Tag Archives: dave gibbons
Links of the Week
- Nancy Ortberg on 3 steps to creating momentum where you are. Momentum is a leaders best friend, it takes time to create, it is easily lost, but it is so important in a church. You can tell when it is or is not there.
- Perry Noble on Leading a team. A must read for all leaders.
- Wayne Daley on Being a man of action and Having integrity.
- Greg Despres on the Uniqueness of the Bible.
- Mark Batterson on What success is. Everyone is trying to accomplish it, but how do you define it?
- Bill Hybels on the state of the church.
- Scot McKnight on Thoughts on a pastor’s schedule. This is a huge resource for leader’s in any organization, but specifically pastors.
- Paul Ingram laid out what God has been doing at Revolution in the first year of life. Love what God is doing and that Paul and Jennifer are part of making that happen.
- Ed Stetzer on Why missional churches don’t do global missions and how they can fix that. This is a very challenging article, it definitely clarifies the definition of missional.
The Pain Principle
“For leaders, pain in life has a way of deconstructing us to our most genuine, humble, authentic selves. It’s part of the leader’s job description. For most people, regardless of culture, it’s easier to connect with a leader’s pain and shortcomings and mistakes than her successes and triumphs.” – Dave Gibbons, The Monkey & the Fish
My Notes from the Leadership Summit
I went to the Leadership Summit last Thursday and Friday with some of our team from Revolution. It was by far one of, if not the best Summit I have ever been to.
In case you missed them, here are my notes from the Summit, in order.
- Four Lessons for Leading in a New Reality – Bill Hybels
- Hiring, Firing & Board Meltdowns – Panel Discussion
- Manage Differently NOW – Gary Hamel
- Four Steps to Spiritual Renewal – Tim Keller
- Jessica Jackley & the KIVA Story
- Against All Odds – Harvey Carey
- Third Culture Leadership – Dave Gibbons
- Aid vs. Trade – Andrew Rugasira
- Leveraging Your Past – Wess Stafford
- Eyewitness to Power – David Gergen
- Switch – Craig Groeschel Interviews Dan & Chip Heath
- Bono, the Church…3 Years Later
- The Irreducible Core of Leadership (An Interview with Tony Blair)
Thinking Forward: Third Culture Leadership – Dave Gibbons
Session 5 was broken into three parts.
Part 1 featured a talk by Dave Gibbons “Thinking Forward: Third World Leadership.”
You can read more about Dave at his blog or check out his church, Newsong Church, which is an international multi-site church, or you can check out his book The Monkey & the Fish.
- Sometimes things are not the way they appear to be, especially when it comes to how we read the Bible
- When Jesus was asked what was most important, he reduced it to 2 commandments: Love God and love our neighbor
- We define the neighbor as someone like us
- We use the idea that likes attract and that is how we build our churches
- God has called us to develop a church that is contrarian, that is not normal
- What is a third culture leader?
- It starts with painful adaptation
- Third culture is the mindset and will to love, learn and serve in any culture even in the midst of pain and culture
- It is normal for us to love someone like us
- No one notices that
- The world will stop and say “that is beautiful” if we love someone who is hard to love and forgive
- The third culture leader is focused on the fringe more than the masses
- Margins lead movements
- Steve Jobs gets this
- If there is ever a time to impact culture, it is right now
- Vision typically starts with the leader, then is passed to the team and then given to the church
- In God’s economy, vision should move from the church
- Who is the outsider? Who is on the fringe?
- What keeps us from moving in this direction?
- Often our definition of success keeps us from moving in this direction
- Third culture metrics: Failure is success to God
- Most of the world does not understand America’s success, but they do understand suffering
- Third culture metrics: Weakness guides us more than our strengths
- Third culture metrics: Relationships trump vision
- Jesus only did what he say his father doing (John 5)
- 70% of your life is the most important things in your life
- Think through design and space shifts
- Third culture metrics: They know obedience is more important than passion
- We are too focused on passion and not focused enough on obedience
- 4 acts of obedience to change the world: deeper collaboration, communal living, prayer, radical sacrifice
Killing Cockroaches and Other Scattered Musings on Leadership
Just got Tony Morgan’s book Killing Cockroaches in the mail. Great read. It is set up as if you are reading 200 and some odd blog posts. Makes for fast reading and easy to understand.
The title comes from a time when Tony was a CEO and someone came into his office and asked him to kill a cockroach in her office. The idea being, killing cockroaches was not part of his job. It was outside of what he did, what he should be doing and spending his time on.
This concept plagues pastors. Everyday, we do good things, things that have to be done, things that we should not be spending our time on, things that keep us from the things we should be spending our time on.
One of the things that was the most helpful were the lists that Tony included. Things like: 10 ways to keep me from visiting your church because I visited your website, how to blog, 10 ways to make church services more boring, 10 things I’ll remember after visiting Disney, 10 ways to know you’re not a leader, 10 advantages of doing ministry without a ministry strategy, 10 signs you’re not ready for change, 10 ways to sink your sermon series, and 10 ways to keep me awake and engaged during your entire message.
He also included interviews with Craig Groeschel, Dave Gibbons, David Foster, Dino Rizzo, Guy Kawasaki, Kathy Sierra, Mark Batterson, Nelson Searcy, Penelope Trunk, Phil Cooke, Seth Godin, Steven Furtick, and Troy Gramling on how they kill cockroaches in their leadership and what they’ve learned.
Here are a few other things I highlighted:
- To try to make everyone happy, you have to be comfortable with mediocrity.
- We become more passionate about something and move towards being an expert on that topic, we begin to develop our own lexicon with specialized words.
- Talent can only take you so far. Preparation is what separates a good speaker from the truly great ones.
- Leaders can’t be recruited from the platform.
- Leaders won’t be fulfilled by performing tasks.
- Leaders don’t follow doers.
- Leaders don’t want to be micromanaged.
- Leaders won’t commit to ambiguity.
- Leaders don’t just show up.
- People aren’t necessarily afraid of change. They’re afraid of being changed.
- The less options you provide (speaking of church programs), the less likely people will be to take a step.
- Always ask: Is there a way we can accomplish this without creating a policy?
- How do you encourage someone to attend your church for the first time? Do you tell them how great your church is? Or do you tell them how the experience may impact their life?
Definitely a book worth picking, a lot of great leadership nuggets in it.
