Do You Struggle With Sin?

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Does anyone out there still struggle with sin?

We don’t like to see our human brokenness through the lens of sin but it is apart of our fallen humanity and it’s helpful to clarify what sin is, if we’re going to overcome it. Sin (hamartia) is defined as missing the mark or more specifically, to fail to live according to God’s intention and design. Because we have failed to live according to God’s original intention and design we are easily misled by the environment around us as well as our own hearts. We are also weakened by our flesh that delights in compromise and we actively resist the wisdom and truth that alone can set us free. In short, we can’t save ourselves, we need Jesus!

Our rebellion against God has caused a spiritual canyon between us and God that only God’s Son is able to remedy. As a result, apart from Christ, our lives epitomize the reflection of a broken mirror, that needs God’s Spirit, truth and community to heal.

There are 2 basic marks of sinfulness that every human has to grapple with:

  1. Immaturity - Demonstrated by a failure to take responsibility for your actions or situation in life and characterized by impulsive behaviour based upon how one feels.
  2. Insecurity – Underlying insecurity is FEAR. Fear of not being valuable or significant in your own eyes or the eyes of the world around you. Insecurity causes oneself to compare themselves to others and it results in coveting and jealousy of what someone else has.
None of us are born into this world fully mature or completely secure, be it physically, emotionally or spiritually. We have to experience a process of growth in all aspects of our humanity. Unfortunately, you can be fully mature physically and yet be immature spiritually and emotionally, if you haven’t responded to God’s work in your life. Maturity and security are byproducts of a healthy relationship with God, one’s self and others.
When we find that we miss the mark (and all of us do in some way and often), it’s not going to help to simply give up on yourself or on life but God gives us the grace and power to get up again and grow closer to the mark of maturity and security in Christ. All of us have missed the mark and fallen short of God’s intention and design for us but nothing in our past, present or future is a good enough excuse to give up on God’s love, grace and power to help us grow into the people he’s called us to be.
Grace!

Building a Team for Breakthrough!

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People aren’t your greatest asset, the right people are!

One of the great metaphors for a church or ministry team is a bus. On a bus you have a driver and a whole lot of passengers, with hopefully some key people in the seats closest to the driver. Depending on who you have in the key seats, will determine the trip you take.

Research has shown (Jim Collins – Good to Great) that the first thing you must do before you want to build a team for breakthrough is get the wrong people off the bus, the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats. Before you work out where you want to go or what you want to achieve, you must focus on who you are going to take the journey with.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Whoever is on your bus should be there because of who is on it, not just where it is going. When you have the right people on the bus, you eliminate the need to constantly micro-manage and drive them to get results. The right people are self-starters and are led, not driven to make things happen.

“We focused year after year on injecting endless stream of talent and building them into the best managers in the industry. That’s how you build the future.” (CEO Dick Cooley, Wells Fargo)

Are you trying to be the genius with a thousand helpers or are you trying to build a team of great strength and depth? A genius leader doesn’t need a team, just a bunch of soldiers that will implement their ideas. The problem is, it’s unsustainable. Don’t settle for being a genius on WHAT to do in ministry. Aim to be a genius in WHO you pick for your team. Great leaders build a team for breakthrough, not a platform for their talents.

Look for the 4 C’s in recruiting people – Character, Chemistry, Competence and Calling. Recruit people to your team, even if you don’t have a vacancy for them as yet. Great people will start to contribute because they are initiator’s. It takes rigorous discipline, not a ruthless dictatorship to build a team for breakthrough. A rigorous team environment is disciplined, whereas, a ruthless dictatorship is ego-centric and fear mongering.

Practice the 3 essential disciplines of a rigorous environment:

  1. When in doubt, keep looking – better to have an unfilled position, then fill it with the wrong person.
  2. When you need to change, act quickly – Don’t delay but be decisive.
  3. Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems – Your best result on your biggest problem will be average. Your best result on your biggest opportunity could be world-changing.

The human component in bottle-necking church / ministry growth isn’t location, circumstances or marketing but the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. Walter Bruckart was once asked to name the top 5 factors in his companies breakthrough. He responded with, “Factor 1 – right people. Factor 2 – right people. Factor 3 – right people…” You get it!

Grace!

Delay is not Denial!

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Read Genesis 16 for context.

Genesis 16 is the account of Sarai, Abram and Hagar. It’s got a plot line that would rival any episode of ‘Days of our lives’. Sarai and Abram have received a promise from God many, many years before but they have grown impatient and frustrated with God’s apparent memory loss of his promises to them. Due to their impatience and impetuosity, Sarai comes up with a bright idea, to help God’s promises to come to pass. She offers her husband, her very own maidservant as a wife. Just brilliant! Of course, Abe being a red-blooded, half moron male decides it’s a brilliant idea as well and ends up sleeping with Hagar and ‘kaboom’ ‘WW1 the prequal’ begins in the centre of the household. Some principles that emerge for our benefit today are:

  • Don’t misinterpret delay as denial – We live in the space-time continuum, God doesn’t. He exists outside of it. His purposes are established in alignment with his timing which is, in the grand scheme of eternity, perfect. God makes everything beautiful in its time. Some promises of God come to pass quickly, some take a lot longer to come to pass and we being finite, impetuous human beings want everything the moment we conceive the idea or hear God’s word to us. When God’s promises delay we conclude that we heard wrong or that God is not interested in us anymore because we must have done something wrong. To conclude this would be to conclude wrong.
  • When you misinterpret God, you try to accomplish in your own strength what can only be achieved in God’s strength. That which is born of the flesh must be sustained by the flesh. That which is born of the Spirit must be sustained by the Spirit. Too many of us are tiring ourselves out, unnecessarily, because we are pursuing things, God has never sanctioned or ordained for us. Attempting short-cuts to get close to God’s promises only ever ends up in conflict and frustration. It causes conflicts in relationships and it actually delays what God wants to do anyway.
  • Cutting corners on God’s promises leads to bitterness and more pain. The ‘Hagar Highway’ only ever takes you into bitterness and more frustration. Near enough isn’t good enough. Good enough isn’t satisfactory from God’s perspective. God has plan A and he intends to bring plan A to pass. Don’t settle for short-cuts when deep down you know you are just being immature, impatient and finding it difficult to trust in God (Prov 3:5-6).

I know exactly what delay feels like, because I have lived in delay most of my ministry. Trust me, shortcuts never provide the answers you are looking for. They are simply a mirage. Instead, run to God. Ask him the hard questions, remind him of his promises. Do what he’s asking you to do right now with what he has put into your hands. Stop complaining to others and start complaining to God. The funny thing is, he can take it from you way more than you think he can. He may even give you the answer you are looking for.

Grace!

It is Finished!

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When Jesus declared on the cross “It is Finished” (Jn 19:30) what did he mean?

Those who look at Jesus with the eye of reason see the cross as final only in his lifetime. But those who look at Jesus with the eye of revelation see the cross as a finished work both in this life and the life to come.

What some of us lack is a deep understanding of Christ’s finished work on the cross.

It is finished means we’re not saved by our performance. The world constantly tempts us to locate our ID in something and smaller than Jesus Christ. Apart from Christ, we base our identity on our performance, on our strengths and weaknesses and on our successes and failures. The Gospel liberates us from ourselves and connects us to Christ’s finished work on the cross.

It’s not Christianity AND your works or your degree or your bank account or your trophies or your reputation. It’s just Christ and Christ alone. The Gospel frees us from the pressure to perform for our salvation and significance. Who you really are has nothing to do with you but in what Christ has finished on the cross. Our identity is not even established in our fallenness but in Christ substituting himself in our place.

When your identity is rooted in Christ, you are no longer bound by the transient things of this world but are set free to spend yourself on giving rather than taking and on serving rather than being self-serving.

The truest definition of who you are is found in Jesus’ words, “It is Finished!”

Grace!

Choose to become a Great Leader!

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I’ve observed leadership is a choice, as much as it is a calling. Once you answer the call to lead, you are given a choice as to how much you want to grow as a leader, and this choice can be a wrestle as great as the wrestle to answer the call to lead. The reason why we wrestle with this decision is because we love comfort and convenience, which leads to a static approach to life. Leadership is about progress and requires a more dynamic approach to life. If you’re going to move from where you are to where you want or are being called to be, you need to choose to grow.

Good is the enemy of Great! Most organizations aren’t great because they’re content with good. Yet I believe any church, company or team can go from good to great provided they have a desire and intentionality. A great church isn’t a result of right location, right branding, right planning, right circumstance or a celebrity leader at the helm. It’s largely a matter of conscious choice.

A church becomes great because people within it choose to become great leaders. A great leader is a paradox of both humility and sanctified ambition, not for themselves but for the church or group they’re apart of. Just as a duck floats on top of the water with grace but is ferociously paddling under the water, so too is the great leader. They are humble and self-effacing but ferociously determined to accomplish a result for the sake of their team.

To become a great leader (which is possible for all of us) observe the following:

  • Repent of pride
  • Become results oriented
  • Be more plow-horse than show-horse
  • Look out the window when you succeed and look in the mirror when you fail
  • Reproduce yourself in the next generation and set them up to succeed.

Remember, Great leaders are very rarely recruited from outside the organization but are already being raised on the farm. Great leaders attribute any success as a work of Gods sovereign grace rather than personal greatness (1 Cor 3:7). Make the decision today to move from being a good leader to being a GREAT leader.

Grace!

Reinvent yourself at each stage of growth!

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One of the most important leadership lessons I’ve had to learn is the need to reinvent aspects of my leadership during the different stages of growth we have experienced as a church.

I thought I was under pressure as a youth and young adult pastor of a large church but it’s clear there is a drafting effect of being a staff member on a team with a strong point leader at the helm. When you are apart of a team, you can get into the spiritual slipstream of the point leader, like a cyclist, riding in a pack, gets into the slipstream of the lead cyclist.

When I transitioned from youth pastor to lead pastor, the shift in weightiness of responsibility and accountability was very significant. Here are some ways I’ve had to reinvent myself as a leader:

  1. From highly directive to highly collaborative – When I first started the church with a core group of 13 people, I could make decisions instantly. Because the majority of the group were inexperienced in ministry, I needed to be stronger in my directives to shape the foundations of the church but as we grew bigger, I needed to consider the counsel of more people and include them in the decision making process. How I lead now is different to how I led in the early days. I recognized this by listening to people’s feedback and realizing if I didn’t change, I would limit the buy in of others. It’s not that I’ve abdicated the need to be directive, it’s that I’ve brought more people into the decision making process with me.
  2. From generalist to specialist – Like a GP at a doctors clinic I played the role of a generalist in the early stages of the church plant. As we grew I had to move from being all things to all people to being a specific thing to some people and empower others to be a specific thing to other people as well. Unless a leader makes the transition from generalist to specialist, the organization will be limited in its future growth. For me this has meant a greater clarity on my strengths and what I specifically bring that can make the single best contribution to the church. This reinvention must be reflected in your role and job description. For me the primacy of preaching and leadership are the twin towers of my role that must fight against the onslaught of the distractive attacks against it.
  3. From defined to re-defined – I began the church with a 52 page blueprint doc of defined ideas that I wanted to build the church with. Every year after that first initial year, I’ve had to redefine my ideas to fit with the ever changing context of the ministry and cultural landscape. This has extended to my theology. The demand for answers to people’s questions and my own wrestling with issues of God, life and ministry has forced me to delve back into the study of God’s word and bring a re-definition to how I think about God and the world around me. There has been a deepening of my faith in God and ideas about God through this redefining process.

Grace!

Weekly Wrap Up!

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book of the week

‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins is one of the best books on leadership and organizations you will ever read. It’s a best-selling book that looks at the timeless principles that help any organization move from being good to being great over a long period of time. This is my second reading of the book and definitely worth a few more reads in the future.

quote of the week

“Its piercing to have God crawl through the gutters with you until you get clean.” C.S. Lewis

moment of the week

The couple of hours I spent with Sy Rogers Friday afternoon was priceless. What God has done in his life and taught him over many years has become catalytic in people’s growth in God all over the world.

news of the week

Fallen superstar footballer Ben Cousins getting arrested while traveling to Teen Challenge (Christian based organization) in Western Australia to enter yet another phase of drug rehab.

Grace!