How to ReFocus in the New Year

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

In 2 Timothy, Paul tells Timothy: Therefore, I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.

This is incredibly important as we start a new year. Many of us have spent time thinking about last year, growth plans for the new year, praying through, and coming up with a word for the year, all so that we can focus on the new year. This is a great thing. 

But Paul tells Timothy to rekindle the gift of God. We don’t know for sure what the gift was that Paul was talking about, but it gives us the idea that whatever it was, it had started to fade or fizzle out. Our passions, drive, and focus can all fizzle out. This is why it is so important as we start a new year to take stock of where we are and where God wants us to be in the coming year. Not so we can come up with new goals or resolutions but so we can have focus as we move into the new year. 

Many of us don’t need something new but to be reminded of what we have and what God has entrusted to us. 

To help you focus this year, here are 8 questions Brad Lomenick asks in his book, The Catalyst Leader: 

  1. What are the 2-3 themes that personally define me?
  2. What people, books, accomplishments, or special moments created highlights for me recently?
  3. Give yourself a grade from 1-10 in the following areas of focus: vocationally, spiritually, family, relationally, emotionally, financially, physically, and recreationally.
  4. What am I working on that is BIG for the next year and beyond?
  5. As I move into this next season or year, is most of my energy spent on things that drain or energize me?
  6. How am I preparing for 10 years from now? 20 years from now?
  7. What 2-3 things have I been putting off that I need to execute before the end of the year?
  8. Is my family closer than a year ago? Am I a better friend than a year ago? If not, what needs to change immediately?

Many of us don’t need something new. We, like Timothy, need to rekindle what God has called us to. 

When we do, we can move forward in that power, love, and sound judgment instead of living from a place of fear. 

How do we know the difference?

We live from a place of fear when we live someone else’s goal for our lives, fall into what everyone else is doing, and live in a way that doesn’t honor God or his word. Too many people live someone else’s life or someone else’s dream. Timothy could’ve struggled with this very easily. His mentor and spiritual father was the apostle Paul. A man who wrote 2/3 of the New Testament and planted many churches. Those are huge shoes to fill. Yet, Paul says, “Don’t fill my shoes. Fill what God has called you to, be who God created you to be.” 

In this New Year, fulfill what God has called you to. Be who God created and called you to be. 

Highlights from Rethink Leadership on Team

leadership

I’m at Rethink Leadership Conference in Atlanta, which has been like drinking from a fire hose of leadership wisdom. The fourth session was on team, which is always a challenge in a growing church and one that I really appreciated. Here are some highlights:

Brad Lomenick & Heather Larson
  • Everybody around the table needs to be known and recognized for what they bring.
  • One of the best things that everyone can do on a team for the lead pastor is get good at leading up.
  • It is important to know what is the lead pastor’s passions in the local church to know how best to help him.
  • Influence matters far more than position.
  • What someone grows up is very different than what someone walks into.
Jimmy Mellado
  • The most important thing you will bring to your team is your soul.
  • The reason teams break up is the inner stuff, not the skill stuff.
  • Great gifts will take a leader to a level, but an absence of strong soul and character won’t keep you there.
  • Hell is not just a destination but can be a diagnosis of where your soul is today.
  • A good or rotten soul never stays to itself.
  • Do people want to be around you because of your soul?
  • What is running your life at any given moment is your soul. -Dallas Willard
Cheryl Bachelder
  • What are the convictions about leadership that are evident to the people who are entrusted to your care?
  • Why do people work?
  • Why do we lead?
  • Where are you taking the people you lead? How do you think about the people you lead?
  • A leader needs to take people to a daring destination with the humility to serve them along the journey.
  • A leader needs to choose to lead people to a daring destination.
  • Taking people to a bold destination is serving them well.
  • A leader must choose to love the people they lead.
  • A leader has to deliver results.
  • No one wants to hear your convictions about leadership if they don’t work.

My Favorite Books of 2015

books

Each year, I post a list of my favorite books, the ones I would call the best books of the year. To see my list of favorite books from past years, simply click on the numbers: 20092010201120122013 and 2014. To me, I love this list because it shows what has influenced me in the past year, where I’m growing and what God is teaching me. If you are a leader, you should be a reader, there is no way around that.

To make this list, it does not have to be published in 2015, I only needed to read it in 2015. As always, this list was hard to narrow down, but here are the top 15 books of 2015:

15. Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership by Ryan Hartwig & Warren Bird

Summary: Teams that Thrive looks at how a leadership team can move to the next level and really make an impact. This was an incredibly insightful book for the leadership team at the church I lead.

Best Quote: “The five Cs of thriving teams: Clear. Does the team’s purpose paint a clear picture of value? Compelling. Do team members view the purpose as consequential? Does it address something that truly matters, drawing people into it? Challenging. To accomplish the purpose, is each member of the team required to contribute in a meaningful and interdependent way? Calling-oriented. Does accomplishing the purpose help members accomplish God’s calling on their lives and pursue their goals? Consistently held. Do the members of a group truly know the group’s purpose and pursue it with fervor?”

14. Taking People with You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen by David Novak

Summary: Yum! Brands CEO David Novak shows that in order to lead a great organization of any size you need to get your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission.

Best Quote: “You have to begin by asking yourself three big questions that will drive your approach to leadership and allow you to take people with you. They are: 1.) What’s the single biggest thing you can imagine that will grow your business or change your life? 2.) Who do you need to affect, influence, or take with you to be successful? 3.) What perceptions, habits, or beliefs of this target audience do you need to build, change, or reinforce to reach your goal?”

13. Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Summary: Leadership BS takes a look at the leadership industry, showing why it’s failing and how it might be remade. Pfeffer looks at the usual prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest, tell the truth, build trust, and take care of others and asks if these prescriptions are truths or myths about leadership.

Best Quote: “Being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders do not need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track.”

12. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg

Summary: An inside look at Google, how it works, what they’ve learned and how they continue to grow and get better.

Best Quote: “Start by asking what could be true in five years. Larry Page often says that the job of a CEO is not only to think about the core business, but also the future; most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. And that is especially fatal today, when technology-driven change is rampant. So the question to ask isn’t what will be true, but what could be true.”

11. Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send by J.D. Greear

Summary: Greear looks at how we are not only called to send people out to plant churches, but also to train them as leaders to be involved in our cities, governments, businesses and the arts. The best churches are those that send.

Best Quote: “I want to suggest four reasons why the future of Christianity belongs to churches that send, and why those of us who want to see the world reached will be more committed to raising up and sending out than we are to gathering and counting. Those four reasons are: 1. Increasingly, in a “post-Christian” society, unbelievers will simply not make their way into our churches, no matter how “attractive” we make them. 2. Multiplication beats out addition, every time. 3. The presence of God accompanies those who send. 4. Jesus’ promises of “greatness” in the church are always related to sending.”

10. Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller

Summary: All that Tim Keller thinks on preaching. Enough said.

Best Quote: “What, then, is good preaching? Let me pull all these ideas together into a single description. It is “proclaim[ing]. . . . the testimony of God” (1 Corinthians 2:1)—preaching biblically, engaging with the authoritative text. This means preaching the Word and not your opinion. When we preach the Scriptures we are speaking “the very words of God” (1 Peter 4:11). You need to make clear the meaning of the text in its context—both in its historical time and within the whole of Scripture. This task of serving the Word is exposition, which is to draw out the message of the passage with faithfulness and insight and with a view to the rest of biblical teaching, so as not to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” It is also proclaiming to “both Jews and Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:24)—preaching compellingly, engaging the culture, and touching hearts. This means not merely informing the mind but also capturing the hearer’s interest and imagination and persuading her toward repentance and action. A good sermon is not like a club that beats upon the will but like a sword that cuts to the heart (Acts 2:37). At its best it pierces to our very foundations, analyzing and revealing us to ourselves (Hebrews 4:12). It must build on Bible exposition, for people have not understood a text unless they see how it bears on their lives. Helping people see this is the task of application, and it is much more complicated than is usually recognized.”

9. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Summary: How to be more organized, productive and get the right things done to lower your stress level.

Best Quote: “In training and coaching many thousands of people, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action…Many people try to get organized but make the mistake of doing it with incomplete batches of stuff. You can’t organize what’s incoming—you can only capture it and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done.”

8. H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle. by Brad Lomenick

Summary: Lomenick categorizes 20 essential leadership habits organized into three distinct filters he calls “the 3 Hs”: Humble (Who am I?), Hungry (Where do I want to go?) and Hustle (How will I get there?).

Best Quote: “Who you are is not what you do. What you do is not who you are. Identity is unchanging. Being comes before doing. Who you are determines what you do.”

7. The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #Join the Ride by Darren Hardy

Summary: This book looks at the roller coaster entrepreneurs go through. The applications of this book to church planters is obvious and incredibly helpful.

Best Quote: “The only constraint of a company’s growth and potential is the owner’s ambition. I am the constraint. The market, the opportunity, everything is there. It’s up to me to set the pace, clear the obstacles, get the resources, and create the conversations to grow the company faster. As CEO, the most important thing I manage is myself. Do that right, and everything else falls into place.”

6. Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game by Mark Miller

Summary: Written in the style of a fable, this book looks at how a company/church grows the leadership and systems need to change as it grows, but often the last people to realize it are the leaders.

Best Quote: “Most small businesses can be successful with a checkers mindset. That’s actually the game you play when an organization is in start-up mode. The leader does virtually everything in the beginning. That’s checkers. Then, if you grow, you begin to add staff. Many leaders see these additional people as interchangeable pieces, nothing more than hired hands, no need for specialists. Each piece is capable of the same limited moves. That’s checkers. In the beginning the game is simple. That’s checkers. You react, you make decisions, the pace is frenetic—you’re playing checkers. And, it works … for a while. You can win in business by playing checkers until someone sneaks in one night after you’ve closed for the day and flips the board. The game changes, and you don’t even know it.”

5. Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller

Summary: Miller looks at what keeps us from getting close to people, trusting them and moving past our fears of relationships and intimacy.

Best Quote: “Here’s something I heard recently: Men move toward whatever makes them feel competent.” As soon as I heard that I knew it was true. Every man I know migrates toward something that makes him feel powerful and in control. If it’s work, he puts in more hours, if it’s sports he’s constantly at the gym. I only bring this up because few men I know feel competent in intimate relationships, which might be one of the reasons they don’t sit around talking about how well they do or don’t get along with the people they love.”

4. Yawning at Tigers: You Can’t Tame God, So Stop Trying by Drew Dyck

Summary: Many people have lost a reverence and an awe for God and his power. This book helps you to recapture who God is, how powerful He is, how in control He is and how that brings freedom to your life.

Best Quote: “Many of us say we want to experience God, but we don’t look for his majesty. We travel life’s paths with our heads down, focused on the next step with our careers or families or retirement plans. But we don’t really expect God to show up with divine wonder…Unfortunately, in our efforts to make the Bible interesting and relevant, we try to normalize God. We become experts at taking something lofty, so unfathomable and incomprehensible, and dragging it down to the lowest shelf. We fail to account for the fact that God is neither completely knowable nor remotely manageable. Here’s the beautiful irony: making God strange actually enables us to know him more. Once we have marveled at his magnitude and mystery, we are able to achieve the deep intimacy that grows out of a true appreciation for who God is. Instead of treating him as an equal, we approach him with reverent awe. Only when we’ve been awestruck by his majesty can we be overwhelmed by his love.”

3. Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City by Tim Keller

Summary: Like Preaching, this is all that Keller knows, believes and how he leads his church. So much wisdom packed into this book. He helps leaders lead their churches through creating a theological vision.

Best Quote: “What is a theological vision? It is a faithful restatement of the gospel with rich implications for life, ministry, and mission in a type of culture at a moment in history. A theological vision is a vision for what you are going to do with your doctrine in a particular time and place.”

2. Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth by Samuel Chand

Summary: This book looks at the reality that the only way for you to reach your potential as a leader, for your church or company to reach its potential, you must raise your threshold for pain.

Best Quote: “My advice for a pastor who faces any kind of crisis is to give yourself one day to moan, whine, and feel sorry for yourself. Just one day . . . then get up, ask God for direction, and take your people where He leads you. Leaders can’t afford to collapse for more than a day. They then have to seek solutions. We don’t have the luxury to be paralyzed by anxiety and discouragement. We have an obligation to trust God for a workable solution and a plan of action. Begin with the positive assumption that God always has a plan. The price is the figurative blood of leadership: having your sanity or integrity questioned, the uncertainty of taking bold risks, the pain of hard conversations and replacing people (many of whom are friends) who no longer fit the larger scope of responsibilities, and the strain of being publicly positive while dealing with the myriad of private pains of change.”

1. The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus by Zach Eswine

Summary: A look at how God does his best work through broken and flawed humans, not perfect ones.

Best Quote: “To the important pastor doing large and famous things speedily, the brokenness of people actually feels like an intrusion keeping us from getting our important work for God done. Our desire for greatness in ministry isn’t the problem. Our problem rises from how the haste of doing large things, famously and as fast as we can, is reshaping our definition of what a great thing is. Desire greatness, dear pastor! But bend your definition of greatness to the one Jesus gives us. At minimum we must begin to take a stand on this one important fact: obscurity and greatness are not opposites. It is possible for ministry leaders to desire greatness in ways no different from anyone, anywhere in our culture. Attaching Jesus’s name to these desires doesn’t change the fact that they look just like the cravings of the world.”

14 Favorite Books of 2014

books

It’s that time of year again, time to share my top lists of the year. If you are a regular on this blog, you know that I love to read. You can read my recent reviews of books here.

Each year, I post a list of my favorite books of the year. To see my list of favorite books from past year, simply click on the numbers: 2009201020112012 and 2013. To me, I love this list because it shows what has influenced me in the past year, where I’m growing and what God is teaching me. If you are a leader, you should be a reader, there is no way around that.

To make this list, it does not have to be published in 2014, I only needed to read it in 2014. As always, this list was hard to narrow down, but here are the top 14 books of 2014:

14. What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done | Matthew Perman

What sets this book apart from others on productivity: Its emphasis on understanding how the gospel impacts productivity, How the gospel frees us to be productive, and it also brings together some of the best ideas from other books on productivity to show a better system that combines the strengths of different systems.

13. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know | Meg Meeker

To me, this is such an empowering book for fathers. We often feel unsure, at a loss of how to relate to our daughters, how to treat them differently than a son, or how to feel like we are moving forward in a relationship with them. This book is about what a daughter needs from a father that a mother cannot give. This book gave me such a clear understanding of how to interact with our daughter, how to build a relationship with her and prepare her for the life ahead of her. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to Dad’s of daughters.

12. Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds Carmine Gallo

Giving a presentation that truly moves people takes hard work. Let’s face it, many pastors are lazy. They become a pastor because it seems easier, they read a lot and most people don’t have a high expectation for a sermon to be great (sadly). They are simply hoping for short. Preaching is hard work. If you aren’t willing to put in the hard work, don’t preach. At the end of the day, someone pays a price for a sermon, the pastor or the church. This is the best preaching book of the year.

11 The Catalyst Leader: 8 Essentials for Becoming a Change Maker | Brad Lomenick

One of the things I’ve been chewing on from this book all year has been, “To get to the top and to be successful at the top requires two different skill sets.” Such a helpful book for younger leaders.

10. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration | Ed Catmull

This book was so good and eye opening, it took me 3 posts to share all that I learned from it. You can read those posts here, here and here.

9. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Greg McKeown

Two things stood out to me in this book that have shaped a lot of my life: If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will and If it is not a definite yes, then it is no.

8. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God Timothy Keller

I debated between this book and Keller’s book on suffering for this list. Both were helpful and meaningful in different ways, but his book on prayer opened my eyes on how to pray to God as Father and how to meditate on Scripture in deeper ways. If prayer is a struggle for you, this book is well worth working through.

7. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers | Ben Horowitz

Even though this is not a church planting book, it is by far, the best church planting book of the year. So many insights from this small business guru that is relevant for churches and church plants.

6. Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church | Scot McKnight

This book challenged me in some ways I didn’t expect. How to read the Bible through the lens of Jesus was one and how to see how God worked through all of history instead of jumping from Genesis 3 to Matthew 1 when we read the Bible. The other was, seeing Jesus as King when I think about him. This may seem obvious depending on your church background, but I appreciate the emphasis that McKnight places on Jesus as King. My church background seems to focus on Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, which He is and leave the King part until the end of the world. Yet, Jesus is King, now and forever.

5. Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You | John Ortberg

If you love what Dallas Willard has to say but have a hard time understanding what he says, this is a great book. I found myself challenged, encouraged and challenged some more. It is a mix of how to care for your soul, how to rest and ultimately, how to connect with God at a deeper level.

4. Hacking Leadership: The 11 Gaps Every Business Needs to Close and the Secrets to Closing Them Quickly Mike Myatt

This was the most relevant and helpful business leadership book that pastors should read this year. Myatt covers the gaps that exist in any business (church) and how to overcome them. This is a leadership book that I will re-read in years to come. I found it that helpful.

3. People-Pleasing Pastors: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Approval-Motivated Leadership Charles Stone

This book is unlike any other I’ve read. First, it hits a topic that every pastor or leader (and probably most humans) struggle with: people pleasing. This is an enormous deal for pastors and churches. Second, it combines stories and real life examples with a ton of helpful research on how our brains work and what drives leaders to care what others think. Third, it ends with some incredibly helpful insights to fight people pleasing in your leadership.

2. Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm Mark Sayers

The point of the book of the book is to show how leadership has changed, how culture has changed and what leadership looks like moving forward. I am thankful as Sayers points out, we are moving away from deconstruction in our leadership and culture and moving towards rebuilding. I’m hopeful Christians get this idea as many leaders seem to be behind the times and keep talking about deconstructing.

1. The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection Richard Blass & James Cofield

I’ve read maybe 3-4 life altering books. This was one of them. The authors walk through why we fail at relationships so often and show how that begins the before we are even born, but then our inability to deal with what our lives have been like and how to move forward. Many people cannot work well with others, can’t engage in their family or marriage, struggle to make work connections and all because of something in their past that has not been deal with. This isn’t to say that it is easy, only that, to live in true freedom and be our “true self” as the authors put it, we must deal with those things.

How to Figure out God’s Will

book

In his book The Catalyst LeaderBrad Lomenick lists some great questions to ask as you discern God’s will and God’s call on your life:

  1. What are your passions and gifts? At the intersection of these two elements, you’ll find your purpose in life.
  2. What would you work on or want to do for free? That is usually a good sign of what God has designed you to do.
  3. What energized you when you were a child? Does it still animate you? Knowing your calling is often directly connected to childhood passions and gifts.
  4. If you could do anything and take a pay cut, what would that be? You may have to blow up your financial goals in order to pursue your true calling.
  5. What barriers are preventing you from pursuing your true calling? Can you begin removing those?
  6. If you aren’t engaging your gifts and talents where you find yourself now, could you make changes in your current role to better engage those? Don’t rule out the possibility that where you are is where you need to be.

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Questions to Ask for Your Year End Review

year end review

Many times we review our life at the end of the year, but I find it helpful to take stock of things throughout the year. Often, it can save us hitting a roadblock, making the wrong choice or simply wasting our time doing something we shouldn’t be doing. In The Catalyst Leader by Brad Lomenick and he has some great questions to help with that:

Year End Review Questions:

1. What are the 2-3 themes that personally define me?

2. What people, books, accomplishments, or special moments created highlights for me recently?

3. Give yourself a grade from 1-10 in the following areas of focus: vocationally, spiritually, family, relationally, emotionally, financially, physically, recreationally.

4. What am I working on that is BIG for the next year and beyond?

5. As I move into this next season or year, is a majority of my energy being spent on things that drain me or things that energize me?

6. How am I preparing for 10 years from now? 20 years from now?

7. What 2-3 things have I been putting off that I need to execute on before the end of the year?

8. Is my family closer than a year ago? Am I a better friend than a year ago? If not, what needs to change immediately?

If this is something that is a struggle for you, this book: The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months is a great place to start. 

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