Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

leadership

The Influence of Hugh Hefner and D.L. Moody

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Hugh Hefner and D.L. Moody—these are two names (and pictures) that you don’t typically see side by side.

In a Chicago Sun-Times article on the most influential Illinoisans, Hefner and Moody were listed one after the other. Here was their rationale:

Hugh M. Hefner (1926-2017), publisher and bon vivant. Steinmetz High School graduate Hugh Hefner was a product of the Northwest Side Bungalow Belt. His imagination and drive forged a publishing empire and changed the social and sexual mores of American society in profound ways during the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever else one may think of him, he was one of the most influential people of the mid-to-late-20th Century.

Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899), American Christian evangelist, author, publisher and founder of the Moody Bible Institute. Born in Massachusetts, but influential in Minnesota and Illinois. Moody converted to Evangelical Christianity as a 17-year-old in April 1855. During the Civil War, President Lincoln visited and spoke at a Sunday School meeting he sponsored on November 25, 1860. Moody preached on many battlefronts including Shiloh, Stones River and Richmond. After the Civil war he moved to Chicago begin a congregation in the Illinois Street Church. Wiped out by the Chicago Fire, Moody began anew and over the next 20 years he became internationally known, holding many religious revivals in Great Britain and Sweden. Moody led the Chicago Bible Institute, and after his death the Chicago Avenue Church was renamed the Moody Church and the Chicago Bible Church became the Moody Bible Institute we know today.

If influence is measured by your ability to affect someone else—their opinions, character, development, actions, and thoughts—then yes, both Moody and Hefner are influential.

And if influence is what we truly want, then we’re living in the best time of history, since everyone has a voice—all you need is a smartphone or a computer to amplify it. Just take a look at your social media feed and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

However, what we desperately need to understand is that influence is not neutral.

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How to Develop Servant Leaders

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Have you ever tried to change something in your church, only to be met with skepticism? Or with responses like these?

We’ve tried that before!

What makes you think that this will work better than the last idea?

Why can’t we just do things the way we’ve always done them?

Believe it or not, situations like these shape us more than we know. Resistance after resistance, shut down after shut down—they just stock pile on top of each other until we wake up one morning being the one that is now resisting change.

After all, isn’t it easier just to keep the status quo? To let things roll? To continue as is?

Change is difficult to implement in our churches because the immune system of our church body knows when we try to transplant foreign ideas. And not only does it detect the new idea, it sees it as bad bacteria, a virus, or foreign material—thus resulting in its rejection.

In your church, is change usually detected as bad bacteria, a virus, or foreign material?

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But as a leader, you know that change is not only inevitable; it’s necessary to reach a new generation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Although the Gospel is timeless, methods aren’t. After all, when’s the last time you saw teenagers or young adults in your church using a pay phone or hand writing a letter?

If you want to raise up the next generation of leaders in your church, you can’t just do what you’ve always done. Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work. The rate of change in our culture has sped up to the point where we are now measuring cultural shifts, not by the century or decade, and not even by the year anymore. But now by the month, the weeks, and in some cases, minutes.

Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work.

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Rather than feeling overwhelmed or suffering from a paralysis of analysis, I want to suggest three shifts that will change the trajectory of your church so that you can raise up a new generation of servant leaders, or harvest workers as Jesus mentions in Matthew 9:35-38.

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Don’t Be Dead Weight

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Your church or organization is like a train.

There are things you’re doing that are causing the train to move (the coal).

There are things outside of your control that are either speeding up the train or slowing it down (hills and air resistance).

And there are things within your control that are slowing the train down (baggage and needless weight).

The next time you gather your team together:

Try identifying what’s core to your team and what needs to happen to keep things running, like casting vision, celebrating, or having the right metrics.

Then, identify the things outside of your control that are moving your team forward or slowing you guys down, like neighborhood growth/decline, market growth/decline, change in leisure activities, or time of year.

And then identify what’s within your control that could be slowing your team down, like toxic team members, a weak culture, or a lack of planning.

And for you personally, reflect on whether or not you want to be on the train that you’re on.

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God is NOT Anti-System

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In 1995, astronomers thought there were were only 3000 galaxies.

Close to 10 years later, they realized there were 10,000. And now, through the Hubble telescope, they are estimating 100 billion!

Consider the vastness of our solar system, and how intricately connected it is to each other and to other systems in the universe. If the sun were to die out, it would blow away half of its mass, inflate itself, and swallow the earth. After that, this would push Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune way out and off their orbit. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

Don’t you find it fascinating that one of the first things God created was in fact, a system? The solar system? The system of the universe?

This goes to show us that He is not anti-systems in anyway.

One of the first things God created was a system—the solar system.

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I recently came across another system that you might not have heard about…

I learnt about it from a TED talk on how trees talk to each other—the system is called a mycorrhizal network.

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How to Get People to Serve in Your Church

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William Wallace, Melinda Gates, Hitler, Elvis Presley, Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, Bono, and Jeff Bezos.

What’s your off-the-cuff reaction when you hear those names? Do you think of similarities or differences? If you could group them together with one word, which one would you use?

Would the word “leader” come to mind?

Now you may or may not agree on how effective each one of those individuals were (or are) as leaders, but it’s clear that when they acted, people followed. They led and history is different because of it.

When leaders act, people follow. And history is different because of it.

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While William Wallace led with passion to secure Scottish freedom from the English, Melinda Gates has led with compassion to give away more money than most people can even begin to fathom. While Hitler led the Germans with an authoritarian grip, Elvis Presley led with his charisma and rolling tunes.

Haven’t you ever noticed that as quickly as you can name leaders, you are able to name different attributes that make each of them uniquely effective? This is because there is no silver bullet to leadership. There is no common set of characteristics that—when put together—produce the end result of a leader.

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