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Asking the right questions

May 17, 2012 in Leadership with 3 Comments

The most important thing we can do as a leader is ask the right questions of ourself and others.

When we don’t ask the right questions we get wrong information. When we don’t ask the right people questions we get wrong information. When we don’t ask ourselves the right questions we live in self deception.

Questions I am asking myself

1. What story am I writing for myself and my family?
2. In any area God gives me influence what am I going to say?
3. Am I treasuring Christ?
4. Am I living my life free from regret of the past and fear of the future but fully dependent on Christ?
5. What am I doing that if God doesn’t show up I’ll be in trouble.

Questions we need to ask as leaders few people are asking.

1. How are we going to communicate the Gospel to kids?
2. What do we want our kids, teens and adults to become?
3. What will my decisions as a leader look like in 10 years?
4. In a curriculum climate that largely leaves out the Holy Spirit, how am I going to intentionally add the truth of who the Holy Spirit is in a biblically accurate way.
5. When I leave the area of ministry I am currently serving what deposit will I leave? What will remain what we be lost after I am gone.
6. Am I building on my personality and preferences or am I building on Christ and his work that will remain?

REdefining Maturity (Part 2)

May 8, 2012 in Leadership, Personal with 2 Comments

This is an article I did for K! magazine a few years ago. K! is a great magazine Ryan Frank and his team do an outstanding job of finding new voices. I also am a huge fan of the layout of the magazine love the artwork. If you are not getting K! magazine and are involved in ministering to kids you need to subscribe now. Here is the link to part 1.

Here’s a few things you can do to ensure that you are maturing in your faith:

Read Your Bible

It’s not a textbook for ministry, but a guidebook for your personal life. It’s huge. Something that I find intimidating, if not down right frightening, is the fact that you reproduce who you are. I want to make sure I can say to those I am leading, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” We live in an amazing time in history, and yet we face some very unique and serious challenges.

One of the challenges we need to overcome is how to produce young people who are passionate about the Bible. There are a million things vying for our attention; we are bombarded by information. Our kids have more options today than we ever had growing up.  That is why we need to be more intentional than ever about reading our bibles.

One of the best ways to get our kids reading their Bibles is to read our Bibles. I think the more we model this to our kids, the more we are going to be able to give them a biblical answer when they need one. The more we read our bibles, the more we are going to shape their world view.  As a result, they will see the value of God’s word in their daily lives. I think we do our kids a huge disservice by treating the Bible as a textbook only to be studied or a storybook to entertain. I think we need to model the Bible to our kids as a handbook for life. If we don’t read it, they won’t read it.

Listen to Podcasts

I am not in the auditorium sitting and listening to the pastor’s sermon very often and when I am, I struggle with my ability to focus on what is being said because my thoughts so often drift to my kids and volunteers. One of the things I have found over the years to help me is to listen to messages during the week when I am able to listen without interruption. I try to get podcasts from my church and from many different leaders from around the country. I have to admit I am like a 13 year old girl buying concert tickets to Hannah Montana, when I am downloading Andy Stanley’s leadership podcast. If you are in ministry and don’t listen to Andy’s podcast – shame on you! I have also been listening to massive amounts of Tim Keller. Love Tim and Andy. Either way, find some podcasts of leaders you like and leaders who stretch you, and you will grow.

Practice Transparent Faith

This could be a whole article in itself, but I think another sign of maturity is transparency. Accountability has been a buzz word for years, and I believe it is very important, but I think as a leader of kids in today’s culture you need to practice, model and teach transparent faith. I grew up in church, and I honestly can’t ever remember any of my pastors talking about a personal struggle, a failure or misstep they had made. Do I think we as leaders should talk openly about everything we are dealing with? No. I do think that creating a healthy church environment starts by doing what James tells us to do: confess our sins to each other that we may be healed.

I often tell kids that there are times when I don’t feel like coming to church. Why do I say this? Because it’s the truth, and the more I can model transparent faith, the greater chance we will have of creating a community that also values it. I believe that people who are far from God can identify more with our transparency than they can with our super-spirituality.

Leverage collaborative connections

The last thing that I believe we need as leaders is other leaders that are fighting along side us. I remember as a young guy starting out in kids’ ministry and not knowing what the heck I was doing.  I would have done anything to have 10 minutes with someone like Jim Wideman or Craig Juntila or anyone for that matter who had been doing kids’ ministry longer than me. When I was starting out, I was not connected to any other kids’ pastors, and I made some bonehead mistakes simply because I didn’t know better. I also did some things well but could have done better had there been other voices speaking into my life.

Fast forward to today, and I can tell you I have met more awesome kids’ leaders in the past year than in all my years of ministry combined. There are so many phenomenal tools like Twitter, www.cmconnect.org and www.kidology.com to help you connect, learn, and grow. Hard to believe that 12 years ago I would’ve had to spend $2,000 to attend a conference to wait in line for the slim chance of asking Brother Jim one question. Today I can sit on my couch, unshowered, eating cheetos while watching the Yankees slaughter the Red Sox , and Tweet my question to Jim (@jimwideman by the way).  I get my response before the baseball game is over. Or I can think of a joke that would make @funnymandan laugh all the way in Australia. That, my friends, is amazing.

If you are not leveraging the power of collaboration, you need to start for your sake, for your kids’ sake and for the kingdom’s sake.

These are just some of the ways I stay fresh and try to model maturity to my kids and kids’ leaders. You’re leading the next generation of leaders and world changers. Don’t treat your spiritual life like the house plants in my living room.  Begin the self-feeding revolution. You’re on the frontline of instilling values and spiritual formation in our churches. Feed yourself, and model for the kids and families in your church what it means to mature in Christ. Go ahead, grow!

REdefining Maturity (Part 1)

May 7, 2012 in Leadership, Personal with 1 Comment

This is an article I did for K! magazine a few years ago. K! is a great magazine Ryan Frank and his team do an outstanding job of finding new voices. I also am a huge fan of the layout of the magazine love the artwork. If you are not getting K! magazine and are involved in ministering to kids you need to subscribe now.

Keeping your faith fresh.

I’m no green thumb but my wife by her own admission is even worse. Over the past ten years of married life she has successfully killed every houseplant we’ve brought into our home. She over waters, under waters, gives them her leftover espresso, she don’t give the plant enough sunlight, she give them too many nutrients, or generally just neglects the potted shrine in the corner of our living room. In our time-pressed (and often forgetful) 21st century context she (and I) often just forget to care for our little green friends. The result: they just don’t grow. At best they’re a weak, anemic sick thing that hides behind the couch; at worst they’re dead, but remain there as part of the living room environment.

In my interactions with kids’ pastors, workers and volunteers over the past ten years, I’ve noticed at times a striking parallel between the plant life in my home and ministry. It’s all too often true that in the midst of our time-pressed, budget-strapped, need-more-volunteers culture we sacrifice, even neglect, the very thing that fuels our ministry. I’d even go as far as to say that beyond all our creative programing, it is this one thing that is absolutely vital in the transformation of our kids.  Simply put, it is our spiritual growth – our intimacy with Christ – that truly impacts our kids.  Whether it be in our homes or ministries, kids will engage first with our passions long before they are impacted by our principles, programs or our creativity. A healthy, vibrant, growing relationship with Jesus is the greatest gift we can give our kids, and yet so often it’s the thing we forsake.

As I’ve delved through what it means to mature spiritually, it struck me that perhaps we’ve been honing in on the wrong target in our westernized version of Christianity. For too long we’ve defined spiritual maturity as being about all the spiritual stuff we know. Quite frankly, when I read the Bible and see how Jesus lives it out with his disciples, life as Jesus intended seems much more about what we’re becoming and then acting upon what we know. Is it possible that our erroneous definition of spiritual maturity has led to a kind of shallow, self-focused Christianity that’s always looking to be fed more stuff and find the perfect church or ministries for our families? What if spiritual maturity was about living out, in real and dynamic ways, what we read about in Scripture? Imagine what we might become.

I find the author of Hebrew’s reference to maturing Christians in chapter 5 in which he pointed to the fact that in the context of their everyday lives they were practicing the truths of Scripture. They weren’t being fed bottled milk; they had learned what it meant to feed themselves, and then live out that truth. Perhaps this is the greatest gift we can give the kids under our care and ministry – a real life example that growing in Christ, indeed our spiritual formation, isn’t a plate full of facts and knowledge but a dynamic relationship with Jesus that transforms and finds expression in the relationships and world around us.

If I was to define maturity in just a few words that would fundamentally change the face of Children’s ministry and the church as a whole, it would be the ability to feed yourself. That’s it. No big words just feed yourself.  Being able to fill your own spiritual tank is a great example of intangible leadership.

Being a self-feeder is a must for any growing healthy Christian.  It is even more essential for those involved in leading kids. We are often in that position of giving out and pouring into kids and families. Without learning this principle we will dry up and burn out. It’s imperative that we not neglect our own spiritual growth. So what does it look like “to fill your own tank”?

Why volunteers don’t attend your meetings.

April 23, 2012 in Leadership with 12 Comments

Have you ever asked yourself why no one ever comes to your training meetings? Have you ever bought 200 bagels and 5 boxes of Joe in preparation for 100% attendance by your volunteer teams? Only to have 185 bagels left over. I see that hand and that hand belongs to me.

What do we do? We blame the people we invited we blame the methods we used to get the people out, and even sometimes the donuts, but rarely do we look at the content of the meeting itself.

In my experience most meetings for volunteers are held because of the accumulation of important information that needs to be shared. So you call everyone out to the church, on a Saturday for a three hour meeting on diaper changing policy.

The first big mistake we make is we think people care as much about information as we do. They don’t.

If you want people to attend your meetings. Here is what you need to do.

1. Start on time end on time – value their time.
2. 30% Fellowship/Relationship
3. 60% Inspiration/Vision/Values
4. 10% Information – Give people information other ways – email, facebook, blogs.
5. Connect meetings to things they are already attending
6. Most leaders want to grow make your meeting about leadership growth not trivial facts.

If they know they are going to be poured into and challenged they will come back. Do them and your ministry a favor. Talk vision and values way more than you talk about putting stickers on freshly changed baby bums.

Are you Insecure?

April 13, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

Read this in a book I am reading called “The Importance of Being Foolish” by Brennan Manning. Such a powerful reminder of our need for constant dependance.

Insecurity not only paralyzes our relationship with the living God but has a devastating effect on interpersonal relationships. It is the starting point of all social estrangement. It breaks down openness, which is the bridge to the existential world of the other.It undermines real communication and causes a kind of rupture in the evolution of authentic personality. Ken Keys Jr. Writes:

The security center is such a lonely level of consciousness. When you consciousness is preoccupied with striving toward what you feel to be your security needs, you are more isolated from people than at any other level. And your energy will be at its lowest. When you are preoccupied with security, you are trapped in conflicting conditions in your relationships with others. You create “others” as objects to help you become more secure – or as objects to fight because they threaten your security. On the security level you cannot love others since this level creates great distances between you and other people.

The insecure Christian finds it exceedingly difficult to listen to the opinions of others. He is so uncertain about his own identity that he has to assert himself all the time, gripped as he is by the fear that in listening to others or surrendering an opinion he may lose a part of his own shaky identity.

So powerful. Our hope and our identity has got to be firmly found in Him. If our peace, if our joy, if our foundation is anything other than Christ we will be shaken. The deeper our trust in who he the more He will be exulted and glorified in our triumphs and in our tragedies.

Be secure you have been bought with a price walk in the Grace by which you have been saved extending love and grace in every interaction because of the grace and love afforded to you.

 

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