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Leadership Illusions w/ Bill Hybels, Henry Cloud & Shauna Niequest

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leadership

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 13th 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 session with Bill Hybels, Henry Cloud and Shauna Niequest:

  • There is a blindspot in many leaders when it comes to self-reflection and hitting the pause button.

Illusion #1

  • You can increase speed in your life and simultaneously keep your soul heading in the same direction and same rate of your speed.
  • If God is pleased with your leadership, he gives you bigger problems to solve.
  • If we aren’t careful, as we increase speed, we lose touch with our soul. Our connection with God gets distant the faster we go.
  • To last in leadership, we must slow the speed periodically and raise the effort we put into our soul.
To last in leadership, we must slow the speed periodically and raise the effort we put into our soul. @BillHybels

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  • Reflection: Is the speed you run, is it sustainable? Does your soul need more attention?

Illusion #2

  • Part of what it takes to keep your head on straight is the power of the other.
  • The factor that drives everything in your leadership and life is who are you connected to?
The factor that drives everything in your leadership and life is who are you connected to? @DrHenryCloud

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  • Your brain stops working if you are not connected.

4 Corners of Connection

  1. No connection. You are alone.
  2. Bad connection. People are with you, but feel disconnected from your marriage, team or boss.
  3. Good connection. Corner #3 is a fake good, a pseudo good. It relieves the pain of isolation but we often connect with a substance that makes us feel good.
  4. Real connection. To connect with someone, you need to let someone know what your needs are. You must know your needs.

Reflection: What corner do you find yourself in most often? What prohibit you from getting to corner 4?

Illusion #3

  • Another illusion for a leader is achievement. We try to hit marks, attain things, grow something.
  • Everything is not an opportunity to succeed and fail.
  • Many leaders live in the place of exhaustion and isolation.

Reflection: How satisfied are you in life? Is the hustle worth it? Where are you not satisfied?

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Leaders Make Decisions Others Don’t

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leaders

While leadership is many things, vision casting, team building, strategic thinking, developing leaders, leadership can also be boiled down to one very important thing: decision making.

Now to be fair, all people, bosses, employees, volunteers, and pastors, make decisions in a church or organization. But one thing sets leaders apart: they make decisions others don’t.

Leaders are the ones who are faced with making decisions that will be unpopular, that will decide what is right and wrong in a church or organization, and that will affect others.

3 decisions leaders make that others don’t.

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Here are a few:

1. Vision decisions. It is the job of a leader to cast vision, to set direction for a preferred future. This is best done in teams, with the buy in of key leaders, but there are also times when a leader must say, “This is it; that is not it.” Vision divides, vision clarifies. Vision also unites. Vision says, “We’re going here, not there.” Vision says what the win is, which also means vision says what the loss is.

These can run up against “what has always been done”, what used to work, and sometimes what is still working but isn’t what needs to be done.

Vision also decides how resources are allocated, what money is spent on, what staff and volunteers are needed and not needed. This can be incredibly difficult.

Many people in leadership roles simply skip this. They don’t push to make a clarifying decision, which is still making a decision, but it is the one of least resistance.

2. Being willing to be unpopular. Ronald Heifetz says, “Exercising leadership might be best understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” This also means that as a leader, you must be willing to be unpopular with someone at some point. Now as a leader you don’t set out to make people mad or be a jerk (although some do), but sometimes that happens. It should never be a goal, though.

This means that to be a leader you must develop tough skin. You must develop clarity as to who you are, who you aren’t, where you want to go and where you don’t want to go. You must know which hills you will choose to die on, because you will die on those hills. Not every hill is worth dying on, but you must know which ones are.

Leaders know which hills are worth dying on.

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3. Decisions that affect others. The last thing that separates leaders is that they are willing to make decisions that affect not only themselves but others. These are the decisions that keep me up at night. Ones about hiring or firing, setting salaries, making budget decisions that will have an impact not only on the financial situation of someone else, but also their happiness if we stop doing something as a church that they love.

These are incredibly difficult, and too many pastors are unwilling to make these calls. They aren’t easy, but being a leader isn’t supposed to be easy.

These decisions, when taken together, are some of the things that make someone a leader. Are they willing to make decisions others are not willing to make?

3 decisions that set leaders apart.

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8 Thoughts on on Being a Dad on Father’s Day

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father's day

As today is Father’s Day, and now being a dad for over 10 years and a son for a lot longer than that, I thought I’d share some things about being a dad.

8 thoughts on Father’s Day.

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1. In our culture, being a man is difficult. I know that being a woman is incredibly difficult, and I’m not wading into a historical debate or sexism in our culture (which sadly still exists). The reason I say it is hard is because of a lack of clarity, which is also one reason why being a woman is hard (but that’s a different blog post).

Most people have no idea what a man actually is. Now with people choosing their gender identity, the lines are becoming even more blurry than they already are. This makes success as a father, husband, friend, brother and son that more difficult. Are men supposed to be tough or tender and cry a lot? Should they be hard workers and entrepreneurs or play video games until 4am? All of them at once? Which is it?

Being a man (and a woman) is difficult.

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2. Purity is really hard. I’m not just talking about sex here, but that’s part of it. Having a pure mind, a pure heart, pure motives as you pursue your dreams, those are all incredibly difficult. Sometimes this is because we are sinning, but other times it is because what we are pursuing is right, but it just doesn’t line up with what people around us think we should do.

3. Parenting is really hard. I know, parenting has always been hard. Throw in now raising kids with social media, exposure to porn at an early age, the gender conversation, and it is really hard. It is hard to keep kids focused on who they are, who God is while everything gets pulled in a different direction. On top of that, everyone has an opinion on every parenting topic: discipline, vaccines, schooling, sports, dating, and you often feel like a failure. I figure my kids will end up in a counselor’s office when they’re adults (I did). I just hope it isn’t that bad. Just writing that makes me feel like a failure of a dad, but you can judge.

4. Being a picture of God as a Father to my kids is scary. Going along with #3, I’m reminded on a daily basis that my kids are forming a picture of not only relationships with others but with God as they interact with me. Here’s a question every dad needs to keep in the front of his mind: What is it like on the other side of me? What emotions and feelings do people (my kids and spouse) have as they interact with me? As your kids grow up, that is what they will often feel from God.

Ask: What is it like on the other side of me?

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5. Dealing with your wounds is hard work. Depending on your upbringing, your wounds will be different than mine. But you have them, and they make an impact on your life today. I’ve talked before about mine, but if you don’t deal with yours, they will haunt your future. You have wounds, and they are impacting every relationship you have. They are impacting every interaction, everything you hear. But it is hard work. I want to leave what happened when I was 11 back in 1990 with Vanilla Ice. But I can’t, and neither can you.

If your past is not dealt with, it wreaks havoc on your life.

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6. Having friends is hard work. Let’s be honest, friends for most people are difficult. For men they seem to be a lot harder than I expected. In college hanging out was easy. In your 20’s, really easy. Now with jobs, mortgages, kids, marriage, moving across the country, being friends with people is hard. We expect people to keep up with our lives on social media but never really connect with them. I keep hearing from men in their 50’s and 60’s about how they have no close friends, and that is really scary to me. I asked a room full of young church planters recently how many of them had close friends, and in a room of a 100 just a few hands went up.

Having friends as a man is hard work.

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7. I’m astounded by my wife. Regularly when people hear we have five kids, the looks are often comical. Sometimes they say what is running through their heads, sometimes not. I always fill in the blanks if they don’t say it out loud, but they always stop in their tracks. They wonder how we ever sleep, have time for ourselves, not lose our minds, and it takes being intentional for all of that to happen. That’s why I’m simply blown away by Katie. Without her I wouldn’t be the father, husband, leader or man that I am. When church planters ask how Revolution got off the ground, my response is, “Besides God, my wife.” The way she rounds me out, holds our house together, pushes me, believes in me, deals with me, deals with our kids, it astounds me.

8. I’m hopeful about it all. We’re about to enter the teenage years in our house, and I’m hopeful. I love the relational beings my kids are becoming, the questions they are asking (even though we’re having the sex talks a lot earlier than I thought we would when I was a young parent), I love playing games with them and experiencing life. I also love that I have the privilege of raising five people who will make an impact on the world one day. That thought shapes my parenting every day. I get to be a part of the legacy they will leave.

As a parent, you’re part of the legacy your kids will leave.

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How to Prepare a Sermon

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sermon

I’m often asked by other pastors or church planters about how I prep a sermon. While these aren’t so much things you should do, these are things that are principles for me and shape how a sermon goes from nothing to something.

6 things that go into preparing a sermon.

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1. Plan ahead. My goal is to know 18 months in advance what I plan to preach on. This is crucial to my process. I’m a big believer that the Holy Spirit is just as likely to talk to me about a sermon 18 months before I preach it as He is the day before I preach it.

I start by getting away and praying through what am I learning right now, how God is challenging or convicting me personally, and if there is anything in that for my church or is it just for me. I also keep a list of questions I get asked by people in our church through emails and conversations and look to see if there are any common themes to them. During this time I also look back to see what we’ve preached on, what books we’ve covered, how long has it been since we preached through an Old Testament book or a gospel, and when was the last relationships series. I’ll ask leaders in our church about conversations they are having, questions they have, and books they think we should preach through.

One of the keys to a great sermon is planning ahead.

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Then I take all of these notes and pray over them, seeing what jumps out. I’ll read through certain books of the Bible to get a sense of what God might want to say to our church. After spending several weeks praying and thinking through this, I’ll share with our team what I’m thinking. At this point it is between penciled in and permanent marker.

We’ve changed series at the last minute and tossed something we had been planning to do for over a year. That happens, and you have to be flexible.

I’ll be honest; this step is by far the hardest part of sermon prep. It takes the most time and has the least amount of immediate payoff, which is why most guys don’t do it. I meet so many guys who are just week-to-week or month-to-month.

2. Research. Once I have a sermon outlined, meaning I create what passages I’ll do on which week, how I’ll break up a book of the Bible, I go to work on researching it. I’ll create a notebook in Evernote and then a notebook in that folder for each week of the series. When I come across an article, a podcast or a blog, I simply hit the shortcut button on my chrome bar and put it into the folder. This is incredibly helpful when you are preaching on a controversial topic like homosexuality. At this point I might read the article, but I’m just gathering things. This is one of the biggest advantages to planning ahead in preaching.

For example, in the summer of 2017 I’m planning to do a series on spiritual practices or disciplines. So right now I’m pulling stuff on how habits are formed, looking at spiritual disciplines and how to best communicate and practice things like reading your Bible, fixed hour prayer, silence and solitude, fasting, etc.

3. A few months out. At this point, I start reading books that cover some of the topics I’ll be preaching on. I started preaching through Romans in March 2016, and so towards the end of 2015 I began reading books by John Piper and others on the book of Romans and some of what is covered in the book.

4. The week of. The week of a sermon is what most people think of when they think about preparing a sermon. And while I spend about 20 hours a week on sermon prep, as you can see, it is not all dedicated to the current sermon.

On Monday morning I spend a couple of hours preparing my heart by listening to worship music, reading some soul reading (John Piper or someone who has been dead for centuries) and reading through the passage I’ll preach on. I write out what stands out, what God is saying to me through the passage, etc. I think the most powerful part of a sermon is when the pastor says, “And here’s how this passage has been working on me this week.”

Monday or Tuesday I’ll start working through commentaries. When I started out I would read 8 – 10 commentaries and gather so much information that I never used it all. Most commentaries say the same things. Go to www.bestcommentaries.com and buy the top ones. My favorites are the NICNT or NICOT, The Message series by John Stott and the NIV Application Commentary. I’ll veer from that depending on reviews, but those are typically the ones I use.

I’ll also pull up the Evernote folder at this point and look through it. What is helpful, what can I use, etc.

My goal is to have all of my sermon stuff largely done by Wednesday at noon. This gives our team time to edit what goes in the program, what is on the screen and to make sure our next steps stuff is all ready to go.

At this point the sermon isn’t done, but is cooking.

5. Saturday. Every week I make a playlist on Spotify of the songs that the band is going to be doing. On Saturday afternoon I’ll take a run, listen to that playlist and pray through my sermon, the people who will be there, the things on my heart. This is such a crucial time for me and what God is doing in my heart as I prepare.

6. Sunday morning. I try to be sitting at my computer by 5:30 on Sunday morning. This is a final time to prepare for the day. I look at my heart, confess sin, and listen to worship music, go over my notes and edit them down. I also do my best to memorize my intro and conclusion. How will I present the gospel? How will I lay out the challenge? While I try to not look at my notes, I want the beginning and the end to be as solid as possible.

Then like all pastors, I drive home on Sunday with things I wished I had said or said differently.

But then I get to do it all over again the next Sunday!

What you can learn from how one pastor prepares a sermon.

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The Most Important Trait for Success

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success

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.

This one thing separates the winners and losers in life.

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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.

The most important & overlooked trait of leadership.

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It fuels success.

The most important & overlooked trait for success.

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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.

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Why Your Spouse Doesn’t Listen to You

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spouse

It happens in all relationships. There are times when things are going great and communication seems effortless, and there are other times that communication feels like a boulder you are trying to push up the hill.

There are reasons for both the easy and great times and the difficult times. While we may think the effortless just magically happens, it doesn’t. The couples that communicate well do specific things and don’t do specific things.

What are they?

If I had to sum it up, I’d say there are five reasons (there may be more) that your spouse doesn’t listen to you or ignores you. While many people may read this and think of just one gender in a relationship, my guess is that in most marriages both people are doing these. Remember, if a relationship is struggling, it is because of both people. No one bears 100% of the blame. It’s the same in communication.

5 reasons your spouse ignores you.

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1. You nag them about the same thing. Have you ever heard someone say, “I feel like a broken record saying the same thing all the time?” That’s because you are, and you get tuned out. Many times if you nag someone enough, they’ll stop listening. Especially if you nag them about something, and when it doesn’t happen you do it yourself. Do you know what you’ve just told your spouse? If you don’t do it, I’ll eventually get around to it. I’ll be angry, ignore you, give you mean looks, but I’ll do it.

How many times should you say something to your spouse about doing something? It depends on what it is.

I would say that if you have to repeat yourself, the issue is not what you are repeating yourself about but that your spouse is not listening to you. Deal with that, not the garage being a mess or clothes being left out. That is no longer the issue; it’s just what revealed the issue.

2. You bottle up your feelings. One reason a spouse ignores the other is because one doesn’t express themselves. They can’t help but ignore you because you don’t say anything, you don’t share anything, you don’t let them in.

This is easy for me to do. I’m a mental processor, and Katie is a verbal processor. When I’m convicted about something, bothered by something or someone, I think on it. If I see an issue in my life or job that needs to be fixed, I think about it and work it out in my head. Katie is the opposite of that. This can lead to her not feeling like I let her into my life or share what is going on. I’ve had to learn to start processing things out loud, but she’s also had to learn to ask questions.

The sad thing is when couples think that whatever the issue is, it will be fixed by one person doing something. You are a couple. It will take both of you.

In the same way, if you are upset about something and your spouse asks you what is wrong, don’t say, “Nothing.” Or, “You should know.” Maybe they should know, but they don’t.

Many times one of the battles that women and men have has to do with women wanting to express their feelings about something and their husband wanting to fix it. A woman asked Katie once, “How did you get Josh to stop fixing things when you talk to him?” Katie chuckled and said, “Before I tell him something, I let him know my expectation. Do I want him to listen, give feedback or fix it. Then he does.”

I know what you’re thinking. I should just know, and so should your spouse. But they don’t, and I don’t. Yet we make it hard, almost playing games with our spouse, and then we wonder why they ignore us.

3. You talk about your marriage to all your friends instead of your spouse. Too many couples are venting to their friends instead of to their spouse. Now I think you should have a friend or friends that you confide in. Someone when you are at the end of your rope you can call and vent to. However, this friend should be a real friend and not a cheerleader in your corner for your cause. The worst thing you can say to your spouse in an argument is, “I was talking to ____ and they agree with me.” You just brought another person into your marriage, and now your spouse is playing defense.

These friends that you confide in, they need to challenge you and your sin. Yes, they can affirm that your spouse dropped the ball because that may be the case, but it wasn’t all their fault, no matter how much you think it is.

Talk to your spouse more than to your friends about your marriage.

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4. You feel like it is no use talking. This is when you stop trying. I’ll admit this is easy to do when marriage feels hard. It feels easier to not say anything, to not try. What’s the use? The moment you feel this coming on, that is a sign to press in. The moment you think about taking a break or pulling back, not saying something, that is when you need to push into the relationship.

5. You want peace more than intimacy. One of the reasons people don’t express themselves in a marriage is because peace is easier than intimacy.

A downfall in marriage: Peace is easier than intimacy.

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When any couple chooses peace over intimacy, they have chosen a lesser marriage. Is it easier in the moment? Yes, but in the long run it will suffer. This can come from legitimate fear of an argument, a fear of being rejected or something else. Often when peace is chosen over intimacy, it is because of something in our past that is still broken. Maybe you grew up with a shouter and you don’t want that, so you learned silence fends that off. But silence also doesn’t bring closeness in a relationship.

Ever feel like your spouse is ignoring you?

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Let me close with this. Often what your spouse is ignoring in a conversation is not the issue. You want to make it the issue, but it is only what is revealing the issue, that they ignore you. That you aren’t connecting to them when you talk. Focus on that.

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How to be a Better Communicator

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book

I watched the Preach Better Sermons conference yesterday. So much great stuff when it comes to preaching and growing as a communicator.

Here are some things I learned that are dynamite for preachers:

  • 90% of unchurched people choose a church based on the lead pastor & the preaching.

The First 5 Minutes of a Sermon – Jeff Henderson

  • If you don’t engage people in the first 5 minutes, it is very difficult to grab their attention again.
  • When you start a sermon, you have to assume the worst. You can’t assume that people are already are listening.
  • In the first 5 minutes, great communicators are shrinking the gap: the physical and emotional gap between the person speaking and the audience.
  • Connect with the audience first, then bring on the content.
  • Connection is the most important thing in the first 5 minutes, not content.
  • Communicate that you are there to help people, not impress them.
  • 5 tips for the first 5 minutes: be like able (smile), tell a story, create tension (make them wonder what the solution is), ask, “Have you ever felt like this?” (this creates understanding), and tease the solution (say, “there’s a way to get ahead in ____”).

Jud Wilhite

  • Preaching is a gift. Ask God to steward his gift in you.

The Pain of Preparation – Jeff Henderson

  • If we aren’t careful, we skimp on preparation.
  • If we don’t get ahead on our preparation, our preaching suffers and our church suffers.
  • The better you prepare, the better you preach.
  • Preparation starts with empathy. You have to be empathetic towards the people you are preaching to.
  • When you have empathy, it causes you to make sure you are prepared.
  • Questions to ask for preparation:
    1. What does my audience currently think about this topic? Where is the pain point?
    2. What do I want my audience to think about this topic?
    3. What is my single most persuasive idea?
    4. What do you want them to do?
  • Until you can say “because of that, this is what I want you to do” your sermon prep is not done.

Transformational Preaching – Derwin Gray

  • Consecrate yourself.
  • You preach out of the overflow of your time with God.
  • Always preach the good news. People need good news, not advice.
  • Be compelling and clear.
  • Too many pastors are not overwhelmed by Jesus so they look for other things to be compelling.
  • Preach convicting sermons.
  • At the end of the sermon, people should want to join Jesus’ cause.

Feedback:

  • What was working?
  • What could have made this better?

Crafting Memorable Phrases 

  • A sticky statement is one that someone can memorize and utilize in their life.
  • One sticky statement repeated several times.
  • Sticky statement is your big idea, it is your elevator pitch of your sermon.
  • Can people take your sermon and remember it?
  • To create sticky statements, you must P.R.E.A.C.H.
    • Give people a word picture.
    • Rhyming is key to a sticky statement.
    • Use an echo in your statement: Nobody expected no body.
    • Use alliteration (contrasting): your soul is more important than your stuff.
    • Contrast different things.
    • The hook is what makes it memorable and tells them what you want them to do.

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How to Pick Ministry Ideas

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ministry ideas

Pastors know this conversation.

Someone comes up to you and says, “Do you know what our church needs?” A ministry for _______.

Now, that blank is often a good idea. In fact, it might be a great idea. The one idea that is just waiting to take your church over the top.

What many people and pastors fail to realize, the person asking it doesn’t actually want that. They may think they want that or that they want to be a part of that, but they don’t.

When to say yes to something.

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Typically, when someone in a church says “we need a women’s ministry” or a class on finances or prayer or parenting, we need a group for empty nesters or college students, church leaders jump and start one up because “they don’t want to lose this influential person.”

Now, when this class or ministry starts, do you know who won’t be there?

That’s right.

The person in the original conversation.

Why?

When it comes to our spiritual growth we don’t know what we actually need. 

We often want what we think others have. We look at the end product of another church, another ministry but don’t ask, “What led them to start that? What need were they trying to reach? Does that need exist in our church or city? If it does, what is the best thing to reach it?”

We often get asked why we don’t have a women’s ministry or life stage groups at Revolution. The answer is, we think there’s a better way to reach our target in our city. There is nothing wrong with them, we just think the way they are usually done would hinder our goal as a church.

The other issue we don’t often think about is when a need is presented, it is simply in an effort to meet that need. This is good, but what leaders often fail to realize as they take in suggestions is they are tasked with seeing the whole field, the whole situation, while the person making a recommendation is not.

This isn’t bad, but before a leader goes ahead with an idea, they must stop to ask if it fits into what is already happening, the goal of a ministry or church.

Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it is no or wait.

So, when that new idea comes up, here are some criteria to take it through:

7 ways to know if now is the time to start something new or kill something old.

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  1. Does it reach our target as a church? Every church has a target whether they admit it or not. The target of your church, whether that is families, singles, students, empty nesters should drive many of the decisions of your church. Your target is who you are best situated to reach and who God has called you to reach. You want to reach everybody, but are best suited to reach certain people in your city. Who that target is will determine the ministries and ideas you run with as a church.
  2. Does the answer to question 1 matter? Sometimes the answer to question 1 doesn’t matter. God is calling you, your church or team to move forward with an idea that your target doesn’t matter. This won’t happen a lot, but I wanted to put this in there.
  3. Can we afford to do it? Do you have the structure, the bandwidth, the finances to make something happen.
  4. Can we afford not to do it? If you don’t do something, what happens? Not enough pastors list out what happens if they say no or not yet. Often, we live in fear of people, losing people, making someone angry and never list out, “What really happens if we say no?” Often, saying no will not mean the world ends.
  5. Is now the time to do this? Just because an idea is good or great does not mean now is the time to do it. Church planters often feel this tension as the larger church down the road can do a lot more than they can. That’s okay, let them.
  6. If we do this, will it hurt something else we do? Many times, we unknowingly undermine something that we are already doing by doing something else. This is why we don’t do a women’s ministry at Revolution, because of what unintentionally happens in a church when one is going.
  7. Can we be great at doing it? Too many churches do too much because that’s what churches do instead of asking, if we do this, will we be great at it? Can we do this better than someone else? Don’t just do concerts, Awana or classes to have them. Be great at the things you do. This will mean, you will do less.

The reality when this conversation happens is the person who says, “We should do ____” wants to see their church be great, healthy and reach more people. You as a leader though are held accountable for knowing when the time is right to say yes.

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When a Woman Struggles with “A man’s problem”

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On Sunday as part of our You & Me series, I talked about porn and sexual addiction and how it breaks intimacy in our relationships and ultimately harms us. Following the sermon, Katie and I did a live Q&A, which you can watch here as part of the sermon.

I love the willingness of our church to ask hard questions and I love that we get to be a part of helping people find freedom from sin.

One of the questions that came in asked: What if you’re a woman struggling with a sex addiction?…all the support seems to be for men struggling with sex addiction – who helps you if every time you hear about men’s struggles w/ sex you know you have the same problem? It’s incredibly isolating to be a woman struggling with “a man’s problem.”

Hope for women who struggle with porn.

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While we responded to that question in the Q&A, I asked one of our leaders, Ciara Hull, if she could speak to that struggle from her story and she has graciously said yes. Below is her answer and story, which I hope, if you are a woman struggling with this, you will find this as a first step towards freedom.

When I heard these words from a live Q & A in Sunday’s sermon at our church, they echoed in my heart. I heard the plea, the pain, the shame, the desire for freedom behind those words. I don’t know this woman, but I share her secret. My earliest memory is of finding my dad’s Playboy magazine. That day changed the course of my life, it started a 22 year addiction to porn. It opened the door for early abuse, for wrong ideas about sex, intimacy and general confusion about how to relate to others. Sex became something that was a secret obsession. No one knew. But then it wasn’t enough and I had to push the boundaries. The term the industry uses is “experimenting”. Our culture calls it curiosity and encourages us to “explore”. But what happens when that’s not enough? How far do you go? How do you stop? Who do you go to for help? What are other people going to think? Ok, really what are other women going to think?

Hope for a woman struggling with a porn addiction.

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This shouldn’t be a problem for a woman. After all we are the ones being used as objects in porn. You begin to wonder does anyone else have this problem? Do they feel this embarrassed? Can I ever find freedom? These are all the questions I could feel unspoken in this one woman’s question. These are the fears that haunted me everyday.

But I’m here to say there is freedom! There is healing. There is change. There is redemption. Galatians 5:1 says “For freedom Christ has set you free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”

I remember the day those words struck a chord in my heart. The day God got a hold of me. We are set free in order to have freedom! Seems like a no-brainer, but if you are a slave do you know what freedom feels like? Having a sex addiction is slavery. You are bound to your next fix and the high is always short lived. So how does freedom come? How do you go on to have a healthy sex life with your spouse?

Here are some of the things that have helped on my journey to freedom:

7 steps to freedom if you are a woman struggling with porn or sexual addiction.

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  1. Recognize the truth that Christ paid the price to free you. Develop this relationship with Him. Dive into His Word daily to see what He says about Himself, about you and about living free.

  2. Know you aren’t alone. There is an increase in women acknowledging they are addicted and are seeking professional help. It isn’t just a man’s problem anymore. You may feel you are the only woman on the planet that is like this, but you aren’t.

  3. Identify when the most likely times are for your addiction to happen. When you are bored? Stressed? Suppose to be studying? What is your pattern? Once I figured out mine I could create systems to change the pattern. For example I could study at Starbucks instead of my living room.

  4. Reach out to a trusted female mentor. If she hasn’t had the same struggle she may know someone who has that she can connect you with. At the very least she is probably willing to help with accountability. This could be a leader in your church, it could be a professional counselor, it could even be an addiction group.

  5. Figure out your triggers and work to avoid them. For me this means there are a lot of movies I don’t choose to watch anymore. There are high filters set on our home firewall to not allow access to certain sites on the internet. There are also clothing magazines I had to call and request them to stop sending me – if they still come in junk mail I put them in the recycle bin before I go back inside. Just like a man I had to train my eyes for purity.

  6. If you are married, you need to share it with your spouse. In order to work towards unity this is not a burden you can carry on your own, you can navigate it together. If you are single, you should prepare one day to share with a potential finance what your struggles have been and how it may affect your intimacy.

  7. Pray constantly. Just like any other addict I have to choose to fight everyday. I’m constantly talking to God to help me not recall a certain memory and to help me find healing.

My hope is that the one woman from Sunday reads this and is encouraged to fight. Please know I’m praying for you.

Porn is not just “a man’s problem.”

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