Humility

Here's some more from Catalyst. It was great to hear from Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Outliers. I enjoyed listening to him for the first time. But for some reason I kept thinking "More cowbell."

What does the financial crisis tell us about leadership?
Miscalibration - thinking you know more than you actually know. Overconfidence.
In times of crisis we think we need daring and bold decision making, but we don’t. What we need is humility.

Andy Stanley's questions:
What are the warning signs of an overconfident leader?
- The potential for it is in all of us. All of us start to think we are better than we are.
- We should be looking for it in everyone who is in authority.
- When they stop listening to the people around them, watch out.
Humility = the ability to listen to others.
Can a leader see this in the mirror?
- In the Iraq war, we went in terribly overconfident. There was a point where we realized we were wrong, and had to start over.
What do you say to the leader who has resisted accountability?
- In business there’s a moment where the entrepreneur can no longer do it on their own.
- Growth requires a change in leadership - it can’t all go through one person anymore.

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Catalyst 09

I had the great privilege of going this year to Catalyst, which was last week in the Atlanta area. It was also the first time my wife has gotten to come with me to a conference in a long time (six years we think!). We left the kids at home and had an amazing couple of days listening to some great wisdom. I took notes during most sessions, so over the next few days I'll post my notes on some of the speakers that were there.

My notes are kind of sporadic, so if you have trouble following them and want some clarification, let me know.

First up, Andy Stanley:

Leaders always leave a mark, the question is what kind of mark will you leave?
You won’t really understand the mark you’ve left until way after you’ve made it.
You don’t know a defining moment is happening until long after it happens

Joshua
- He and the people have crossed the Jordan and are beginning to lose their dependence on God.
- At the end of his life he says “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord” - Joshua 23:8-15
- Joshua 5:13 - Are you for us or are you against us? The angel says “no.”
- “I’m not here to be a part of your story. I’m here to find out if you are willing to play a role in my story.”
- This is a question that very few leaders are willing to wrestle with.
- “What message does my Lord have for his servant?”
- Joshua made a decision in that moment to be part of God’s story, not his own.
- V.15 - “Take off your sandals. This is holy ground.”
- Before you make your mark and become a household name, I just wanted to make sure you were going to be a leader not just with authority but under authority.
- This is why late in his life he is able to say “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.”
- God takes full responsibility for the life wholly devoted to him - Charles Stanley.
- Why do we do what we do and who do we do it for?
- Once we settle that in our lives, then we can live with a freedom that is unexplainable.
- God will take full responsibility.
- Our mark isn’t worth our life. Living to make my mark is too small a thing to give my life to.

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Plans vs. Vision

"Plans change, vision stays the same." I listened recently to another Andy Stanley leadership podcast that hit me at just the right time. I asked on twitter last week for people to be praying for me as I had some pretty big decisions to make. I feel like God really answered many of those prayers by allowing me to hear this particular podcast. In it, Andy talks about how many of us fail to realize that our particular vision is not the same as our particular plan. I know for me this church planting adventure that I am on is one where my plans and the vision God has given me sometimes get confused. I think this is common for many of us. Maybe your vision is about a particular ministry, or about your business, or even a particular vision for your family. Our plans become so important to us. After all, we pray about them, we align our finances around them, we follow our plan to the greatest detail. But which is more important - the plan (how I will accomplish the vision), or the vision itself? Sometimes we have to be willing to be flexible with our plans. Plans change, vision stays the same.

In my context my church planting plan has had some significant changes along the way. The vision has continued to stay the same. Our vision is to plant a life-giving church that encourages people to embrace the story they were meant to live. It's a vision that calls people out of boredom and into the life God intended for them. And yet my plan has often gotten confused with that vision. Originally my plan was that this would happen primarily in downtown Durham. When God began pointing me closer to the Grove Park area, I struggled with that. How could we change our focus like that? Oh yeah - downtown isn't the vision, a life-giving church is the vision. More recently I've wrestled with a new change of plans. For a year I've been planning on launching Story Church on September 13, 2009. And yet recently, I've come to terms with the fact that we aren't ready to launch. At first this was a devastating reality for me. How can I change my launch date?? Oh yeah, September 13 isn't the vision - a healthy, life-giving church is the vision. September 13 is a plan. And it can change without affecting the vision.

How about you? What's the vision you have for your life, your career, your family, your marriage? Is that vision married to a particular plan, or is the plan flexible? If we don't learn to flex the plan, our vision can die with a bad plan. Good vision thrives at the right time with the right plan - but it's not the same as our plan. We die for vision, but not for our plans.

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10 years and counting...

We got married pretty young. I was 21, she was 20. But in our defense, we dated for four years counting our engagement. It's not like it was a rash decision. I look back at our wedding pictures now and I see it - wow, we were young. But God has been so good to us. We are truly more in love today than we were on that day. I seriously feel like I'm still getting to know her. It's as if layers of depth continue to be unfolded for me, and I see her in new ways all the time. I have friends and family whose marriages haven't enjoyed the same kind of growth and love. I've seen people close to me split and relationships torn apart. I'm not naive enough to think that I'm immune from that kind of thing. As if somehow my marriage is indestructible. I think it's precisely because of that fragility, that I work so hard at protecting it. Marriage is not easy. It's not a given. But it is the most life-giving, beautiful thing in the world when it functions the way God intended. I get to wake up every day and win the heart of my wife all over again. Some days I do that well, others days I fail. But tomorrow I get to do it all over again. I have been so blessed by this woman. She stretches my faith, she teaches me about love and sacrifice and humility, and I am simply a better follower of Jesus because of her.

Anyway, here are some of the lessons I've learned along the way. I'd love to hear some feedback from others of you who've learned similar or other lessons.

1. Don't go to bed angry. Seriously. Don't do it. There have been times when we've laid in bed where the silence was thick. I might lay there for an hour, but at some point we're going to talk. I won't ignore it. I won't let it go. The second you choose to let it go and bury it, is the second you've stopped fighting for your marriage. Seriously, this is huge.

2. Serve each other. Whether it's cleaning up the kitchen, taking the kids so she can relax, or when she makes me food, or encourages me to go hang out with the guys. There's no "I" in marriage. oh wait... How about "we" is more important than "me."

3. Date. We've always tried to get out and do stuff together. Really in the last year though this has become so important for us. I find that as we get busier, and as stresses increase with finances, kids, etc. it's even more important that we don't neglect dating each other. For many people the difficult times create strain on their relationship. For us these have become important times of connection. I find that we grow deeper and stronger through adversity rather than fragmenting. And that's not because it just happens. We force ourselves to spend the time, to talk through the pain, to confront the elephant in the room.

4. Honor God. I don't know what else to call this. But maybe the best example of this is in finances. Statistics say that finances is the #1 reason marriages don't make it. The stress of paying bills, the differing priorities when it comes to spending, all of that can be quite a threat to a marriage. We have found that God's way really is the best way. And I know that sounds trite or whatever, but stay with me for a second. We just don't argue about money because we are committed to honoring God with our finances. That means we give generously, no matter the circumstances. We have always lived within our means, refusing to carry debt. What debt we had from school and cars, we've aggressively paid those things off. We've also tried to save so that we would have margin in times of difficulty. Right now is one of the most difficult financial times of our marriage. And yet, there is a strange peace in knowing that because we have committed to honoring God in this way, we don't have to worry.

Andy Stanley recently gave a talk about Pathways. He says that the path you're on determines the destination. I know that isn't all that profound, but it's surprising how many people don't understand that. The direction you are headed will determine where you end up, not your intentions or desires. When we left CA to move to NC, we could have done all the planning in the world. We could have mapped out our travel, all our stops, created a budget, all of that. But if we had gotten on Interstate 10 and headed west, despite all our best intentions, we would have ended up at the Pacific Ocean, not in NC. Many people want to have a healthy marriage. They want to grow old with someone and they dream of raising an incredible family together. But then they get on the 10 and head west. They make decisions along the way that lead them on a different path, not the one they intended to be on. And when they get there, they wonder how it happened. Their intentions and their desires for their marriage and their family don't line up with where they find themselves. Kimi and I have a destination in mind. And we believe that the things I mentioned above (along with many other things like sacrifice, commitment, trust, accountability, etc.) will get us there.

Here's to the next 10 years, and hopefully many more beyond that!

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Visioneering

I'm reading Andy Stanley's great book Visioneering right now and it is really hitting me at just the right time. As we get further along in this church planting adventure, and closer to our launch, I feel more and more inadequate and less and less prepared. I just thought I'd post a few of my favorite nuggets from the first few chapters so far and let you think about them.

"Vision is always accompanied by strong emotion. And the clearer the vision, the stronger the emotion" (10).

"God ordained visions are always too big for us to handle" (42).

"You are not responsible for figuring out how to pull off God's vision for your life. You are responsible to do what you know to do, what you can do. And then you must wait" (56-57).

"If it is just a good idea, you have to make it happen. When God gives you a vision, there's a sense in which you stand back and watch it happen" (57).

"I think it is safe to assume that most Christians are not attempting anything that requires God's intervention" (71).

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A revealing question

What won't happen if we don't do what God has called us to do? I've been listening lately to a leadership podcast from Andy Stanley. In a recent episode, he asked this question. From a leadership standpoint, it's important he says to get people thinking about a problem that needs to be solved, and that this question helps do that. I've been thinking a lot about it in terms of my own life, and in the life of Story Church. A couple years ago Don Miller gave a talk at Mars Hill (Grand Rapids, MI), in which he talked about story. That message is the basis of where our name came from. Anyway, he said that the way you tell whether or not a story is good is to ask the question, "What would happen if this story wasn't resolved?" He asks how would the story resolve if the hero got hit by a bus. He gave the example of his friend Jenna, who heads up Blood:Water Mission. What would happen if Jenna's story wasn't resolved? People would die. She provides clean water wells for millions in Africa, and if she couldn't continue - thousands if not millions would die. That's a good story!

I have friends who are living great stories. One friend gave up a huge career opportunity to go spend a few months working in a health clinic in Africa. Another friend is rescuing a whole generation of kids in one of the poorest communities in Guatemala. Another friend goes every week to hang out with his friends who are homeless in downtown Raleigh, for whom he buys boots in order to take care of them in the cold. Still another friend planted a church for 20 somethings who were burned out on a church that was disconnected with the world around them. Now they are providing food for families that are HIV+ and have adopted them as part of their mission. What would happen if these people didn't do what God called them to do? What if instead they pursued something else? Like the American dream, success, fame, money, etc. It's so tempting isn't it? To spend our lives trying to better ourselves, to have more, to achieve more.

What won't happen in your life if you don't do what God has called you to do? Who won't be mentored? Who will go hungry? Who will suffer from an absent father or mother? Who will be sick? Who won't be loved? Who won't experience grace and forgiveness?

For me, I wonder what won't happen in Durham if Story Church doesn't do what God has called us to do. What marriage won't be rescued? What family won't be redeemed? What person will give in to hopelessness? What addictions won't be broken? For many churches in America, we fail to ask this question, and the church suffers. We grow inward, we fail to connect with a hurting world, and we basically become irrelevant. It's not the way God intended His church to be. God invites us to be part of something so much bigger than ourselves. He invites us to be part of a bigger Story, one of redemption and hope. I pray that you and I and the church in America begin to realize this truth and to live for something more.

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