Not Softening The Call of Leadership

We got it all wrong, Edmund Chan said at the end of the IDMC Conference. We think the world is in trouble and the Church is in need. Global warming, flu pandemic, terrorism, economic meltdown and such leads us to believe that the world is in big trouble. And the Church, we say, struggles to engage the troubles of the world because we are so in need - we lack resources, leaders, equipping, etc etc.

But the truth? It is the Church that is in trouble and the world that is in need. This is the Corinthianized Church - full of outward glamour and pomp but empty of real substance and depth and rooting.

It made me think. Really think. My mind raced to the way we raise potential leaders because we are so in need leaders in the church. Many times I have yielded to the the temptation to soften the call of leadership. I wanted to emphasize how little time it would take, how low the expectations were and how easy the ministry would be. The temptation to soften the call of leadership is huge.

I was reading Luke 9 this morning where Jesus came across three potential new leaders. Listen how he handled the call to leadership. “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” 59He said to another man, “Follow me.” But the man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.” 62Jesus replied, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

I can’t think of one instance where Jesus softened the call to leadership when he was recruiting new leaders. In fact it’s just the opposite. Jesus was forthright and bold when he was asking for commitment. When we soften the call to leadership we run the risk of dampening the new leader’s passion, diminishing their sense of significance and decreasing their level of commitment.That' s when the Church gets into more trouble!

The greater the need we have for leaders, the greater the temptation to soften the call of leadership. When our goal is simply to “Fill a Position” then we tend to soften the call to leadership. But when our goal is to find a passionate person who will serve God’s purpose then we will be bold and honest about the commitment and the level of expectations.

The Church is in trouble for as long as leaders are small-minded and not Kingdom-minded; man-centred and not God-centred (anthropocentric vs theocentric).

What I See

This past week at the IDMC, Edmund Chan closed the Conference with three keys of godliness from 2 Peter 1:3-4. The first key is the ability to SEE. He siad it is the most essemtial leadership skill. It is the starting point. It is fundamental.

Have you seen God lately? How about last week? Yesterday? Today? When I see God show up it does something to me as a leader, I’m amazed, overwhelmed and inspired. Every time I see God come through, my faith is renewed, my dependence increased, my confidence enlarged. When I see God move I’m humbled and encouraged. When I see God at work my passion intensifies, my courage soars and my vision is emboldened.

In those seasons I don’t see God it’s not because He’s not there, it’s because I’m not looking. So if seeing God is so beneficial why do I sometimes stop looking for Him? I don’t know if it’s busyness, sinfulness or a combination of both but I do know there are times I don’t see God,.

Those are dangerous times. Dangerous because it indicates the eyes of my heart have gone astray. Dangerous because the results of my leadership are only as good as “I can” produce. Dangerous because those who follow me may stop looking for God as well.

This was the problem in Israel during Jeremiah’s day. When Israel had grown spiritually cold God directed his accusation against the leaders in Jeremiah 2:9 when he said, “The priests quit asking: Where is the Lord?” Wow, the spiritual leaders of the day stopped looking for God. They no longer lived or lead with a sense of anticipation and as a result they were no longer witnessing the power of God on their behalf.

When we stop looking for God we start leaning on ourselves and that’s spiritually destructive not only for us but for those who follow us.

Leaders what are you looking for God to do? Where are you looking for God to show up? How are you asking Him to work? Are you leading with a sense of anticipation? Where do you expect to see God today?

"When you see as God sees, you will do as God says."
Edmund Chan

God Ideas

There are good ideas and there are God ideas - ideas that originate with the Spirit of God. But there is nothing more compelling or inspiring that a God-ordained idea!

Victor Hugo said, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

I thinkback ten years and the idea of 5 Ps to Community-Taking is a great example of an idea whose time has come. It gave us a sense of direction. It came from the story of the fall of Jericho. It was taken up and adapted by many churches doing community penetration. It was a God idea whose time had come.

Isaiah 43:19 says, "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?"

God is always doing a new thing. But if we're too focused on the past we miss out on the "new thing" God is doing. So yesterday's God ideas may not be good for today. We tend to do ministry out of memory instead of ministry out of imagination. We keep doing what we've always done.

Andy Grove of Intel says, "There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment and you start to decline." The same holds true for churches. We have diligently hear the call of the Shepherd to graze the next tableland or we just stay at the sma level on barren land that was once of great grazing potential. We need new God ideas!

I'm more and more convinced that God ideas are the thing that makes ministry fun and exciting. It's also the key to exponential impact. I'd rather have one God idea than a thousand good ideas.

I believe everybody has great ideas but most of us never do anything with them. Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, once said, "Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference."

We've got to be good stewards of God ideas!

There is an old proverb: the shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory. Abraham Lincoln had a creative way of capturing his ideas. He put them in an idea drawer. He said, "Often an idea would occur to me which seemed to have FORCE...I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper and put it in that drawer. In that way I saved my best thoughts on the subject, and, you know, such things have come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out."

You never know when you're going to get a God idea. Suzanne Langer says, "Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there." The illustrative use of two dolls to push a point about relational clashes in the series STAY TILL THE END is an example. It was a "crazy idea" I got driving home from the office one evening. But it gave me an adrenaline rush. I came alive with the idea.

Another time, I got this idea of using a life-size wooden cross at the Free-Me Weekend where people could write down all their sins and using actual nails and hammer, they could nail their sins to the Cross. The effect was phenomenal. People felt such a release of God's forgiveness.

Habakkuk 2:1 says, "Write down the revelation." When God gives you an idea that comes with a force, write it down. Record it on your phone.

For what it's worth, Leonardo Da Vinci, who might be the most multi-talented person who has ever lived, never went anyplace without his notebook. He was constantly recording ideas and observations. Even on his deathbed he took detailed notes about his symptoms. We still have seven thousand pages of Da Vinci's journals. In 1994, Bill Gates purchased 18 pages for $30.8 million!

Your ideas may be worth may than you think :)

A few years ago, Catherine Cox did a study of 300 of history's greatest minds. She found one thing in common: All 300 geniuses recorded their thoughts and feelings, their ideas, insights, and observations, their reflections and questions in a journal of one kind of the other.

Dave Goetz, founder of CustomZines.com, says, "For me, when an idea hits me, it strikes fire, almost like God speaking. I know that sounds heretical, but there it is. The more time that passes after the idea strikes, the less heat it gives off. I forget parts of it, it doesn't seem as great. Ideas have a short half-life."

When God reveals something - anything - you need to write it down. Then you need to pray it back to God It's idea stewardship!

Tomorrow, the staff and I enter into the new season of planning for 2010. It is a long process that begins end of August and ends at the end of November. But it is also a season of God ideas. Hearing God through one another; refinement those ideas so that they become powerful when implemented; watching the impact of God at work through the ideas inspired by the Spirit - all these and more makes serving the Lord such an adrenaline rush!

When Kids Are Difficult

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at his wits with his primary level children. I remember when my kids were younger - the many frustrations I had felt with their attitudes....

We’ve all been there before as parents. Your child has been told what to do and doesn’t do it. You’re tired and irritated. You have no patience left in your parenting tank. And so, you yell at your child (and perhaps even punish your child irrationally) in anger and frustration. But what good does it do? Even though you took charge of the situation, your heart feels empty and frustrated and so does your child’s.

Let’s rewind the tape. Your child has been told what to do and doesn’t do it. Instead of reacting in anger, you acknowledge the fact that you are tired and lacking in patience. So before speaking to your child, you speak first to God. Just a simple prayer asking Him something like,

“Father, I need your help right now. I need your Spirit to give me wisdom to talk with my child. I can’t do it on my own. I need you and my child needs you. Without you, Jesus, I can do nothing. So be with me now as I go. Open up my heart and my child’s heart to you.”

With a simple prayer such as this one, we take our parenting out of our hands and put it into God’s hands. We admit we cannot parent on our own. And so we pray a simple prayer of dependence … a simple prayer of reliance … a simple prayer of surrender.

I use to do that often when the kids were younger. I would walk out of the house. Take a walk by the park and pray and unload before the Lord. I would seek to first guard my heart and get divine perspective. And every time I came back to talk to them, I felt things were better. I changed. They changed and God was in the picture.

This is the prayer we parents rarely pray. But when we do take just a little time to pray it would change us, and it would change our families.

A Stepford God!

What I read this morning from Tim Keller was so thought provoking, I just have to leave you with the entire quote. In chapter seven of his book, The Reason for God, Tim Keller addresses the common objection of skeptics that "you can't take the Bible literally". At the conclusion of the chapter he writes:

If you don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won't have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives? The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it. - The Reason For God, pages 113-114

You can check out the website and read excerpts from the book and mp3 downloads here.

The Lukewarm And Left-overs.

I revisited the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan today. Here is one book that cuts at your heart and makes you think, think, think. In chapter five, Francis Chan talks about The Lukewarm and the Leftovers. Hesays those who are lukewarm will only give God their leftovers. Below is a summary of lukewarm people as dcescribed in the book.

According to Scripture, lukewarm people:

▼ Attend church, sometimes frequently or even every week (Isaiah
29:13).
▼ Give tithe to the church and to worthy causes, but only if it doesn’t
hinder what they consider a comfortable lifestyle (1 Chronicles 21:24,
Luke 21:1-4).
▼ Desire to fit in, both inside and outside the church, more than they
care to hold up what is right~popularity wins over morality (Luke
6:26, Revelation 3:1).
▼ “Lukewarm people don’t really want to be saved from their sin; they
want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin. They don’t genuinely
hate sin and aren’t truly sorry for it” (John 10:10, Romans
6:1-2).
▼ Feel moved to hear about radical followers of Christ and their radical
stories, but they don’t think the “extreme” Christian life is for them
(James 1:22, 4:17; Matthew 21:28-31).
▼ Seldom share their faith with those in their sphere of influence because
their fear of man trumps their fear of God (Matthew 10:32-33).
▼ Measure how moral they are by weighing their own sins against those
of the secular world (Luke 18:11-12).
▼ Say that complete surrender and dependence on God is only for the
ultraspiritual like those whose paid vocation is ministry (Matthew
22:37-38).
▼ Love themselves more than they love others (Matthew 5:43-47, Luke
14:12-14).
▼ Serve God and people, but only to the extent they feel comfortable
with (Luke 18:21-25).
▼ Think much more about the here and now, the temporal realm,
than they do about the eternal realm (Philippians 3:18-20, Colossians
3:2).
▼ Often don’t consider the possibility of giving as much as they can to
the poor (Matthew 25:34, 40; Isaiah 58:6-7).
▼ Do whatever they need to do “to be ‘good enough’ ” to keep them
from feeling plagued by guilt (1 Chronicles 29:14, Matthew 13:44-
46).
▼ “Are slaves to the god of control,” would rather steer their own life,
and don’t believe in risk taking for God (1 Timothy 6:17-18, Matthew
10:28).
▼ Feel a false security because they are known and labeled as Christians
and do “Christian” activities~like attending church, getting baptized
(Matthew 7:21, Amos 6:1).
▼ Live lives so structured that living by faith is out of the question (Luke
12:16-21, Hebrews 11).

How does your life compare to the above list?

You can check out more about Crazy Love from this website here.
Especially watch the chapter videos.

He made the complex SIMPLE.

Jesus had the ability to take the complex and make it simple.

A prime example is Matt 22:37-40 where Jesus gives the Great Commandment. The context is this. He has just stumped the Sadducees. Literally, He silenced them with His wisdom (Matt 22:23). Next up are the Pharisees.

The Pharisees gather for a meeting. They devise a debate strategy. Their goal is to humiliate Jesus in front of the crowd. They choose their smartest guy, a lawyer, to take on Jesus. He asks Jesus which is greatest commandment of the Law. Of all the 613 comandments, he is asking Jesus for the greatest. He thinks he has got the Master teacher!

Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’

He brought all the commandments into just two irreducible minimums! Amazing. He put the Pharisees out of speech! He was not lowering the standard of the Law. He was not abolishing it. He said all of it hangs on this. If you know these two irreducibles , you know it all. If you live them out, you have lived the entire Law!

He summed up 613 commands in two. Jesus took the complexity and the advancement of the Law and made it very simple.

I just love the way Jesus simplified the complex. Its a gift every preacher and teacher should desire.

Jesus was also a visual teacher. He pointed to the fields and the birds. He picked up a child and used a fig tree to make a point. After claiming to be the bread of life, He fed bread to five thousand men (Jn 6). After calling Himself the light of the world, Jesus put light in a blind man’s eyes. (Jn 8-9) After claiming to be the resurrection and the Life, Jesus called Lazarus to come out of the grave (Jn 11). The water conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well definitely involved real water (Jn 4).

A visual illustration increases clarity. It helps people remember better. And unless people remember, they cannot live it out. Jesus knew that and illustrated His teachings with relevant, precise down-to-earth illustrations. He was the Master Teacher.

Lord Jesus, I just wanna be like you!


ps. I wrote this post at my annual Personal Retreat in reflection of the question I asked myself - What is the one thing I am most satisfied with this year in relation to my personal growth?

Make TODAY a little better than YESTERDAY.

I am not good at fixing thing that are broken. Hence, there are two or three items in my car that remain in a state of disrepair. I just leave them broken. For some people fixing broken items is usually easy. I truly envy such people.

But in life there are issues that cannot get fixed with just one work of repair. Many challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure.

Like a complex and bug-riddled system needs to be overhauled. Your career is stagnating by the minute. You are steadily letting your sedentary desk-bound lifestyle turn your body into mush (ahem! am I talking about myself?).

All of these problems are much bigger and harder to just fix than a broken chair. They’re all complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutions–some of which will fail to work!

Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. That’s why I am procrastinating fixing those broken items in my car. To me they are too complex. They are beyond me. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more.

Here is another area I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve struggled with ‘serious’ exercising for a long time. To get rid of that guilt I walk some and climb stairs some but I should do better. I can do better.

The point of demotivation here is the notion that just getting into rigorous exercise for a week or two does not guarantee that you get into shape. That is what makes it harder - if you do something toward improving, you can’t tell immediately or even after a week that anything has changed. In fact, you could spend all day working on getting in shape, and a week later you might have nothing at all to show for it.

This is the kind of demotivator that can jump right up and beat you into resignation before you even get started. It does me! It has happened to me before. Even after you have followed a serious, disciplined regime of exercise, it’s hard to see the results.

So how do you overcome the discouragement? How do you go pass the demotivators to press on?

There is a simple solution I have learnt from dealing with the problems of life. The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve and make better today than it was yesterday. That’s it. It’s easy. And, it’s possible to be enthusiastic about taking real, tangible steps toward a distant goal by taking one small step at a time.

So, you trudge along making small fix after small fix, and over time, the fixes become faster, and easier. This is because you make the decision to live a day at a time and seek to simply make today a little better than yesterday.

You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental change, though. When you’re trying to become more Christ-like in your workplace or be healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often won’t lead immediately and directly to tangible results. This is the reason big goals like these become so demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re committed to, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday. And to thank God for helping you to win today’s battle leading on to eventually win the war.

I can’t, for example, guarantee that I’ll be less fat today than yesterday, but I can control whether I do more today to lose some weight. And if I do, I have a right to feel good about what I’ve done. This consistent, measurable improvement in my actions frees me from the cycle of guilt and procrastination that most of us are ultimately defeated by when we try to do Big Important Things.

You also need to be happy and grateful with small amounts of “better.” So, make your improvements small and incremental but make them daily. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.

The Lord told the Israelites: “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land.” Ex 23:30

It’s little by little, in small increments. Just aim at making today better than yesterday.

ps. I am writing this from my annual Personal Retreat. This reflection came from one of the questions I asked myself today: What is the one area where I feel like a failure this year?