Theology of Leadership

My Theology of Leadership By tony Leadership is less about the words or actions of the leader and more about the character of the leader. That's the conclusion I've reached after revisiting what the Bible has to say about leadership within the Church. For example, we can look at a handful of passages and come to this - a job description for leaders: Encourage others. (Romans 14:19) Set an example with your speech, life and faith. (I Timothy 4:12) Remain pure. (I Timothy 4:12) Embrace humility and gentleness. (Ephesians 4:2) Promote peace and unity. (Ephesians 4:3) Avoid arguments and quarreling. (I Timothy 2:24) Gently instruct others. (I Timothy 2:25) Maintain emotional control. (Titus 2:6) Demonstrate integrity in your actions and speech. (Titus 2:7-8) Live your life above reproach. (I Timothy 3:2) It's not the job description you would expect to see for a leadership position is it? When you think about today's leaders, in politics and business and even the church, these aren't typically the attributes that first come to mind. I guess it's possible that leadership outside the church looks different than God intended it to look inside the church. That may explain some of the differences between the job description above and what we routinely see in the marketplace. Ironically, though, Jim Collins offered some research in his book Good to Great that seems to suggest business leaders would do well to model this biblical approach to leadership. Every good-to-great company Collins studied was led by what he described as a Level 5 leader. Collins wrote: "Those who worked with or wrote about the good-to-great leaders continually used words like quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated, did not believe his own clippings; and so forth." It's interesting how similar that list is to the list above. Neither list reflects the larger-than-life leadership that we tend to expect from people in these positions. And that, of course, challenges me to think about my own leadership. I may be gifted to lead, but my character will determine the ongoing impact of my leadership. That's something that can't be measured in an interview or through a personality profile or on a resume. Character is proven over a lifetime. Do you have have the character of a leader?

Increase My Faith

Increase My Faith! By perry on Vision Last week I was walking through the book of Luke and Luke 17:5 hit me like a TON of bricks!!! The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" Confession: I need to pray this more! If we truly have a vision from God then we will be driven to desperation, and if we're not then we do not have a vision but merely a daydream! AND: if God truly lays HUGE vision on your heart it will completely overwhelm your faith, which is why we must CONSTANTLY run to Jesus and beg Him to increase our faith! As I look at where I believe God wants to take us, it completely overwhelms me: there is NO WAY I can do this by myself and I am FORCED to pray, "Lord, increase my faith!" The church needs to quit running towards what we know we can do and embrace the risks associated with the unknown! We need for men and women who are NOT passionately obsessed with the way things are, but rather intensly focused on the way things should be! We've GOT to quit doing ministry minus faith because even though it is safe, it never fulfills what Jesus has called us to do: ADVANCE His Kingdom! Those who are not willing to attempt the impossible with never experience the unexplainable! Lord, increase my faith!!! (Hebrews 11:1 & Hebrews 11:6)

How The Mighty Fall

TEAM: An article from Tony Morgan:

On my trip to Florida this week, I had the chance to read the newest book from Jim Collins.How the Mighty Fall is a quick read with some pretty insightful thoughts that have application not only for business leaders, but also for leaders in the church. Here are some of the key thoughts that grabbed my attention:

• “When you are at the top of the world,…the best player in your game, your very power and success might cover up the fact that you’re already on the path to decline.”
• “When an organization grows beyond its ability to fill its key seats with the right people, it has set itself up for a fall.”
• “Organizational decline is largely self-inflicted.”
• “A core business that meets a fundamental human need – and one at which you’ve become the best in the world – rarely becomes obsolete.”
• “When institutions fail to distinguish between current practices and the enduring principles of their success, and mistakenly fossilize around their practices, they’ve set themselves up for decline.”
• “Innovation can fuel growth, but frenetic innovation – growth that erodes consistent tactical excellence – can just as easily send a company cascading through the stages of decline.”
• “If a great company consistently grows revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth, it will not simply stagnate; it will fall.”
• “When bureaucratic rules erode an ethic of freedom and responsibility within a framework of core values and! demanding standards, you’ve become infected with the disease of mediocrity.”
• “Every person in a key seat should be able to respond to the question “What do you do?” not with a job title, but with a statement of personal responsibility.
• “The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”
• “Those in power blame other people or external factors – or otherwise explain away the data – rather than confront the frightening reality that the enterprise may be in serious trouble.”
• “Whenever people begin to confuse the nobility of their cause with the goodness and wisdom of their actions, …they can perhaps more easily lead themselves astray. Bad decisions made with good intentions are still bad decisions.”

Is it just me, or! is it pretty easy to see a correlation between these thoughts from Jim Collins and the decline of once-great churches and denominations?

How Church Growth Happens

TEAM: This article is from Steven Furtick......and he's SOOOO right!!!

How church growth happens:

We enable experiences and interactions that leave our people saying:
I love my church

So they’ll tell their friends:
You’ve got to come check out my church

The friends come.
We worship Jesus and preach the Gospel with excellence.

The friends leave saying:
I really like this church

Inspiring them to come back again and again until they say:
I love my church

And tell their friends:
You’ve got to come check out my church…

The Law of the Little Shovel

TEAM: Another article from Seth Godin.........


If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.

If you walk around town with a little shovel, you'll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.

Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.

The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it's not going to start working better just because you use it more often.

Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.

Which leads to two viable strategies:

1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.

2. If you can't stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don't get a second time.

Winning On The Uphills

Team: This is from Seth Godin......a marketing genius.........


Interesting business lesson learned on a bicycle: it's very difficult to improve your performance on the downhills.

I used to dread the uphill parts of my ride. On a recumbent bike, they're particularly difficult. So I'd slog through, barely surviving, looking forward to the superspeedy downhill parts.

Unfortunately, I had a serious accident a few years ago (saving the life of a clueless pedestrian by throwing myself onto the pavement). Downhill might be fast, but it's crazy.

Lesson learned. Now, I look forward to the uphill parts, because that's where the work is, the fun is, the improvement is. On the uphills, I have a reasonable shot at a gain over last time. The downhills are already maxed out by the laws of physics and safety.

The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset. The moment you earn your keep as a public speaker is when the room isn't just right or the plane is late or the projector doesn't work or the audience is tired or distracted. The best time to engage with an employee is when everything falls apart, not when you're hitting every milestone. And everyone now knows that the best time to start a project is when the economy is lousy.

Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn't.

Overwhelmed

Team: This article was written by Perry Noble.......and while it applies to Newspring Church, it does us good to look back sometimes as well.........

This past Saturday on "daddy date day". I took Charisse to the campus of Anderson University for a walk.

AND GOD ROCKED MY WORLD!

We were walking around the campus together and I was telling her about how Lucretia and I used to live there. We spent some time on the swings and enjoyed walking by the tennis courts.

When all of a sudden I looked up and we were in front of the Sullivan Building and I froze and could not move for a couple of seconds as I thought, "That is where Jesus allowed us to begin NewSpring Church."

I am amazed at all He has done; at His INCREDIBLE favor and faithfulness He has shown. I still remember:

• When we owned NOTHING! Everything we had was borrowed and broken, yet we seemed to be able to pull off church every Sunday.
• The summer the air conditioner was ! broken nearly every week and no one complained.
• Sitting outside on January 16, 2000 (our first service) and wondering if anyone would actually show up.
• Sitting at home the night of January 16 (after it was all over) and wondering if they would actually come back!
• The decision to hire Lee full time, even though we didn't have the money, knowing that it was a step of faith that Jesus had called us to take.
• The time Jenn Sangl (who was sort of the church secretary at the time) came to me and told me our money was just about gone and that we might not be able to pay the bills that month (July of 2000 in case you are curious!)
• Getting the staff and leadership together to pray about our financial situation and then taking up more money in our offering the next three weeks than we did the first two and a half months! ($2,500, 2,500 and 3,000 in case you were curious!)
• The time the dude in the bathing suit showed up to an evening service and gave his life to Christ in the lobby during the music.
• Going to two services and people sitting outside of the room on the steps listening to the service.
• Making the decision to move to the Fine Arts Center; a room which would seat 1,100 people (and we had around 180 coming.)
• Challenging people to give generously towards and offering to move so we could actually buy some sound equipment and such and 52 people giving $26,000.

Telling the people at the last service in the Sullivan building that when we got in the Fine Arts Center we were going to fill it up not once, but twice. (I was wrong. We filled it up four times.)

All of these thoughts hit me like a ton of bricks, and it caused me to revisit the original reason why we started NewSpring Church.

I wanted to create a church where people could meet Jesus and walk with Him every single day of their lives. I feel like He called me to that, and it absolutely overwhelms me every time I think about how far He has brought us. Our passion today is the same it was back then: to make the name of Jesus famous one life at a time!!!

Lamentations 3:23 says His faithfulness is great, and I am living proof that HE IS!!!

Why Not?

George Bernard Shaw once said: "Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not’?”

I think we're called, as Christ Followers, to ask the why not question. We're called to take the why not approach to life. Faith demands it.

Any other parents have children that ask "why" when you ask them to do something? It can drive you crazy can't it? I wonder if that is how God feels sometimes. We're always asking why. It's like we need an excuse to do something. What if we asked why not instead.

I love the story in Acts 8 about the Ethiopian Eunuch who has a divine appointment with Philip. He puts his faith in Christ and immediately says: "Why shouldn't I be baptized?" That one question reveals a why not mindset. And it changes the course of history. He becomes the first missionary to Ethiopia.

I can only imagine what we'd accomplish for the kingdom if we had a why not mindset.

Why not.

Dream Big!

We need to dream big dreams.... not because we need to accomplish big things. What we accomplish is a byproduct. We need to dream big dreams because it keeps us on our knees in raw dependence upon God. Unless He intervenes we look foolish. Dreams have far more to do with who we become in the process than the what we accomplish. They stretch us. And that's why they are so good for us. You want to take your prayer life to the next level? Dream God-sized dreams!

I'm Guilty Here

This came from another blog......and hit me between the eyes, not just on this subject, but made me do some examination and ask, "Where else am I hypocrite?"

You too? Read it and see..........


The Ethics of Working on SundayThomas Steagald01-28-09

I promise I am not making this up ...

My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili's a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help—her or others.

A group of six church-goers came in the other night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server's. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, "We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because ..."Are you ready?"... we do not believe in people working on Sunday.

"The girl, taken aback, stammered out something like, "I wouldn't have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn't come in," or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their ... uh ... Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, "Well, we don't believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight." And he did. God bless him.

No one is consistent. I am clear on that. But better to confess your own sin in such a situation than presume to see it in another who is just doing the best they can. No wonder Jesus had such animosity toward Pharisees who "lay (heavy burdens) on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them" (Matthew 23:4). No wonder an entire generation of would-be believers has such animosity toward the church.

As George MacDonald wrote long ago, "Had you given yourself to understanding his word that you might do it, and not the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown ..."

For my part—and I am a Pharisee myself even saying this, but I cite my practice not with pride but with confession—I pray for the forgiveness of God and verbally ask the forgiveness of the Hardee's drive-through lady each Sunday as I buy coffee on my way to church.

I know I am complicit: On the one hand I do wish, with my head and heart, that all people had Sunday free; that said, I do nothing, nothing to lift a finger to make that happen by even so little a fast or act of self-sacrifice as making my own coffee on a busy Sunday morning—much less by not eating a Sunday lunch or dinner at one of the sit-down places in town.


I share this, not to condemn anyone......like the author, I am the chiefest of sinners here. But this brings us to this point: Are we asking the hard questions? The real, genuine, see the church from the world's viewpoint questions?