I'm going to love you no matter what.

5) Having fun. We all have bad days. We all have long days. But if ministry isn't enjoyable you need to get out of the game! The top quality I look for in prospective staff, besides a thriving relationship with Christ, is a sense of humour and the penchant for clean healthy fun without apology! And these guys know how to let their hair down.

6) Making mistakes. I have no problem with mistakes. I expect the staff to try new things, take risk and make mistakes and learn from them. I just don't expect staff to make the same mistake over and over again!

7) Riding On A New Win! I think a dose of divine discontent is healthy! We should never become satisfied with what has worked well in the past. We need to apply right brain thinking. We need to keep getting a new win. This allows the staff to keep depending on God and growing in the adventure of faith.

Bravo Staff! You are a blessing!

My Staff Team

I am so grateful for an amazing staff team. Who you do ministry with determines how much you enjoy ministry. That is why having the right staff on the team is so important--it is a major key to church culture and church growth. You've got to get the right people on the bus - people who are passionate about Christ, have a sense of humour,; people who have a natural chemistry with one another; love what they do, have good people skills, and self-motivated. I am just so grateful to God that He has blessed Agape and blessed me with all those ingredients in the staff team that we have.

One of my great joys in ministry right now is seeing our staff come into their own. It is pure joy watching the pastors preach; watching the staff disciple; create; administrate; and serve. I am so very proud of them. I often feel the cumulative stress every time I pray for them to reach their highest potential in Christ. But then again, that is part of being their boss and senior pastor.

But they take so much pressure off of me, really. I hardly need to look over anyone's shoulders at work. And they make me look so good by taking care of all the details of ministry, administratively and pastorally. They have such an ownership. Last December, I was gone three weeks visiting my daughter in Europe and Agape didn't skip a beat. They did so well!

This afternoon at our regular staff lunch, they asked if they could take me out for lunch on my birthday. I am rather protective about who I spend my actual birthday with, especially when this year I will be half a century old. I always like to be alone with God for most of that day and spend the evening with my family. But this afternoon, I readily said yes to my staff because I really don't mind spending meaningful time on my birthday with some of my most favourite people in the world - my staff!

I guess what I'm saying is this: I am so grateful for my staff team!

Die Young At A Ripe Old Age!

I started a new series yesterday – Soul Detox. It is all about giving attention to the heart, that invisible, intangible part of us from which we live, love, lead and learn. Every experience we encounter in our lives passes through the heart. It is the sphere in which relations happen and relationships are broken.

Because of the myriad of life’s experience, sometimes our hearts become weary and old. We lose the childlikeness of the heart. We lose that sense of awe and excitement that comes with the heart of a child.

In Matthew 18, Jesus inverts the long-standing relationships between children and older people. The disciples asked Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of God?” Jesus picked a little child out of the crowd and said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Most religious traditions look to the wise old sage as the epitome of spirituality, but Christianity is child-centric. Children are the centrepiece of Jesus theology. Christians are called to childlikeness.

It’s important to understand the difference between childlikeness and childishness, so let me make the distinction. I Corinthians 13:11 says, “When I was a child I thought like a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

The word “childish” means “simple-minded.” Some people are unwilling to deal with doubt. They’ve never wrestled with paradox. They’ve never been stretched by the tension of opposites. They have a childish faith - it’s simple-minded. Hebrews 6:1 says, “Let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.” I Corinthians 14:20 puts it this way, “Stop thinking like children. In regards to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” We need to avoid childishness at all costs, but we’re called to childlikeness.

Somehow we need to rediscover the child within. We need to find healing for our hearts so that we become child-like again. Jesus said, “Unless you change and become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” The King James version says, “Unless ye be converted.” The words “change” and “converted” come from the Greek word strepho which means “to reverse.”

One dimension of spiritual growth is reversing the aging process, not the physical effects of aging, but the spiritual and psychological affects. Childlikeness is rediscovering the heart of a child in our lives again - the person we were before we were pressured by peers or polluted by the harsh realities of life, before we developed limitations and assumptions, before we had egos and alter egos, before the wounds and pains in life turned us into sceptics and critics, before the toxins of the past got lodged into our hearts, making our hearts to age too quickly.

Conversion kick starts two processes: Christlikeness and childlikeness. Spiritual maturity is becoming like Christ and becoming like little children by returning to the heart of a child.
Jesus says, “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” The humility of children is disarming. There is no pride or pretence. (Pretension damages the heart). There are no inhibitions or hidden agendas. When you’re around children you don’t need to “put on airs.” You can just be yourself.

Here’s a final thought. Ashley Montague said, “I want to die young at a ripe old age.” This has become the new theme of my life as I approach 50. As we get older we should get younger in our hearts. And that only happens has we continually allow the Holy Spirit to detoxify our souls.

Do you want to return to childlikeness?

Journey back to your heart. Detoxify your soul.

Hunger

Today, the Agape Men’s Ministry Core Team goes into JB as an advance team before 52 men come in for Men’s Breakthrough Weekend. This journey with the Core team in seeking God for the Breakthrough Weekend has been so fulfilling. One of the key things I see in these men is hunger. More specifically: a hunger to see God do the extraordinary as demonstrated by humility, sacrifice, and perseverance. This has led them to sacrifice the early Saturday mornings for prayer and driven them to spend countless hours in planning for the Breakthrough Weekend.

None of the core team members have the experience to do what I was asking them to do. But man, they were hungry. And sometimes an ounce of hunger is better than a pound of experience. Because a truly hungry leader will hunt for wisdom and experience until they find it. And they’ll learn it by living it out rather than philosophizing and theorizing about it.

I saw this same hunger this past week in the men who put together an outreach BBQ dinner in Kota Kinabalu where I was invited to share on the downturn. These men from D'Gap Baptist Church were so hungry for God to touch men in the marketplace. That night we saw eight grown men give their lives to the Lord. The power of hunger.

On the flipside, I’ve found that experience minus hunger equals arrogance and cynicism.
Statements like:
“But we’ve always…”
“But we’ve never…” and
“Why should we bother to…”
are a sure sign that the hunger isn’t there anymore.
You can’t stay hungry when you’re full of yourself.

Jesus seemed to exemplify this in his senior management team selection process.
Peter wasn’t diplomatic…but he was hungry.
Matthew’s profession wasn’t popular with the people, but he was hungry to make a difference.
Thomas wasn’t always sure…but he was hungry to search for truth.

When you looking for authentic leaders through whom God moves to achieve His grand purposes, value the ir experience, probe for their aptitude and certainly validate their character. But don’t forget about the secret ingredient called hunger. Look for hungry men.
It covers a multitude of incompetency.

God is going to fill the men for their hunger this weekend.

Trust His Timing

Time is relative. What I mean by that is this: the way we experience it is subjective. It depends on what you're doing. Ever been around with someone you love? Time flies. Ever been around with someone you didn't like?

The way we experience time also depends on how old we are. If you're seven years-old, holiday break is 4% of you life. If you're twenty-five, it's 1%. If you're fifty, it's .5%. The older you get, the faster time seems to fly because relatively speaking it becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life! By the way, that is why when you were a kid, a two-hour trip in the car seemed like an eternity because relatively speaking, it was much longer for you than the adult who was driving!

So what?

Well, I think most of us have a hard time handling a bad day. We have a very low threshold for circumstantial uncertainty or spiritual discontinuity. We need answers. And we need them now. I would suggest that we need some biblical perspective. When we look at our lives through the lens of Scripture, our perspective on time changes.

We have a hard time waiting for God to fulfill His promise. But what about Abraham and Sarah? They had to wait 15 years before Isaac was born. We have a hard time suffering for a season. But what about the invalid in John 5 who was in that condition for 38 years. And that's when the average lifespan was 20-30. We have a hard time waiting for God to make sense of our circumstances. But what about Joseph? He was a slave and a prisoner for 17 years before becoming Prime Minister of Egypt. Or Moses? He was a fugitive for 40 years! And we have a hard time waiting to fulfill our calling. But even Jesus didn't transition from carpentry to ministry til he was 30.

We need to zoom out and get some biblical perspective. We think in days. But we might need to think in years. Last week I was praying for someone who may be subject to some new transitions again, and here's what I heard from the Lord: those that God wants to use the most have to go through the longest season of preparation. You might have to struggle a little bit longer so you can learn some more lessons or develop some more character. You might need to suffer a little bit longer so God can reveal a little bit more of His glory in your life!

What we need is this: trust His timing. He is never early. He is never late. As we grow spiritually, I think we take a different perspective on time. It's less about chronos--time. It's more about kairos--timing. And for the record, He is far more concerned about who you're becoming in the process than when you arrive at your destination. Maybe you need to quit praying for deliverance and start praying for revelation.