Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I was at the Drive Conference in Atlanta and heard Joel Thomas layout three important categories for leaders. Since then, I’ve been chewing on it because I think they are critical, and they also explain some frustrations we have as leaders if we don’t understand them.

Identity 

Identity is who you are. Your role in life as a husband, wife, parent, friend, boss, and child of God. 

These are also the roles you play outside of leadership and ministry; the hobbies that you have, the interests you give your time to. 

This is hard for us to think about, but this is the foundation of leadership. Too often, as leaders, our identity is wrapped up in what we do or our ability. 

Your identity is formed in a lot of ways that affect your leadership. 

It started years ago in your family of origin. It is formed in early experiences in school and friendships as you grow up. Your experiences and the heartaches shape it, as well as the celebrations you experience through life. 

If you grew up and learned not to trust people or that people can’t be trusted (real hurts), that shapes how you interact with people around you and how much trust you give to others. If you were raised to believe that what you did was the most important thing about you, that shapes how you go about leadership and teamwork.

Your story affects how you interact, show up, your motivations and how you trust or do not trust those around you. 

Connected to this is understanding how you are wired. You need to know your personality, motivations, desires, and fears. You also need to understand the things you carry from your past: shame, hurt and other parts of your story. 

Those things about you shape your identity as a leader and are easily overlooked.

Calling

Calling is what you feel like God has called you to do with your life. 

We define that differently. And we talk about how that calling comes to us in different ways, but we have it. 

Some feel called to be a pastor, in ministry, etc. You may feel called to leadership in the marketplace, a non-profit; your calling may be to eradicate something. But all of us have that calling. 

We get tripped when we confuse identity and calling. They are connected but not the same. 

And let me say this, being a pastor is a calling, but it’s also a job. A job that you will one day leave and retire from. 

In many ways, identity is who you are, calling is what you do with that or because of that.  

Identity is who you are, calling is what you do with that or because of that.
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John Onwuchekwa said, “You HAVE a calling FROM God. You ARE a child OF God.”

Assignment

Your assignment is what God has called you to now. Your assignment right now might be to be a lead pastor, associate pastor, church planter, elder, or volunteer. 

Your assignment is your current season. It may be just beginning. You may be ending an assignment and figuring out what’s next. 

Again, we can confuse our calling with an assignment. We can also confuse our assignment with our identity. Many pastors and leaders don’t know where they end and where their church begins, which leads to all kinds of unhealthy things. 

Assignments can last decades, and they can last for a year. Assignments can change at the drop of a hat when you aren’t aware. 

These categories are critical to understand and keep separate. If we confuse them, we will find ourselves in some dangerous places as leaders and watch our hearts erode. 

3 areas leaders need to be aware of.
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One of the things I appreciated about Andy Stanley’s book Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move is the second question, “What story do I want to tell?”

As he points out, all of our decisions do not simply stay decisions. Instead, they one day become stories.

The decision for which high school you went to (maybe not even your decision) became a series of stories in the future.

This idea framed for Katie and me our decision to move from Arizona to Massachusetts. I’ll get to more detail on that in a couple of weeks.

But the story question is the legacy question. It is the moment where we pause to ask, “When this simply becomes a story, what story do I want to tell?”

If you’re a follower of Jesus, you often ask the question about God’s will for your life. And while I don’t think it is as mysterious as we make it out to be, there are some things we can do to help us make decisions each day that lead to a story we want to tell and honor God.

But how do we make sure that our lives are so close to Jesus that when we make decisions, they align with what God has called and created us to be and to do?

Here are some simple ways to begin seeing God speak and move in your life and stop resisting His voice:

6 questions to help you figure out God’s will for your life.
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Here are some questions I came across a few years ago that will help you tell a better story with your life and see what God’s will for your life might be:

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? Unfortunately, you may have to blow up your financial goals 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 change your current role to engage those better? Don’t rule out the possibility that you are where you need to be.

I’m praying for you this week as you decide to tell a better story. 

How to find what you must do with your life.
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It’s that time of year. One of my favorite times of the year, when I share my favorite books of the year. If you want to see all the books I read this year, you can see those here. I also posted my favorite fun books and our favorite shows of the year.

Now, on to the list:

When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse by Chuck DeGroat. This is an important book for churches and leaders to wrestle with. There were multiple times where I thought back to leadership situations, meetings I sat through, and things said to me and wondered, “Was Chuck there?” This was a quick read, but one that is hard to digest. Pastors need to wrestle with what it looks like to lead like Jesus in a world that desperately needs Jesus.

Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You by John Eldredge. As a dad to sons and trying to make sense of life stages, this was a helpful read. Eldredge takes us through the stages of a man’s life, when they happen, what a man needs to move through each one. It gave language to things in my past but also my future. It also showed me some important things for my sons. If you are a father of boys, this is an essential book to read. 

Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump by Kate Andersen Bower. This book was a fun read. A few leadership lessons in it, but I learned a ton of things about the Presidents that I didn’t know before, and it felt like a timely read with the election upon us and watching The West Wing with Katie and the Reich 5. 

The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus by Rich Villodas. This might be one of my favorite spiritual formation books I’ve ever read, mostly because of how unique it is. When we think of spiritual formation books, we expect a book to have a chapter on bible reading, prayer, fasting, etc. What Rich does is take us on a different journey. He unpacks Sabbath and includes things like racial reconciliation and sexual wholeness, which puts this book in a different category compared to others. He looks at our whole lives and how they interconnect with others, not just on an individual basis, which is so needed today. 

Building Below the Waterline: Strengthening the Life of a Leader by Gordon MacDonald. I rediscovered Gordon MacDonald this year (you’ll notice he’s the only author on this list twice). I say rediscovered because I read some of his books in college and seminary, but reading his books in your 40’s is different. This is an older book, but it has so much wisdom in it.

Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move by Andy Stanley. This is one of the books that got added to my kid’s reading list for high school. I wish I had had this book years ago. The 5 questions Andy takes you through are critical when facing any decision. The two that stood out to me were “paying attention to any tension in you” and “What story do you want to tell when this decision is a story?”

This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers by KJ Ramsey. This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Her words and ideas were so helpful in this season. In fact, I got to have KJ join me for a deeper dive at our church about her book and how it helps us to get through the difficult parts of life. Very rarely am I moved to tears with a book, but this book did that. It spoke to a very deep place in me. 

Tempered Resilience: How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change by Tod Bolsinger. This was easily the best leadership book I read this year. Not only was this timely for 2020, but one all pastors and leaders should read as we head into 2021. It gives you a framework for what you faced this year and how to survive into the next year, and the road ahead. It also helps make sense of the difficult road that a leader walks and how that road prepares you for what is next. It’s possible I highlighted more of this book than left it unhighlighted. 

A Resilient Life: You Can Move Ahead No Matter What by Gordon MacDonald. A mentor told me that this is a great book to read at the halfway point of life, and he was right. At 41, I am really trying to engage in what helps a leader last and become the older person I want to become. Like the other book by MacDonald on this list, there was so much wisdom packed into this book. I’ve recommended it to everyone I know who is turning 40. 

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortlund. This book is on a lot of “best of” lists and with good reason. Each page is saturated with gospel goodness. If I had to pick my favorite book of the year, this is it. 

If you’re curious about past years’ list, click on the numbers: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2019.

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All of us have hopes and dreams. You and I look at our lives and see things we wish were there, or things we want to be different. It could be for your career, your family, a relationship with a friend, sibling, spouse, parent or child.

This vision, the difference between what is and what could be in many ways keeps us moving forward in life. This dream gets us up in the morning and gives us hope that things will change and get better, even when it seems hopeless.

A vision is a difference between what is and what could be.
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Sadly though, many of our dreams stay like that. Dreams. They don’t get out of our heads and hearts. We don’t tell anyone the world that we see, the hope that we have.

Why don’t we go public with our dreams and goals?

Going public with your dream.
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There are a few reasons:

1. We have a lot of self-doubts. These doubts could come from your family of origin or somewhere else, but we believe all kinds of messages about our dreams that aren’t true. Things like, we aren’t smart enough, we aren’t a good enough parent, boss or leader; we’re too late to get started, we aren’t old enough or have enough experience.

Whatever message we carry around and we all have a tape that plays in our head.

Mine is often centered around not being smart enough or not belonging in a room that I find myself in. I’ll sit with other leaders and think, “I don’t belong here.” This will cause me to clam up and not bring my whole self to a situation. I miss out, and so do others.

With our self-doubts, the moment we go public with a dream and someone tells us why that can’t happen; they confirm our self-doubts. So why put ourselves through that?

So we stay quiet, and our dreams die a slow death in our heart.

2. We like the idea of a dream more than the work of a dream. Many people love the idea of starting a business, church, going back to school, getting out of debt, but not the work it will take. I see this a lot in church planting circles. A potential church planter has gone to some conferences, listened to the podcasts, read the books, can tell you the strategy for his plant, the name and even has a logo, but no people. Why? It is just in his head. Now, a dream has to start there. But if it never moves, it will never move anyone.

And honestly, if you aren’t willing to do the work of your dream, it won’t happen and it wasn’t yours anyway.

We like the idea of a dream more than the work of a dream.
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How do you know if you should go public with your dream?

Andy Stanley says an effective vision shares the problem, the solution, the reason something must be done and the reason something must be done now.

Just because a problem exists, doesn’t mean you need to solve it or that the time is right. There are lots of things you can point out as a problem, but don’t have a solution to.

Does it need to be solved now? The answer to that question is, not always. It might be nice, but it might not be yet.

At the intersection of that statement: a problem, a solution and a reason that something must be done and done now is the answer to whether your dream is right, the timing is right, and it is time to go public with it.

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I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. This is my 14th summit and every year, God stretches me and challenges me. So much wisdom and inspiration wrapped up into two days. I always blog my notes, so if you can’t attend or missed something, I’ve got you covered.

Here are some takeaways from the last session of day 1 with Andy Stanley:

• If we had to do it all over again, what would we do all over again? What really worked in our church?
• It’s important to answer the question, why is this working.
• Part of being successful as a church is having a uniquely better product.
• Unique isn’t enough. You can be uniquely bad. Unique doesn’t create momentum.
• There are shared assumptions in every industry that cause us to do the same things, the same way.
• Uniquely better is often the byproduct of circumstances that successful organizations are trying to avoid.
• Uniquely better is often a solution to a problem.
• Uniquely better is often so unique that successful organizations cannot imagine that it is better.
• The more successful you are, the more likely that when what’s better comes along, the more likely that you’ll miss it.
• Our job is to create a culture to find what is uniquely better instead of resisting it.

How do you create a culture that looks for uniquely better:

• Be a student, not a critic. 
• Don’t criticize something you don’t understand.
• We naturally resist things we don’t understand or can’t control.
• The moment you start criticizing, you stop learning.
• “The next generation product and idea almost never comes from the previous generation.” -Al Ries
• Keep your eyes and your mind wide open. 
• Listen to people who aren’t in our industry, who don’t know how to do what we do.
• Outsiders aren’t bound by our assumptions.
• Closed minded leaders close minds. 
• How do discern if you’re closed minded: How do you respond to suggestions about other organizations? When was the last time your organization embraced a big idea that wasn’t your idea? When was the last time you weren’t sure of an initiative but you gave the go ahead anyway?

Closed minded leaders close minds. @andystanley #GLS17
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• Replace how with wow.
• All ideas die at the word ‘how.’
• You lose nothing by saying wow.
• Wow ideas to life, don’t how them to death.
• We fuel innovation or kill them by our response to new, untried, expensive ideas.
• Nothing is gained by not knowing what your people are dreaming about.
• The world will put enough ‘how’s’ in front of your kids, let’s be ‘wow’ parents.

The world will put enough ‘how’s’ in front of your kids, let’s be ‘wow’ parents. @andystanley #GLS17
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• Ask the uniquely better questions. 
  • Is this unique?
  • What would make this unique?
  • Is it better?
  • Is it better…really?

4 questions to make your church uniquely better. @andystanley #GLS17
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Preaching is hard work, but it is joyous work. Ask anyone who preaches on a regular basis and you will find someone who loves the process of preaching, prepping a sermon, thinking through a series creatively and then standing up to communicate God’s Word to a group of people. It is an awesome task and responsibility.

In light of that, here are eight questions you should ask yourself before getting up to preach a sermon:

8 Questions to Ask Before You Preach Your Next Sermon.
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1. Have I studied enough? It is easy to study too much for a sermon, but it is equally easy to study too little. So much happens in a week; so much has to happen. Life happens for you personally as a pastor and in the life of your church. There are meetings, appointments and opportunities that call for your attention. Then there are all the ways you can waste time as a pastor.

You should never step up to preach until you are prepared. This means you will sacrifice some opportunities to give enough time to the task of preaching. How much time that takes and when that happens will depend on the person, the series, the church size and ability. You should not step up to preach and be unprepared. There are weeks you will feel inadequate. In fact, that will be most weeks, but unprepared should not be what you feel.

Yes, you could always study more. You could tweak more. Many times you need to stop studying and spend time with people or take a nap. Pastors are notorious for overdoing it in sermon prep.

2. Have I prayed enough? Have you confessed your sins, prepared your heart to preach, prayed through your notes and for the people who will be there? Have you asked God to move on your behalf? Don’t just ask for a crowd. God is interested more in movement than a crowd (I believe).

3. Do I care about this topic? You won’t feel passionate about every topic to the same degree. Some will come easily, some will be your soap box topics and sometimes you will preach a passage because it is the next thing in the book of the Bible you are preaching through. Sometimes you will preach on a topic because your church needs to hear it.

Another way to think about this is, do I care enough about the people in my church to tell them what they need to hear this week? Not in a mean, berating way, but in a loving, shepherding way.

4. Is this relevant to my church? This can be tricky, but you need to think through how a topic is relevant to your church. What do they think about the topic? What is their pain point as it relates to the topic? Sometimes this is obvious, and sometimes this takes more work on your part as a pastor.

5. Has this passage and topic impacted me personally? This is like #3, sometimes you are impacted deeply by a truth you are going to share, sometimes you aren’t. The Word of God needs to do its work in you before you stand up to preach. You need to preach from the overflow of your time with God, not regurgitate a commentary. One of the best things that can happen in a sermon is when you say, “Let me share how this has worked in my life or heart this week.”

6. Do I know what I am trying to communicate? This seems obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a sermon and it became obvious that outside of a verbal Bible study, the speaker had little idea what he was trying to communicate. Here is one of the most important words in sermon prep: edit.

Edit is one of the most important words in sermon prep.
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Do your best to nail down your sermon to one line. That’s all most people will remember. This is hard work because some weeks it isn’t obvious. You owe it to your people to do that hard work.

7. Do I know what I want people to do with what I’m about to say? Going along with having your sermon be about one thing, you aren’t ready to preach until you can articulate, “In light of this truth, here’s how we should live.” This isn’t to put a burden on your church but to show them and help them apply the truth of the Bible. Don’t end with, “I’ll just let the Holy Spirit bring about the application for you from what I just said.” No lie, I heard a guy say that once. Your goal is not a how-to self help talk, but your people need help applying something, seeing through the fog of their life to see how the Bible impacts them.

8. What barriers will keep people from applying this to their life? We all have barriers to the Bible, believing God, believing in God, and applying truth. During the week think through what those barriers will be to what you will preach. What will keep someone from applying this text? Why will someone walk out and disregard what you say? Talk to them, talk to that. Say, “You might be thinking ____.” That person will think, “He is talking to me.” Maybe talk about your struggles to apply something. This will show a human side to you that your people will love.

There are more questions you can and should ask before preaching, but these will hopefully get you started.

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For most of us, prayer bounces between a plea for help, a running conversation or to-do list with God, a reassurance of God’s power and presence in our lives, a wishlist or a shouting match with God, down to wondering if God has forgotten us.

One of the most common ways we pray is a prayer for help.

Eugene Peterson said, “Trouble is what gets prayer started.”

And that’s true.

We pray out of desperation. We pray because we aren’t sure what else to do. We rend the heavens in hopes that God will hear, that God will move. We pray through tears, mumbling and bumbling from a place of helplessness.

We pray for health, for healing, for relationships to be mended, for kids and parents and spouses to be saved, to be changed. We pray for jobs, for finances. We pray for those close to us who are destroying their lives. We pray for wisdom in decisions.

And in all this, we are often very helpless to bring about an answer.

So, how do you ask God for help? How does He hear?

Psalm 121 gives us the answer:

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.

Here are four things we learn from this Psalm about asking God for help:

1. Admit your need for help. This seems obvious, but to ask God for help means we are admitting our need for help. We don’t do this naturally. We are naturally self-sufficient, self-assured people. We are raised to handle it, to get it done, to be fine, to not depend on anyone.

The writer of this Psalm is helpless and they know it. They need help.

2. Believe God can and will help. Know where your help comes from.

For many of us, once we exhaust our ability to fix something, we still don’t go to prayer. Maybe there is a book, a sermon, a financial move, a google search I can do, a person I can get advice from. Prayer for too many of us is a last resort.

When we get there, we say, “God, I don’t know if you can help. I don’t know if you care to help. So I’ll look around.”

3. Be patient. The writer of Psalm 121 reminds us to go to sleep. This communicates that sometimes our prayers will take longer than we think but that God will fight for us and work on things, while we sleep.

Sleep is one of the greatest pictures of faith in our lives.

Why?

The time that we worry, are anxious and replay conversations over and over in our minds is at night. We lie there, staring at the clock, thinking about our bank account, our job, our marriage, our kids, our parents. The problems we experience in relationships, worrying about college, bills, health, the list goes on and on. Yet, in that moment there is almost nothing we can do.

The people we are worried about are asleep, the people we would call for help and advice are asleep. The writer of Psalm 121 says, “Go to sleep.”

4. God is over all things. Why can we be patient and go to sleep? Not only because God is our help and never sleeps, but because verses 7 and 8 tell us that God is over all things.

He watches all things. He is not surprised by anything. Nothing catches him off guard.

It ends with a crucial word, forevermore.

Forever is a long time, and yet that is the scope of our God.

Psalm 121 is a prayer to give us confidence to ask God for help and confidence as we wait for that help to come.

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If you ask any parent, “What do you want for your kids?”, eventually you will hear, “I want them to have the life I never had.” They may not sound like that, but parents want their kids to have everything. Yes, we want them to be smart, courteous, have character, show kindness and generosity, but we want them to have it all.

Does every parent want that?

Almost.

If that’s not you, thanks for reading and you can scroll to the next blog.

But let me ask this question: Are you giving your kids the right life?

Are you giving your kids the right life?
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Many parents, in an effort to make sure their kids have every opportunity, get the best schooling, play on sports teams and have opportunities for future advancement, go to extreme measures. Parents work long hours or multiple jobs so that they can have the money to pay for all those activities. They run kids from one team, one program, one practice to the next. They push and push so that kids are getting less sleep and growing up faster.

Then you throw this in with what the parents think their kids want for the rest of their lives.

Let me give you an example.

I overheard someone recently talking about their kids and how much both parents were working. This parent said, “My kids are starting to complain that my wife and I aren’t around enough for them because we work too much.” Someone in the group asked, “What did you say?” The parent looked at the group and said, “I told them, ‘You want nice things, don’t you? You want to go on nice vacations and live in the house we have and do the things we do, don’t you?'”

If you can picture the scene, you can imagine the awkward silence that followed.

The answer to that question, if this child answered honestly, would probably be, “Not really.”

I walked away sad for this family but also convicted by this question: Am I giving my kids the life they want, the life they need or the life I think they should have?

Am I giving my kids the life they want, the life they need or the life I think they should have?
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It’s a convicting question.

Often I give my kids the life I want them to have. The life that reflects well on me. The life that feels easier or less stressful as a parent.

Not always, but it is easy to fall into.

This is one reason that Katie and I created a family mission statement a few years ago. I detailed the process we went through and what ours is in my book Breathing Room: Stressing Less and Living More.

The problem for parents is, in the hustle and bustle of life, we don’t know the kind of kids we are raising. We have never asked ourselves, “What is the goal of parenting? What will our kids be like when they leave our house?”

Without clarifying that, we end up giving our kids the life everyone else is going for.

But what if that isn’t the life you want for your kids or the life they need?

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• I feel like I’m still playing catch up from 2 weeks ago.
• Katie, me and our 5 kids flew to Boston to see my cousin get married on Cape Cod.
• It was beautiful, breezy, sunny.
• It was awesome seeing family and horrible flying through 3 time zones.
• Last week, the Acts 29 Arizona pastors and their staffs got to spend time on a zoom call with Larry Osborne and talk about leadership development, small groups, discipleship and breaking growth barriers.
• So enlightening.
• Sunday was one of those days that pastors know well.
• We’ve been going through Romans this year at Revolution and Sunday we got to Romans 9.
• I love theology, but trying to explain Romans 9 in a relevant way to someone who has know idea about calvinism, free will or predestination.
• I ended up preaching 2 different sermons between our 2 services.
• Not really a good thing but it happened.
• Here’s what pastors know well: your feelings on how church went rarely line up with how church went. 
• Some of the books I’ve enjoyed in prepping for Romans 9 have been Chosen for Life: The Case for Divine Election, PROOF: Finding Freedom through the Intoxicating Joy of Irresistible Grace and for the theological beatniks, The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23.
• I’m reminded that your church really likes it when you tackle hard topics.
• Unchurched people especially because they have no idea this is in the Bible.
• So ready for football to start this weekend.
• I let my 2 oldest boys create a fantasy team this year.
• They couldn’t believe how excited they were about drafting their team.
• According to Yahoo, I won the draft and got the highest grade (even though I didn’t draft a defense).
• So you know I’ll go 2-14 this year.
• People often ask what books me and our leaders are reading.
• Here’s one we’re about to start: The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals.
• Really excited about it.
• Our entire team loved his talk at the leadership summit.
• I have my pastors covenant group meeting today.
• Honestly, at first I was skeptical about joining, but it has been a huge blessing to me.
• I meet once a month with 4 older pastors, I think I’m 20 – 25 years younger than all of them.
• Pastors need other pastors to confide in, pray with and share ministry with.
• Got to celebrate my Mom’s 60th birthday last night.
• She’ll be embarrassed when she reads this that I told you, but we’ll keep it between us.
• I love being able to watch my kids interact with and laugh with my parents.
• Time to get back at it…

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Here are 8 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, pastor, husband and father. I hope they help you too:

1. 5 Tell Tale Signs Your Church is Insider Focused by Carey Nieuwhof
2. A Communications Tip From A Church Secret Shopper by Greg Atkinson
3. Why People Volunteer At Some Churches But Not At Others by Paul Alexander
4. The Senior Pastor as the Chief Clarity Officer by Brian Dodd & Michael Lukaszewski
5. 4 Myths About Delegating by Art Rainer
6. 6 Terrible Ways to Recruit Volunteers by Thom Rainer
7. 4 Types of People a Leader Should Not Listen to by Eric Geiger
8. Motivational Tips From People At The Top by William Vanderbloemen

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