Pastor + Author
Recently I filmed a 90 Second Leadership video for LifeWay Leadership on this important insight that reveals how we best learn.
I hope you enjoy it!
If you like what you saw on this video, I elaborate on this concept further in my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry.
Click here to watch other 90 Second Leadership videos by LifeWay Leadership.
There are no perfect church vision statements.If you’re looking to change yours, or create one from scratch, the thought of copying another church’s vision statement has probably come across your mind.
Don’t do it!
While it’s fine to see how others have worded theirs for ideas and inspiration—whatever you do—don’t short circuit the process.
Now obviously, copying someone else’s vision statement would be easier and faster, but in this matter specifically, the process is as important as the outcome (I’ll explain why later on). And while the foundation for every church’s vision statement is built with the same building blocks of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, the way you put them together needs to be different than the way the church down the road did theirs. This is because the vision statement for your church is for your church—it’s not for the church down the road! So your vision statement needs to be contextualized and worded into language that your church understands.
One more note about vision statements, and then I’ll get to why the process is as important as the outcome.
It needs to be feel real and tangible, but not fully here, since vision is more about the future than the present. It’s more like a foretaste, than it is a full meal. Here’s how I describe it in my book, No Silver Bullets.
Vision is about the preferred future. It’s the ability to conceptualize a picture of a golden tomorrow that does not yet exist. It’s about seeing both the difficulties and possibilities so clearly that you can actually visualize a different reality than the one you can see with your eyes. Simply put, vision is about painting the dreams that God has laid on your heart for all to see. In order to discover those God-given dreams, you need to start by considering “everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8) so that you can stop wondering “what kind of mission God has for me,” and instead begin asking, “what kind of me God wants for His mission.”
[Read more…] about How to Create a Vision Statement For Your Church
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.
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.
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.
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.
[Read more…] about How to Develop Servant Leaders
So to see my name on two published books, four eBooks, and another published book on the way is humbling. This is not a humble brag—I’m just seriously floored and surprised by the way that God has led my wife and I to this point. All glory be to God!
I literally wrote out a plan until my wife and I were in our eighties. Several years later, am I ever glad that this wonderful plan didn’t come to pass because God’s ways are always higher, deeper, and better than ours. We unfortunately had to learn that the hard way post-Korea, which is another story for another time. You can read more about it here.
If God has placed a dream on your heart to write, I hope that this will be an encouragement to you.
There’s no formula for going viral—even the best marketers haven’t cracked the nut. Sure, your article or book needs to be timely, it needs to hit a felt need, and it needs to be written well, but there’s that intangible “share-ability” nature to everything that goes viral that’s hard to figure out. In fact, a pursuit for the next viral article can cause you to chase rabbits and trends, rather than write on topics that you’re personally passionate about and have something to say on.
So stop obsessing over SEO hacks and keywords for your title, and instead focus on honing your writing skills. I’m not telling you to ignore SEO and keywords, since they do help the “share-ability” of your content. I’m just saying that it may not be the best way to spend your time as a writer. What’s most important is practice, since the only way to get better at writing is by writing.
We love overnight success stories. When we see people pop, or their book go on the New York Times bestseller list, we get jealous—especially if we’ve never heard of them before. But when you dig deeper, most of these overnight success stories aren’t overnight success stories. J.K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter pitch was rejected twelve times, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit was self-published, Madeleine L’Engles’ A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times, and on and on it goes.
Don’t get caught up in hacks to get famous or to make your book pop. Like Dory in Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”
The theologian and professor J.I. Packer is probably best known for his book Knowing God. It’s been a classic for over 40 years, one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals, received a platinum book award from the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association, and has sold over one million copies. When Knowing God popped, I’m sure most people thought that Packer was an overnight success—unbeknownst to them, this was his ninth book!
Don’t give up. Just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing.
[Read more…] about 5 Things I’ve Learned About Writing
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…
This goes to show us that He is not anti-systems in anyway.
I learnt about it from a TED talk on how trees talk to each other—the system is called a mycorrhizal network.
[Read more…] about God is NOT Anti-System