Anxiety 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.

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.

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:

1. define success
2. write it out
3. find good feedback
4. build a process
5. give room to the Holy Spirit
6. 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?

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

Proverbs 4:23

Psalm 78:72

Ephesians 2:10

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.

1. An ongoing intimacy with God. – Lead yourself, keep faith present tense, the temptation is to fade.
2. Honest spiritual & emotional journey. – assess the real condition of your life, understand your personal history, the temptation is to fake.
3. 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

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.