Here are 4 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
I just finished reading Simplify: Ten Practices to Unclutter Your Soul by Bill Hybels, and it is a really helpful book.
What’s it about?
When we spend our lives doing things that keep us busy but don’t really matter, we sacrifice the things that do.
Key Takeaway
The chapter on friendships was incredibly helpful to me personally. As our world becomes more transient, it seems like people are moving in and out of my family on a regular basis. Whether they finish school, get a job in a new city, move back to where their family lives or get deployed, people move and relationships change. This is hard and painful. I really appreciated the way he talked about seasonal friends (those who will be in our lives for a season) and lifelong friends. We want lifelong friends but will have more seasonal friends, and that’s okay, but we need to know how to walk through it.
Some things that stood out
What is the most important trait for success?
Do you know what separates the winners and the losers when it comes to leadership and succeeding?
It isn’t what you think.
I was listening to a podcast interview recently where Thom Rainer was interviewing John Maxwell, and Rainer asked Maxwell what is the most important leadership trait for success, and Maxwell replied, “Consistency.”
I had to rewind it.
Consistency.
If you ever read a biography about an athlete or watch stories on the Olympics about those who make it and win, what you will hear is the story of a person who got up early everyday, ate a strict diet, everyday. Did the same stuff, everyday. Practiced, practiced and practiced some more. They were consistent.
That isn’t exciting, sexy or anything. That isn’t about vision, team building, recruiting or fund raising.
Yet if you think about it, it fuels all of leadership.
It fuels vision. No one will follow you to that next great hill, that next great destination, if they don’t trust you and believe in you. They won’t follow you as far if you are new compared to having a track record. Are you consistent? If so, people will follow you further.
It fuels team building. People want to be a part of a team that has a great track record. They want to be with a leader that has been around and accomplished a lot. They are hesitant to follow someone with a lot of turnover on a team. They want someone – wait for it – consistent.
The same goes with recruiting.
Now comes fundraising. This is crucial in church leadership. Your ministry has a ceiling, and it comes from a variety of places, but one of those places is finances. The leaders who are able to raise the most money have a track record of handling money well. They have a track record of being in one place, having a strong team, strong vision, strong character.
They are consistent.
It fuels leadership.
It fuels success.
People may say a lot about you as a leader, but would they say you are consistent? Are you the same person everywhere?
Here’s something that can frustrate you as a leader. You want to start something new, and people don’t want to come along. You think it is them. They just don’t see what you see. They aren’t as spiritual, they don’t have big enough faith. We as leaders tell ourselves all kinds of things about why people don’t get on board with something, and the things we tell ourselves are always about the people.
What if you haven’t been consistent, and people are hesitant? What if the reason people don’t want to give is they aren’t sure you’ll complete the project and stay?
Leadership is vision casting, team building and all those things. But it starts and ends with character and consistency.
Here are 6 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, husband and father. I hope they help you too:
When it comes to anything in life, whether it is marriage, parenting, leadership, or work, someone pays the price.
In marriage you can either pay the price at the beginning, working through all the junk you brought into your marriage; or you can pay it later when you are unhappy and married or divorced.
As a single you can pay the price to stay pure and wait until you get married to have sex. Or you can pay the price after you get married as you work through what it meant to give your body away before you got married. Or your spouse will have to deal with that thought.
The same is true for preaching.
Either the pastor pays the price in preparation, studying, praying, planning, reading, and listening to God; or his church pays the price when they have to listen to him stand up there completely unprepared, unsure of what his big idea is, as he wanders through his sermon aimlessly like the nation of Israel did on their way to the Promised Land.
Too many pastors make their church pay the price.
I was talking with a few pastors the other day who told me, “It’s Wednesday, I’ve got a title.” If all you have on Wednesday is a title, you are not paying the price for your sermon.
Paying the price means you plan a preaching calendar, you think through where you are going as a church. You study, you pray through the text asking God to reveal to you what it is about, what your church needs to hear. You read commentaries and other books, you look into the context to better communicate the text.
Preaching every week is easily the biggest weight I carry and the biggest joy I experience.
On Saturday night I lie in bed thinking through my talk and the text for Sunday. At this point in my preparation I almost have the text I’m preaching on memorized and have thought through the ins and outs. I am now thinking more about who will be there, how I will communicate it. I begin praying for those I think of and those whom I don’t know, those who are coming to Revolution as a last ditch effort on God. This is the weight of preaching. If you do not feel this, I don’t think you should preach. Why? When you stand up to preach you are literally reaching into Hell and pulling people who are on the path to Hell (Matthew 7:13 – 14). I realize that is a paraphrase, but that is the spiritual battle of preaching. That is what’s at stake.
Sunday night I lie awake worrying if I said everything I should’ve said. Did God want me to say something else? Was I clear? I pray for those who made decisions, whether to get baptized, start following Jesus, or any number of next steps we talk through on a Sunday. I pray for the spiritual protection of those who made decisions. I know that night will be a very difficult night as Satan and his angels will be going to work on those individuals.
Pastors, do you pray for those who are coming and for those who make decisions? This is the price of preaching. This is the price of pastoring.
If you are not willing to pay it, then do something else. Lives are at stake. Souls are at stake. Marriages are at stake. Families are at stake. Eternities are at stake.
Pay the price.
If you are anything like me, you are not a patient person.
Patience is hard.
I always hear people joke, don’t pray for patience.
Why?
We want things now. We are an instant culture. We want fast food. We want to post pictures instantly. It’s even called Instagram.
Patience is hard when it comes to leadership as well, not only because of the reasons just mentioned and the way we are wired and how our culture operates but because of how long things take in leadership.
Let me explain.
Leaders are future oriented people. One of the things that separates leaders from followers is the ability of leaders to see a desired future and move people towards it. Because of this, by the time things become a reality, leaders have lived with them for months, sometimes years.
When a church launches a new initiative, ministry, program, a building campaign, buys land or hires a new staff member, the leaders have anticipated this moment for months or years.
Patience is hard. And crucial.
For leaders, because change feels like an eternity to them, it is easy to forget how whiplashed our followers can feel when a change happens. For a leader, they have read books, prayed, talked to mentors and other leaders, listened, and waited for months to launch something. When their followers give pushback, they think the problem is with the followers (and it may be), but often they are not giving their followers the same time to process the change as they had to think about the change.
If you are in a spot as a leader who is about to make a change or launch something, here are some ways to handle it:
I grew up in a farming community, so everyone was very aware of the seasons and what those seasons meant for life. Certain things happened during certain times of the year. You planted, watered, prepped the dirt and harvested plants at certain times. If you did it at the wrong time (too early or too late), you could harm the crops and miss what could be.
Life, leadership and church are the same. There are times when things are high (harvesting the crops) and times when you are prepping the dirt (getting ready) or pulling out weeds, and it feels like nothing is happening.
Then, like a farm, you start over.
When you start a church (or a new chapter in life), you are clearing the field, getting the seed ready, tilling the ground. Things like building a team, building in that team, getting the word out, working through logistics and schedules to get a church off the ground. This is hard work. There is no shortcut through this, although I meet plenty of church planters who want to skip this. It’s easy to see why; it is hard. Long hours, you see very little fruit because you are planting, you are weeding, you are watering. Some younger leaders can relate to this season as they work under a pastor, waiting for the time to plant a church. Many guys see this as “biding their time” but need to see it as the time of pruning, the Spirit of God working in and on them for what lies ahead. This season is mostly behind the scenes. The work that is being done is often being done in hearts, lives and in meetings as people work to shore up systems and how things are done.
In our lives this is trying to get a career off the ground, trying to finish school, pay your dues at a company, working to get your marriage off the ground, trying to figure out kids, how that all works as you parent. This is the beginning of things. This is hard work. In this season most dreams, most goals stop because of the difficulties.
Don’t miss this: this is not a wasted season. If you don’t do this hard work, preparing, studying, reading, getting ready, you can’t actually plant a crop. You can’t start a business, you are unprepared to start a family. We too often rush into things we are not ready for.
Then you water, you clear the weeds away, making sure the crop gets sunlight, plenty of fertilizer and water.
This is the time that you start to see life. The first person to become a follower of Jesus, the first baptism, first marriage saved, you launch something in your church. This is exciting, this is what you hoped for. For many guys, though, this can be depressing because it is slow. You will see plants come up that just die. You will see weeds that overtake plants. Or plants that don’t grow to what they should be. Leaders you poured into who walk away, marriages you counseled only to have them quit. Moments of betrayal and feeling stabbed in the back, feelings of God abandoning you. At this point you will probably hear of how God is working in the church down the street. Don’t despair; they are in a different season.
You are in your season, they are in their season.
Your marriage starts having small wins, you begin to see eye to eye, you’re connecting again. You get pregnant after a long, difficult season of infertility. Your work is beginning to get noticed, you get some accolades, a promotion, get accepted for that master’s program.
Like a church, you can start to get jealous at this point. Someone else seems to have an easier time. Their child isn’t as difficult, their marriage (while yours is great) is better.
The next season is the harvest. Plants are growing, you are reaping rewards from your hard work. In this season you have unprecedented momentum. You can do little wrong. Every idea you try seems to work. Your sermons click, community groups multiply, money is great, staff is getting along. There is a buzz about what God is doing in your church. You might even be getting noticed in your city, people are talking. This is the season you hear about on twitter, blogs and at conferences.
This is where you can look back with some accomplishment on a project that has taken awhile. Maybe you had a lot of work you had to do in your marriage, you sell a business, a business is finally humming and hitting on all cylinders, you graduate, and all the work you put into your schooling is done. It is a season of accomplishment.
This is the season everyone wants to live in.
The reality, though, is that this season comes to an end, and then you start over. What often keeps pushing you through this cycle is the reality that the harvest season does come.
So how long do these seasons last? It depends. Some leaders, churches, careers and marriages get stuck in an early season and never reap any benefits. Some after going through the great feelings of the harvest and seeing things start over simply throw up their hands and quit. Most people seem to stay stuck in an early season and wonder why life is so hard.
The important thing for a leader is to know what season they are in personally and where their church is so they can lead effectively and know how their church is doing. People need to be reminded that hard seasons do not last forever, but they also need to be reminded to enjoy the seasons of growth and momentum.
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Every time you say yes to something, you say no to something else.
This truth has had an enormous impact on how I live my life, how I make decisions, how we do our calendar as a family and how I lead Revolution Church.
But how do you know what to say yes and no to? That’s the most common question I get from someone who has read my book or has heard me say this in a talk. Honestly, it’s different for each person.
Too often we focus on what we want to do in the next day, week or month and then make a decision based on that. Let me frame it a different way for you: What kind of person do you want to become in the next month? In the next half year? One year from now, who do you want to be?
Will this involve doing something? Yes, but it changes the context.
For example, if a year from now you want to be closer to Jesus than you are today, a stronger disciple, then you will make the choice to say yes to community, yes to serving in your church, yes to reading your Bible, and yes to inviting people to church. That will then determine what you say no to.
Often we hope that something will happen. We will simply become kinder, more generous, thinner or smarter without putting in the work or even be willing to make a choice towards something. If you want to become a person who is known for ________, then you will have to make decisions for that to happen. A wish and a hope are not enough.
Take your marriage or another relationship. What if six months from now that relationship was stronger? It would mean that what you are doing right now would have to change. You would need to make more of an effort, you would have to say yes to giving time and energy to that relationship and saying no to something else (ie. golfing, sleeping in, working too late).
We often think we have no power over where our life goes, what our marriage becomes, the relationship we have with God or how kind we are. Yet we do. Every day we make decisions that get our life somewhere.
Here’s the problem: we never sit down to ask, Where do I want to end up?
I remember talking to a mentor once, and she asked, “Josh, do you enjoy success?”
Honestly, the question stopped me in my tracks, and I didn’t say anything for awhile.
The truth is, as a leader I am trained to fix things. I am wired to find things that are not working and make them start working or stop them. To find something that is going well and make it great.
As soon as something is fixed or working well, we go looking for the next thing to fix. Who has time to sit back and enjoy success?
But let me ask you, “How do you handle success? Do you enjoy success?”
Have you thought about that as a church leader?
Many times in life we wallow in things that aren’t working. This didn’t go our way. We didn’t get a raise or a promotion. We prayed for this, and instead that happened. It is easy to become pessimistic.
It is easy to fix things. It makes us feel active and important, like we are needed.
Most leaders do not know how to enjoy something. We are always so focused on future things and projects that we fail to see what is right in front of us.
If something just succeeded for you, take a moment and enjoy it. You worked hard for that to happen. You set goals, made sacrifices and it worked. Gather your team together and enjoy it.
Most people don’t realize it, but the one thing leaders spend the majority of their time on is decision making.
I know you think you spend a lot of time on relationships and in meetings, but when you boil leadership down, much of it is spent on decisions.
Most churches don’t have a strong decision making grid that they look through. For many churches, decisions are made based on cost, if they will lose people (or make people mad) or who thought of the idea (if it is a person with power, that gives more weight to the idea in most churches).
While there are some valid points to those, making decisions through that grid won’t always get your church to where God wants it or accomplish the vision God has given you.
Think of your decision making grid as the hills you are going to die on. These aren’t necessarily theological hills, because the theological hills you will die on should kill a decision before it gets too far.
This a philosophical grid.
Here are some questions to consider for your grid:
