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Trial in the Wilderness

March 19, 2013 by 1 Comment

in the wildernress logo

 

 

 

 

Trial in the Wilderness
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
March 17/18, 2013
Numbers

 

Peace Friends!

Leading Sycamore Creek Church has pushed me into becoming more of a risk taker, but I am not by nature much of a risk taker.  When I have succeeded, it has not been by taking risks, but by working hard and persevering.

The official Methodist statement on gambling is that it is a menace to society and destructive of good government, but my dad wasn’t a Methodist so when we were growing up he took us to the horse track on vacation and gave each of us $20 to bet on the races throughout the day.  My brother would bet on the long shots.  He got lucky and won once.  But he lost it all the next race.  On the other hand, I would make the safest bet you could make.  I’d bet on the for-sure horses.  I’d not only bet on the for-sure horses, I’d bet that they would place (get 1st, 2nd or 3rd).  I walked away that day having won seven of ten races and with $25 in my pocket!  I was no risk taker.

I suspect many of you are like me.  Many of you run into this problem on a regular basis: the unknown trial is worse than the known trial.  You’d rather stick with what you know than venture out and risk something that you don’t know.

We’re in a series called In the Wilderness, and we’re looking at the book of Numbers in the Bible.  “Numbers” is the English name for this book, but “In the Wilderness” (or “bu-med-bar”) is the Hebrew name for the book.  The book of Numbers or In the Wilderness is the story of the Hebrew people who have come out of slavery in Egypt and are wandering around in the wilderness for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.  By the end of the book, there are only two people, Joshua and Caleb, who are left who were present at the beginning of the book.  This is due entirely to their own proclivity to choose the known trial (the wilderness) over the unknown trial (conquering the giants in the Promised Land).

We as a church are in a wilderness of sorts.  Like the Hebrew People we do not have a solid home.  In the wilderness, the Hebrew people set up and tore down a tent whenever they wanted to worship.  The tent was called the tabernacle.  Like the Hebrew people, we set up and tear down our tabernacle every week.  The Hebrew people wandered in the wilderness for forty years.  We have been wandering for twelve years.  I liken our experience to this: it’s like we have been car-camping for twelve years in the same campground at the same campsite every Sunday morning for six hours.

There are naturally some things we have struggled with.

  • How to staff set-up and tear down crews.
  • How to keep these crews motivated.
  • How to navigate shared equipment/technology/space with Lansing Christian School.
  • How to improvise when things break down.
  • How to turn a cafetorium into a “tabernacle” for worship.
  • How to explain where we’re at.  “We meet at Lansing Christian School.” Blank stare.  “It’s near Jolly & Dunkel.”  Blank stare.  “By Trinity Church.”  Light bulb goes on.
  • How to deal with the impression that we worship at our office.
  • How to decide what’s next?

If you’re a guest here this morning I want you to know something: we do all this to serve you!  I was recently asking our volunteers why they do this.  I got answers all over the board.  Some people have been volunteering for twelve years because they feel like they worship better when they’re serving.  Others volunteer because they feel compelled or called to do so.  Others volunteer because it builds community.  All of us volunteer to serve the guest.  We are fiercely focused on the guest among us.  We get up early on Sunday morning and we persevere in the wilderness of not having our own space so that we can create an environment where you can encounter God!  And yet in the midst of this unified motivation, there are still struggles and trials.  What I want to do is look at the trials and struggles that the Hebrew people encountered while they wandered in the wilderness and see if there is anything we can learn as a community about what God is up to in our own “in the wilderness” time.

1. The wilderness is a time when leaders lead and work is shared.

Numbers 11:24-25 NLT
Moses went out and reported the LORD’s words to the people. Then he gathered the seventy leaders and stationed them around the Tabernacle.And the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to Moses. He took some of the Spirit that was upon Moses and put it upon the seventy leaders. They prophesied as the Spirit rested upon them, but that was the only time this happened.

Moses is the primary leader of the Hebrew people.  God has a very special relationship with Moses.  We’re told that God speaks to Moses “face to face” “like a friend.”  It seems that in most churches, God does not give vision to a committee but gives vision to a leader.  God calls and equips a leader with a vision for where this community can and will go.  This is not to say that the leader lords it over everyone or that leadership is not shared in many ways.  We see in the passage above that God shared the Spirit of leadership with many others so that Moses didn’t burn out.  The work of leadership is shared.

Here’s how this tends to work in our church.  When I came to SCC, I was given a job description that included the expectation that I would be a vision seeker and vision caster amongst us.  I seek God’s vision in several ways.  I spend time daily in prayer and scripture reading.  I take spiritual retreats of silence and solitude regularly.  I listen to other church leaders about what God is doing in their churches.  I read continually across all kinds of disciplines to learn about our culture and to ponder how God might be at work in our culture.  I go to conferences for church leaders.  And I listen to all of you.  In each of these ways I’m seeking out God’s vision.

What usually happens for me is when I am not looking for it, an idea or image forms in my mind that quickly forces its way to the surface and brings together all of the different conversations I’ve had.  I usually write it down and then bring it to the rest of our leadership.  If they think this is God’s vision for us, then we bring it to a vision meeting and present it to you.  We are testing the vision at these vision meetings.  The testing of these visions usually goes beyond the actual meeting.  It continues on in informal ways through email, face to face conversations, in small groups, and the like.  The next time the leadership meets, we ask the question: what are you hearing Sycamore Creek Church say about this vision?  We make a discernment call at that point about whether this is God’s vision for us that we’re ready to move on or whether it is best to wait.  In this way, God’s vision comes to a leader, is shared with other leaders, is tested among the community, and then finally acted upon by the leadership.

But it’s not only the work of leadership that is shared.  All the work is shared.  Listen to how the work of setting up and tearing down the tabernacle was shared:

Numbers 3:8, 25-26, 31, 36-37 NLT
The Levites will also maintain all the furnishings of the sacred tent,serving in the Tabernacle on behalf of all the Israelites… The Gershonite clans were responsible to care for the tent of the Tabernacle with its layers of coverings, its entry curtains,  the curtains of the courtyard that surrounded the Tabernacle and altar, the curtain at the courtyard entrance, the cords, and all the equipment related to their use…The Kohathite clans were responsible for the care of the Ark, the table, the lampstand, the altars, the various utensils used in the sanctuary, the inner curtain, and all the equipment related to their use…The Merarite clans were responsible for the care of the frames supporting the Tabernacle, the crossbars, the pillars, the bases, and all the equipment related to their use. They were also responsible for the posts of the courtyard and all their bases, pegs, and cords.

The Levites did some of the work.  The Gershonites did other parts of the work.  The Kohathites and Merarites took up the rest.  It wasn’t just one group that was doing the work.  It was shared.  As they say, “Many hands makes light work.”  Many hands also brings shared ownership.  “This is my tabernacle,” everyone can say.

We have an above average percentage of people who help make Sycamore Creek Church worship happen every Sunday and Monday, but there is still room to improve.  I’ve contemplated dividing all those who call this their home into groups and assigning them a day for set-up and tear-down each month!  What do you think of that idea?  In the wilderness, we all have to share the work.

2. The wilderness is a time where we are regularly tempted to complain and criticize.

Lately, I’ve done a lot of reading around what makes a marriage healthy.  I’ve found out that psychologists have pinpointed four behaviors that are predictive of a marriage falling apart.  One psychologist calls them the “four horsemen.”  Criticism is one of the “four horsemen” that predicts divorce: Criticism, Defensiveness, Stonewalling, and Contempt.  If criticism is a behavior that tears apart the community of marriage, it is also a behavior that tears apart the community of the church.  In the book of Numbers, we read over and over about the criticism and complaining that happens:

Numbers 11:1 – Now when the people complained in the hearing of the LORD…

Numbers 12:1 – Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses…

Numbers 14:2-5 – And all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron…

Numbers 16:1-3 – Now Korah…along with Dathan and Abiram…and On…took two hundred fifty Israelite men…and they confronted Moses. They assembled against Moses and against Aaron…

Numbers 16:41 – On the next day, however, the whole congregation of the Israelites rebelled against Moses and against Aaron…

Numbers 20:2-3 – So they gathered together against Moses and against Aaron. The people quarreled with Moses…

The people and the leadership seem to be continually butting heads with one another.  But that’s not all the complaining going on.  Moses complains to God!

Numbers 11:11-15 NLT – And Moses said to the LORD, “Why are you treating me, your servant, so miserably? What did I do to deserve the burden of a people like this?  Are they my children? Am I their father? Is that why you have told me to carry them in my arms — like a nurse carries a baby — to the land you swore to give their ancestors?  Where am I supposed to get meat for all these people? They keep complaining and saying, ‘Give us meat!’  I can’t carry all these people by myself! The load is far too heavy!  I’d rather you killed me than treat me like this. Please spare me this misery!”

In the wilderness I want you to role-renegotiate rather than criticize.  Go talk to the person or leader who you have a complaint with and calmly share your broken expectation.  Healthy marriages or churches aren’t made by holding in complaints; they’re made by knowing how to express them in healthy ways.  I was reading recently about the characteristics of poor performing teams: they argue a lot.  I was also reading about the characteristics of high performing teams: they argue a lot.  It’s not the disagreement that is the problem; it’s the manner in which you go about arguing.  The healthy way to express your broken expectations is to share it gently but have the humility to recognize that your expectations may be part of the problem!

3. The wilderness is a time when following God is a day-by-day process.

In the wilderness you have to pay attention daily to what God is doing.  You have to be ready to move when God moves.  The way this worked for the Hebrew people was that God would hover over the tabernacle in a cloud.  When the cloud stayed, they stayed.  When the cloud moved, they moved.  You had to pay attention to the cloud daily.

Numbers 9:20-21 NLT
Sometimes the cloud would stay over the Tabernacle for only a few days, so the people would stay for only a few days. Then at the LORD’s command they would break camp.  Sometimes the cloud stayed only overnight and moved on the next morning. But day or night, when the cloud lifted, the people broke camp and followed.

Friends, something I have learned as we’ve begun looking for a building we can call home is that it is a day by day process.  We find one door open one day and we walk through it.  All looks good, but then it shuts.  We find another door open another day.  All looks good, but then it shuts.  We’ve seriously looked at three different buildings or properties.  All of them looked like they might work, but then didn’t end up working because of cost, zoning regulations, or parking issues.  It has been a bit of a maddening process.  But I suspect that some day the cloud of God’s Spirit is going to rise up off of Lansing Christian School and settle somewhere else, and things are going to happen very quickly.  That’s somewhat just the nature of real estate.  We’re not sure whether that will be buying a building or finding a new place to rent that has the right location and is at the right price, and is a place where we can set up and stay set up.

The reason that the Hebrew people spent forty years in the wilderness and only two of them lived to see the Promised Land is because they missed following God.  They sent scouts into the land and came back with discouraging news about the obstacles.

Numbers 13:32-33
So they spread discouraging reports about the land among the Israelites: “The land we explored will swallow up any who go to live there. All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak. We felt like grasshoppers next to them, and that’s what we looked like to them!”

There are two problems here:

1. Lack of vision – They didn’t see the goodness of God’s promise.
2. Focused on obstacles – Saw only the hurdles of the people in the land.

Friends, when God moves I want to be ready to have the vision to see it.  I want to be able to trust the goodness of God.  And when there are obstacles that are in the way, and there are many. We’ve run one capital campaign and will have $150,000 at the end of this  year if all the pledges come in.  We will likely have to run another one.  We’re an awkward size church.  Some church growth specialists call us a “transitional size church.”  We’re not really small, but we’re not really big.  So we are in need of programs, staff, and facilities all at the same time.  But the vision is even bigger: seven satellites in seven venues on seven days of the week to reach as many new people as possible with the love of God that transforms lives and our world!   I want as your leader to have the ability to see the vision through the obstacles.  I’m still growing.  We’re still growing.  We’re still being tested in the wilderness.  As Thomas Dozeman, an Old Testament Scholar says, “The test is whether Israel is able to live the life of faith outside the promised land” (Dozeman, 16).

And that brings us to the point of this whole message: Trust God’s provision for the future and move forward boldly!

Filed Under: Manuscripts Tagged With: , , , ,

Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn

January 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Sticky TeamsSticky Teams
by Larry Osborne
Rating: 8 of 10

Larry Osborn suggests that unity of the leadership team is the most fundamental leadership task that a pastor has to accomplish.  To this end he gives the church leader a very practical resource for how to develop a unified and thriving church leadership team.

There are many practical suggestions I found helpful in this book, but one that really “stuck” to me was the difference between lobbying and continuing education.  Osborn points out that if there is not an ongoing continuing education program for a leadership team, then any educational pieces given in the moment of decision-making will come across as lobbying and are likely to be received with skepticism.  To accomplish this kind of continuing education, he suggests that a leadership team needs to meet more often, perhaps twice a month, with one meeting being devoted entirely to continuing education.

[Read more…]

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Five things to stop doing in 2012

January 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Call & Response

Sometimes things are better said in the negative. Have you ever tried to rephrase the Ten Commandments in the positive? It’s not quite so easy, and something gets lost. Marcus Buckingham wrote about the one key to success in his book, “The One Thing”: find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it. So in the spirit of Buckingham, here’s my list of five things I’m going to stop doing in 2012.

Read more…

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Direct Hit by Paul Borden

December 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Direct HitDirect Hit
By Paul Borden
Rating: 7 of 10

Direct Hit is the second book in a series of books that pastors and laity are reading together in the Vital Church Initiative of the West Michigan Conference and Lansing District.  Borden outlines what he sees as the essentials for turning churches around from dying to thriving.  Borden, an American Baptist, is the original architect of the system that is being put in place for the Vital Church Initiative although it is being adapted to fit the United Methodist Church.

There are many ideas in this book that jumped out at me.  First, Borden highlights just how much visioning time is given to the pastor.  He points out that pastors are given twenty to thirty minutes every week to speak vision into the life of a community.  People come expecting to hear it.  Even beyond this time there are board meetings, staff meetings, and one-on-one meetings.  He asks pastors to consider how effective and strategic they’re being at using that time wisely.  I’ve begun to notice how there is a time before worship every week when my morning volunteers gather to walk through the morning and how ripe this time is for casting vision.  I have begun to use it as such.

Second, Borden points out the importance of the pastor creating a healthy sense of urgency.  My own personality and worldview tends away from alarmism, but Borden has convicted me to insert a little more alarm into my visioning time.  At the same time, Borden uses so much militaristic language in this book that I wouldn’t mind if he turned down a bit his own urgency dial.

Third, Borden introduces George Bullard’s lifecycles of a church. It begins with birth where vision is high and ends with death where maintenance is all that is left.  In between are varying times of emphasizing relationships and programs.  A healthy community needs to cycle back to the beginning and be reborn every five to seven years.  I’ve been using this idea lately during my pre-worship team meetings to help insert a sense of urgency in our church’s culture.  People may disagree with where we are at in this cycle, but everyone understands that for us to remain thriving as we head into the future, we must recreate ourselves with new vision.

Fourth, Borden outlines the process that is being used for the Vital Church Initiative.  This process has been most effectively adapted and used in the Missouri Conference of The United Methodist Church.  The West Michigan Conference is learning it from Missouri.  It includes a year of reading books together, a time of evaluation by an outside consultant, the creation of a prescription for vitality, a vote by the church, and the assignment of a coach if the church votes to adopt the prescription for vitality.  This process may be the most effective I have seen at making a significant amount of change in a relatively short period of time.

Currently Reading/Listening
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Shaped By God’s Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches by Milfred Minatrea

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Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performance from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin

November 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Talent Is OverratedTalent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performance from Everybody Else
By Geoff Colvin
Rating: 8 of 10

Colvin, Fortune Magazine’s Senior Editor-at-Large, argues in Talent is Overrated that if there is an in-born talent in geniuses and high-performers, it has not yet been found, and an easier explanation for world-class performance is a very long process of deliberate practice.

Colvin explores several different case studies, but let’s review just one: Mozart, an assumed musical genius.  Mozart was born to a father who was a famous composer and performer, but even more important his father was an expert in musical pedagogy (the art of teaching a subject or discipline).  Mozart’s early compositions are not in his own hand.  His father exercised editorial control over his son’s work and had a keen sense for marketing Mozart.  His compositions during his teenage years are mostly adaptations of other works, a common strategy for teaching composition.  Colvin notes that none of these early works are today considered masterpieces, and Mozart’s first masterpiece didn’t come until the age of twenty-one, after eighteen years of “extremely hard, expert training.”  Colvin adds that Mozart’s supposed claim to see or hear an “almost finished and complete” work in his mind comes from a letter that scholars now consider a forgery.  Based on today’s “precocity index,” a score that describes how fast a “child-prodigy” progresses, Mozart was at a mere 130%, 30% faster than the average student; whereas with the help of today’s training methods, children reach 300-500%.   According to Colvin, Mozart was good, but not as good as we might imagine.  He goes on to explore in similar ways Tiger Woods, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett among others.

In two key chapters titled “What Deliberate Practice Is and Isn’t” and “How Deliberate Practice Works,” Colvin outlines the path to exceptional performance through deliberate practice.  Here are the key points:

  1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance.  It is designed not by the individual doing the practice (unless they have reached the highest levels of performance and are themselves an expert) but by someone who is an expert on the huge field of knowledge that surrounds any given discipline and can pinpoint specific activities of practice in the “learning zone.”  Mozart’s father’s expertise in musical pedagogy is an example.  Or to put it more simply, who is your expert coach?
  2. Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot.  This repetition isn’t just doing the same thing over and over.  It’s doing a particularly hard specific activity pinpointed by a coach in the “learning zone” over and over.
  3. Feedback on results is continuously available.  Measurement is key.  Seeing whether you are accomplishing what you are aiming to accomplish is essential.
  4. Deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally.  This is the difference between mindless practice of easy things and deliberate focus on the tasks that are difficult and mentally challenging.
  5. Deliberate practice isn’t much fun.  Practice, get feedback, and look at what isn’t going well.  Then repeat the aspect that isn’t going well again and again until it is done right.  This kind of practice is focused on what you probably don’t like doing.

Those who engage in deliberate practice end up with several new skills:

  1. They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.
  2. They look further ahead.
  3. They know more from seeing less.
  4. They make finer discriminations than average performers.

Throughout the whole book Colvin points out just how much time deliberate practice takes.  Therefore, if someone wants to be a top-level performer, but only makes that decision later in life, the obstacles are almost insurmountable to have the time to achieve top-level performance.  Their peers who began as children are already thousands of hours ahead of them.  Perhaps this fits well with an idea that Marcus Buckingham, another well-known business consultant, often makes: it is unlikely that we will improve our weakness so we ought to focus instead on our strengths (See The One Thing You Need to Know which makes the argument that they key to sustained success is to find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it!).

The most obvious application for pastors is in the weekly sermon.  Having an expert communication coach would improve a pastor’s communication skills significantly.  Another idea might be repeating over and over (until “mental exhaustion” as Colvin suggests) one or two parts of the sermon that you really wanted to communicate well instead of the sermon as a whole.  Some less obvious applications would be having an overall leadership coach (Path1 provides just such coaches).  Running through team meeting agendas ahead of time with a coach could be a way of practicing deliberately.

Because I am reviewing this book for our New Church Committee I’d also like to make some observations about how Colvin’s ideas might help us in our big-picture strategy to plant churches and in a new church pastor’s individual strategy to plant a specific church.

New Church Committee

  1. Who is our expert coach giving us continual feedback on our church-planting process?  Our committee has attended the School for Congregational Development, but maybe it would be worth investing in a coach for the committee or the committee chair.
  2. Our own process of planting a church is much slower so how can we take a particular part of the process and repeat it a lot?  We could do that by choosing a particular part of the process and then sitting in on several other conferences’ moments of performing that part of the process (i.e. watch other conferences evaluate prospective candidates).
  3. Benchmarks will be key to continual feedback on results.
  4. For us to do this well, it will be mentally challenging.  Our commitment to planting churches can’t be a side commitment.  It will have to be a full commitment of body, mind, and spirit.  Perhaps members of the committee need to make sure they protect their time commitments so that they have plenty of energy to devote to this mentally challenging task (i.e. being available to attend things like SCD, Church Planting 101, etc.).
  5. We’ve just gone through a couple of processes that weren’t very much fun.  Colvin’s admonition that deliberate practice isn’t much fun should encourage us.  We worked on some areas that we were failing.  That’s part of learning how to do church planting well.

New Church Pastor

  1. An effective new church pastor is probably going to be one that has grown up practicing specific skills that are required to plant a new church.  It is unlikely, according to Colvin, that you can start late in life at acquiring the necessary skills and be very successful at what you are attempting.  This might mean that they grew up or have spent significant time in the culture of a new church.  It also might mean that they have a record of growing or planting churches in the past (or as we have heard over and over again in various settings – a record of having the creativity to start all kinds of new things).
  2. For those who began early, having an expert coach who directs them in specific practices will be key to the success of their church plant.  This coach must be an expert in the field and perhaps even more so, an expert in the pedagogy of coaching and training new church pastors.
  3. Introducing future potential pastors (middle and high school students) and young new pastors early on in their calling to new church ideas and skills will yield more “high-performers” later in life.  Could we create a new church academy specifically for this population or invite middle and high school students to attend a new church academy?

Questions and Conclusion

I have several questions that I must ask about how to integrate Colvin’s ideas with various Christian beliefs.  Over and over again he takes shots at the “divine gift” idea of talent.  Colvin’s ideas are based in research and science.  If excellent performance is mostly the result of a natural training process, then how are we to understand spiritual gifts?  Are spiritual gifts divine aptitudes given by God or are they “divine” results of a lifetime of training?  Our Wesleyan theology of sanctification suggests that we grow both naturally and supernaturally through a process of training the mind and body in certain habits and practices that are means of God’s grace working in our lives.  Are Colvin’s ideas simply an extension of the “natural” side of our theology of sanctification, or do they lack something vital because they discount the idea that God can supernaturally give gifts to specific people whether they have had the right amount of practice or not?  I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I think they are questions we must wrestle with if we are to fully embrace Colvin’s ideas and methodology.

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After Relevance

November 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Call & Response

I was wandering around Faith & Leadership checking out articles the other day. Timothy Larsen’s article “More Relevant Than Thou,” which he wrote earlier this year, caught my attention, because I had just had a heated discussion with a colleague about the word “relevant.” I’m the second pastor of a ten-year-old UMC church plant and we’re supposed to be relevant, but the word sounds so cliché to my ears. Every hip new church today and even some old stodgy ones advertise that they are relevant.

Read more…

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Recreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age By Richard L. Hamm

November 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Recreating the ChurchRecreating the Church: Leadership for the Postmodern Age
By Richard L. Hamm
Library
Rating: 8 of 10

Recreating the Church is the first book assigned for the West Michigan Conference’s Vital Church Initiative (VCI) pilot project.  VCI is an attempt to adapt what has been successful in the Missouri conference at stopping decline in church attendance.  The basic structure of VCI includes two phases each lasting about one year.  Phase one includes a group of pastors and another group of laity (non-pastors) from the same church reading a series of books and meeting for training and mutual accountability.  Phase two begins with a church-wide consultation resulting in a prescription for change and vitality.  The prescription is either adopted or rejected by the church.  If it is adopted the church is assigned a coach to help implement the changes.  It’s a pretty simple design, and I am excited at the potential for it in our conference and also in our church.  Hamm provides the pastors and laity involved in VCI a very helpful and broad overview of why and how things must change in this postmodern age.

Hamm offers 1968 as the pivotal year where things start going downhill for most mainline denominations.  Hamm is not a United Methodist, but it is worth noting that 1968 was the year that the United Methodist Church was born in the merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren.  Perhaps that year we were busy rearranging chairs on the sinking titanic.  Hamm points out that today mainline denominations have “lost even the appearance of success.”  We are too busy trying to survive by maintaining a dying system.  We must seek not just technical change to the system (replacing one leader or structure with another), but adaptive change of the entire system itself (rethinking our method completely).

There is too much in the book to summarize it all, so I will focus on one point that Hamm makes that I found particularly helpful.  I often hear an argument that goes something like this: our call in life is to be faithful and let God deal with the growth or decline.  This argument is persuasive because it has a kernel of truth in it.  But Hamm points out the problem in this argument over the past fifty years.  The entire paragraph is worth quoting:

A fourth reason [that mainline leaders did not notice the shift from modern leadership to postmodern leadership], found among some mainline church leaders, was an attitude that viewed the decreases as a sign that the denominations were paying the “price of faithfulness.”  That is, some mainline church leaders and governing bodies (especially in national settings) had taken unpopular stands in regard to such issues as racism and the Vietnam War, and so some concluded that a lot of contributing members just couldn’t take the “heat” of the “truth.”  This was a self-serving, but understandable interpretation.  If we had done statistical analyses of who was still attending, however, we would have found that the losses were primarily among the young, not the old (who were the primary contributors and would have been more likely to leave than would the young when traditional values were challenged).

Ouch!  I hear the same argument today around issues like homosexuality and politics and religion.  Hamm’s insightful analysis of what has taken place in the past fifty years suggests that today something bigger is going on with the continued decline of mainline denominations than just “taking the heat” for progressive stances on divisive issues.  (This is not to suggest that mainline denominations ought not to take “progressive” stances on these issues, but that we ought not to use those stances as an excuse or justification for decline.)

One solution Hamm suggests is that leadership teams must become smaller and less “representative.”  He doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be diverse, but that they shouldn’t necessarily be made up of a representative from every ministry in the denomination or church.  That approach tends to lead to territorialism rather than broad dynamic leadership of the church as a whole.  I’m glad to say that our Annual Conference passed legislation last year that accomplished just that.  We are beginning to see the fruit of that smaller leadership team as our Annual Conference begins to focus its strategy around ministries like the Vital Church Initiative.  Hamm helps us to continue to see the way forward.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Original Sin:  A Sally Sin Adventure by Beth McMullen
Pompeii (A Novel) by Robert Harris
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris

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Leading with the Heart by Coach K

May 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Leading with the HeartLeading with the Heart
By Mike Krzyzewski
Audio Book
Library (CD)
Rating: 6 of 10

I’m not sure I know what it means to “lead with the heart” after reading Coach K’s leadership book, Leading with the Heart.  This may be a casualty of listening to the book rather than reading it in print, or not.  While Coach K is an incredible basketball coach, and pastors and leaders have much to learn from him, I don’t know that Coach K really provided a consistent and solid thesis of leadership throughout the book.  Occasionally he would say something about leadership and then add, “I led my team/player/staff with the heart.”

If I had to give the idea of “leading with the heart” a summary after reading the book, I would say that it means doing what you are inspired to do at any given moment whether you’ve done it before or not.  This doesn’t mean that Coach K doesn’t have some traditions or rituals or rhythms in his coaching, but there are times when he throws those to the side and “leads with his heart.”  While this was the basic idea of the book, I found the description of his regular habits much more appealing and inspiring.  Maybe one needs to apprentice under Coach K’s usual disciplines before one is ready to “lead with the heart.”  Some of those regular habits that I’ve begun to introduce include three things: learning, focus, and variation.

Coach K has a nice little aphorism about learning: “You hear, you forget.  You see, you remember.  You do, you understand.”  I have found this maxim very helpful in preparing sermons and worship. As I come to the end of putting together a sermon or worship service, I ask myself, “Have I only given people something to hear?”  If the answer to that question is “yes” then I know I need to go back through the sermon and add something for them to see (a prop, image, etc.) and something to do (a next step, an interactive experience, etc.).  I don’t want people to come away from a sermon or a worship service forgetting what they’ve heard.  I want them to remember and understand.  Of course I also want them to be formed in such a way that their lives naturally live it out, but remembering and understanding can be two good steps toward that end.

Coach K also has what his family calls “the F word.”  If you call on game day and one of his family members picks up the phone, you’ll be told that the coach is focused on the game.  He won’t take the call unless it has to do with the game.  How often do I focus like that?  I’m reminded of the time that Jesus was on the mountain by himself while everyone was frantically looking for him (Mark 1:35-36).  He was focused praying.  But what about other times of focus?  Do I let email distract my focus from what really counts?  After reading parts of Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week, I’ve been trying to read my email only twice a day rather than let it distract me from the really important stuff I have to accomplish for the day.  Coach K’s habits of focus on game day also encourage me to remain focused in preparation for worship.  Worship is not a “game”, but it is a key event in the community’s life together, and it demands the best focus I can give it.  I do my best to come focused on Sunday morning to listen to the Spirit, engage people’s lives, lead a team of worshiper leaders, and give a message that speaks God’s word into their lives.

Lastly, Coach K’s habits of variation have inspired me in a very practical way.  Coach K never delivers lessons or teaching moments in the same place.  He always moves around the court and stadium.  Sometimes he pulls the team together at center court, sometimes under the basket, sometimes at the foul line, and sometimes in the locker room.  He believes that mixing up the location like this keeps his team’s attention.  Each Sunday morning before worship our team of Sunday morning leaders gather to walk through the worship service.  We used to gather in the same place every time.  After reading about Coach K’s habits, I’ve been moving them around.  I’ve been trying to move them around in purposeful ways that connect a place with a point I have to share with them, and this has added a level of creativity to what I share.  I think it goes back to hearing, seeing, and doing.  They’re seeing what I’m talking about from a new perspective and then they remember it.  Hopefully they then do it on Sunday morning, and they understand it better.

There is one other thing I found helpful about Coach K’s book.  If you’re a big Duke fan, and given that I’m a Duke alumni I am, you’ll just enjoy hearing about how this legendary coach goes about interacting with a cast of team members you’ve watched or heard about over the years.  While you may not learn as much about leadership as you want to, you’ll enjoy hearing about a Coach who is soon to be the winningest coach in all of NCAA history.  There will only be two things for your Coach K course in leadership: see Coach K do his thing by watching lots of Duke basketball, and then do it yourself with your own team.  You hear, you forget.  You see, you remember.  You do, you understand.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Leading from the Heart by Mike Krzyzewski
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson
The Language of God by Francis Collins

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Francis Asbury – Second Pastor Part V

January 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Call & Response

The last of five reflections on Francis Asbury as a model for second pastors is now up on Call and Response.  I explore Asbury’s personal piety and how that was the foundation of his leadership and authority.  Check it out here.

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Francis Asbury as Second Pastor – Take 4

January 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Call & Response

My latest blog entry about Francis Asbury as a model for second pastors is up on Call and Response.  I explore how Asbury went about consensus building and discernment.  Check it out here.

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