Archive for Leadership
Anxiety vs. Love – Part 6
Posted by: | CommentsAnxiety vs. Love
Products ———-People
Control ————-Contemplation
Experts ————-Process
Results ————-Relationships
Conformity ————-Creativity
Answers ————-Questions
One of the ways that we will surely tell us if we are beginning to live a little too much out of the anxiety instead of love is when we begin to feel a deep discomfort with questions about what we are leading. Living out of anxiety drives us to grasp for control and one of the things that makes us feel a little more in control is having all the answers to all the questions.
After thinking about this for some time, I think that we can follow this anxiety back all the way back to who we believe ourselves to be. It’s not really about any organization, ministry, or program that we are worried about. We end up feeling a deep anxiety about who we are and who accepts us and doesn’t accept us and we strive to control how others perceive us by having or demanding all the right answers.
Let’s try to live out of love this week, we know that, as followers of Jesus, we are children of God. Embrace the questions the come up, let them be, and instead of worrying about the answers to these questions love the people who are asking them.
Where Do I Start?!
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Wow, I’d seriously have to say that The Orange Conference was one of the best conference experiences I have ever had.
Now it’s time to decompress and go through all of the great stuff that I learned while at the conference and figure what needs to be tweaked, what needs to stop, and what needs to be ramped up, both in my life and in my ministry.
One of the toughest things that people tend to go through when they leave a conference experience is that the shear volume (amount & loudness 
) of the information can become paralyzing. How do you get over this? I have found that a good self-evaluation is the place to start. Once you have an honest accounting of where you & your ministry stand as of today, you can match that up with what you took away from the conference and begin to prioritize what you need to do. When you take the time to do this, your action plan is well on it’s way to becoming a reality because you then just need to work on one item at a time.
A word of caution though, keep prayer at the center of this entire process. You walked away from the conference with a lot of stuff, not all of it was for you. Believe it or not, even some of the stuff that really got your attention isn’t for you. Too many people end up forgeting to talk to God about where, when, & what changes need to be made when they come home from a conference and when we do that we tend to latch on to the latest and greatest ministry rabbit’s foot.
Follow Jesus through this process, He is going one step at a time and so should you, right behind Him.
Measuring Spiritual Influence – Orange Breakout
Posted by: | CommentsWith David Kinnaman, President, Barna Group
Lessons About Influence:
Lesson 1:
- Influence begins with humility and ends with your faithfulness.
Lesson 2:
- Measuring influence means defining goals.
Lesson 3:
- Influence is hard to measure.
Lesson 4:
- Influence can be measured.
Lesson 5:
- Influence should be measured.
Lesson 6:
- Tracking influence costs energy, resources, and pride.
STEPS TO MEASURE INFLUENCE:
- define success
- write it out
- find good feedback
- build a process
- give room to the Holy Spirit
- embrace change
Lesson 7:
- Measuring your influence takes courage.
Lesson 8:
- Caution: Your metrics should not become the goal.
Take a look at the life of Jesus. Did He influence in spite of his intentional actions or because His practices were so different?
Pre-Conf #3 – Authentic Leadership
Posted by: | CommentsWith Dan Webster
Above the waterline (what is visible to others) = the work with your name on it.
Below the waterline (what is unseen by others) = the heart, soul, character of a person.
You’ve got to have more weight below the water than above in order to stay upright. The ballast bulb does this for this boat, without that weight below the waterline, it’s get real ugly, real quick.
Three ways to live:
High Competence – Low Character
- Win at all costs
Low Competence – High Character
- As long as you are a good person and follow Jesus it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do.
High Competence – High Character
- See Parable of the Talents
Make sure you check out the Ephesians verse, it reminds us of our identity and that we are to do “good works” but that’s not what gives us our value. This is huge in living as an authentic leader because it allows us to be transparent with people, not always holding up a facade.
How Trouble Comes
The Persona becomes more “weighty” than the character.
- The persona is the image that the outside world sees of us, what we have created to deal with the “stuff” of life.
Authentic Leadership
Our character is “weighty” enough to direct our persona. OR Our persona is porous enough to let a constant stream of our inner character bleed through.
Defining Authentic Leadership
Authentic leaders experience an ongoing intimacy with God, honestly face the inner spiritual and emotional journey, and identify, develop, and use their God given gifts and passions to impact the world.
- An ongoing intimacy with God. – Lead yourself, keep faith present tense, the temptation is to fade.
- Honest spiritual & emotional journey. – assess the real condition of your life, understand your personal history, the temptation is to fake.
- Using gifts & passions to impact the world. – do the work of discovery & development, discover you “sacred trust,” the temptation is to cave in to the shallowness of conformity.
______
Humilty
- Creates space in us to hear God & others.
- Creates space around us for others to flourish
Emotional & Spiritual Maturity is about pursuing wholeness.
- allows my growth to be a catalyst to stimulate growth in others
Successful people have:
- A set of competencies
- Are alliance builders
- Live with integrity
____________
The courageous leader blazes the trail into their own heart. -Henri Nouwen
Anxiety = Youth Ministry!?
Posted by: | CommentsHere is a question for you, why do you think most youth ministries get started?
I tend to fall on the side of those that think that many churches started youth ministries or are starting youth ministries out of the shear anxiety that many adults feel when it comes to teenagers.
The different clothes, the different music, the haircuts, the drama of high school, the relationship issues, the developing bodies, etc. All these things add up to many adults feeling a great sense of anxiety when it comes to being with teenagers. Therefore, the church goes out and hires an expert to recruit a couple of odd people from within the congregation to work with these anxiety causing people on their own, a youth ministry is born.
Of course there are also many churches that have started youth ministries for all the right reasons, I just thought that I would share the above thought as a simple way of saying that anxiety isn’t always bad.
This series on anxiety vs. love could lead someone to believe that we need to avoid anxiety at all costs. Well, if we were to try to do that not only would that be pretty anxiety producing, it just would be true. Yes, we need to work toward living on the side of love but it is true that anxiety is sometimes what it takes for us to actually get something done. After all, there are a lot of people out there that can say that they are living a life of following Jesus today because of one of those youth ministries that was born out of anxiety.
Anxiety vs. Love – Part 5
Posted by: | CommentsAnxiety vs. Love
Products ———-People
Control ————-Contemplation
Experts ————-Process
Results ————-Relationships
Conformity ————-Creativity
The words on each end of this continuum, conformity – creativity, are always a tough thing for a leader. Well, perhaps I should say that that living on the love side of this continuum is difficult for managers, real leaders will find a way to lead people into creativity.
When we fall into the trap of simply managing a ministry we tend to lean toward casting a vision of conformity for those that are a part of our group. We do this out of anxiety of losing control over our situations and in turn losing control over the results that we so desperately need to see.
We need to make a shift, live out of love, and encourage the creativity that God has placed within each individual that we lead. This is a little scary at times because it can seems that there is no way to keep things “under control.” If we are really leading we will provide people with a set of boundaries that fit with the vision and mission of our ministry and then release, equip, and empower people to use their God-given creativity to move a step closer to fulfilling that vision and accomplishing that mission.
Yeah, it is much more effecient and much less messy to work within a culture of conformity, but a culture of conformity is a much less loving place to live because we are stifling the image of God within others.
Anxiety vs. Love – Part 4
Posted by: | CommentsAnxiety vs. Love
Products ———-People
Control ————-Contemplation
Experts ————-Process
Results ————-Relationships
As I reflect on what I have seen in ministry it seems to me that one of the first things to go when we start slipping into the anxiety operating system is our relationships.
When we are operating out of love, relationships are at the forefront of the action; relationships are what it is all about. However, when we fall into the trap of constantly having to track the number of relationships and our job is on the line because of those numbers it is easy and even understandable that we would slide into anxiously being focused on the results.
I don’t remember where I heard it first, it probably doesn’t matter because the person I heard it from probably stole the line from someone else anyway, but I think Jesus would be fired from most of our churches because the results just weren’t there. After all was said and done (or so the religious leaders thought) Jesus was left with no one, not one of his followers by his side. Seems to me that Jesus wasn’t all that concerned with the results what most of us would be concerned with, seems that He was more about the relationships and living out of love.
Anxiety vs. Love – Part 3
Posted by: | CommentsAnxiety vs. Love
Products ———-People
Control ————-Contemplation
Experts ————-Process
There is an over-abundance of people that are ready to step up and offer us all of the answers to all of our youth ministry questions (and spiritual questions in general!) We know exactly where to turn when we need an answer.
Q: How do I organize small groups?
A: Purchase this book.
Q: What material should I be teaching my students?
A: Just follow this curriculum.
Q: What should the youth room look like?
A: Go check out the mega-church a couple cities over (don’t go too close for fear of being “found out.”)
Q: How do I train my volunteers?
A: Attend this conference.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with any of the solutions above or any of the solutions that we didn’t come up with on our own. What I am saying is that we tend to naturally gravitate toward toward finding an “expert” that is already in possession of an answer instead of going through a process of discovery. When we take the time to value the process of coming to our conclusion I think we’ll be operating much more out of love than out of anxiety. Anxiety drives us to find an answer and to find it quick so we can alleviate the anxiety.
Anxiety vs. Love – Part 2
Posted by: | CommentsAnxiety vs. Love
Products ———-People
Control ————-Contemplation
For many of us, contemplation is one of those loaded words, a word that conjures up thoughts of Eastern mysticism, yoga poses, and monosyllabic chants (and maybe even headaches from thinking so hard!)
What is contemplation really though?
The word comes from the Latin word, templum, which means to seperate out. If we think about this in the terms of anxiety, love, control and contemplation what we end up with is the idea that we always immerse ourselves in the nitty gritty details of what is going on in our ministry; if we always try to have control over every little detail of what is going on we will certainly end up living in the land of anxiety.
On the other hand though, if we are able to step back from what is swirling around us in the midst of our ministry programs, separate ourselves from the rush, the hurry, and our near-sighted focus on the details we will be in a much better position to live out of love.
If we can get our our thinking off of control of every situation and we can begin to contemplate what God is doing there, we’ll be leaning toward living from a baseline of love.
BTW: Have you checked out
Anxiety vs. Love – Intro
Posted by: | CommentsHere’s the deal, you know that I got to spend some time with a small group of folks hanging out with Mark Yaconelli last week. One of the things that stood out to me the most was this idea that we are either operating out of anxiety or out of love.
So many, including myself, have operated in life and in youth ministry with anxiety as the driving factor instead of love. Over the course of the next few days we are going to look into some of the identifying characteristics of each of these “base life settings.” To start with we’ll take a look at the characteristics of products vs. people.
Anxiety vs. Love
Products People
When we are operating out of anxiety we tend to be focused on products; we are focused on the next great tool, curriculum, or model that will make our ministry successful.
On the other hand, when we are operating out of love we are focused on people. When we are focused on love, no tool, curriculum, or model comes above the people that are a part of our ministries, the teenagers and the adults.
