When it comes to being thankful, often times as adults we have a way of turning a very simple idea into something overly complex. So this week I asked my girls (Kennedy and Mia who are 6 and 5 respectfully) to star as guest bloggers and do their best to explain their thoughts when it comes to being thankful. This is what they had to say.
Left to themselves organizations…including churches, drift. It can happen to the best of us if were not careful. As organizations and churches grow they seem to naturally become more complex. There are more assets to allocate, decisions seem to have more far reaching consequences attached to them than they once did when you were smaller and more nimble, and those decisions seem to just keep coming faster and faster. It is easy to become consumed with the business of running the church. But just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you’re taking ground.
12 years ago, the dream of North Metro Church was birthed by God in the hearts of a group of people that took a risk and started “doing church” in a way very few had the courage or vision to do 12 years ago in the south. The payoff to their obedience has been literally 1,000’s of people’s lives that will never be the same!
And yet over those past 12 years North Metro Church had become busy. And for the past season of ministry the Elders of the church courageously had been asking the question, “Have we gotten away from what God put us here for in the first place?” What has ensued is a radical commitment to refocus on and refresh the original purpose, values, and approach of North Metro.
On Sunday of this past weekend I rolled out an overview of a refocusing on that dream and a sneak peak into a series that we’ll be doing in January to unpack our values at a deeper level. The conversation that we had this weekend was one that I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for. Leading North Metro Church…this is was what I was made for.
The following is the framework of that dream that God started 12 years ago and some of the nuts and bolts of our conversation on Sunday. To get the whole story you’ll have to listen to the talk from Sunday…I’ll tweet the link out once it’s up this week.
In the blockbuster-hit movie, “The Dark Knight,” Harvey Dent, the District Attorney of Gotham City, is quoted as saying; “The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.” While it was a good line in a great movie, this idea appears to have first been penned in 1650 by the English theologian and historian Thomas Fuller. Who wrote in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine And The Confines Thereof, “It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.”
Volumes have been written about the process of evaluation. In fact, some people make a pretty good living off of the evaluative process and the data that it can produce. I don’t have the time to always dig into everything as deep as I may like to so I’m always looking for clear, simple, and functional tools for effective evaluation. Here’s one that I ran across that I really like.
Leading has much more to do with relationships than most hard driving, task driven, get it done leaders will ever admit. This is one the factors that makes leadership more of a complex art than simple set of skills. That is why the best leaders have the ability to make people feel heard, valued, as though we can trust them, and that we actually want to follow them where they’re going. Believe it or not, a lot of it has to do with their level of Emotional Intelligence (or E.Q.).
Which is the combination of being simultaneously self-aware and others focused.
The best leaders don’t simply spend time on learning new management or organizational theory. The best leaders spend time on becoming better at the art of leading through relationships. After all relationships are both the glue and the grease that make work, happen.
Last month I had the opportunity to hear Tim Tassopoulos, Senior Vice President of Operations for Chick-fil-A, give a leadership talk on “Improving your Emotional Intelligence Quotient.” Below are some of my take-aways…
I help churches make vision real. I am a pastor, speaker, strategist, and ministry consultant at The Unstuck Group.
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