Friday Links
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It is Friday again… and already! Here are some of the best posts I read this week on the blogs I follow. I hope they inspire you to be who God intended you to be. Enjoy!
- Jonathan Acuff posted one of the most important posts I have read in quite some time titled “Forgetting 1 Geography Lesson.” Read this post, if it is the only one you read this week.
- “Get More People To Do It” is an excellent post by Tony Morgan on getting people involved in taking their next steps. Awesome, awesome stuff!
- Perry Noble writes about “Why Some Churches Struggle With Money.” Great insight in this post.
- Having the right people in the right spot is important. Training them right is also important. Mark Waltz speaks to this end in his post “Get The Right People. Train Them Right.”
- 4% is a moving post by Mark Beeson. It is so important to be asking the right questions!
That is it! I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!
Quotable Tuesday
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Today I have another quote to share from the Global Leadership Summit. This one is from Jeff Manion, author of The Land Between. This was a very, very timely message for me as we are in our “land between.” I ended up buying his book at the Summit and will hopefully do a review here in the near future. One of the many great quotes I got from Jeff was this:
“The land between is the best place for transformational growth. But it can also be the place where faith goes to die. The land between is the very soil where God does some of His richest and deepest work.”
Of course the greatest illustration of what Jeff talked about is the nation of Israel as they wandered in the desert. It is this story that he writes about in his book. Israel had a choice: either obey, let God lead and get to the promised land, or disobey, complain against God, and wander around until everyone that current generation of leaders died. Of course, we know the rest of the story. We know that Israel ended up wandering around for 40 years.
In my “Land Between,” I want to do my best to let God grow me. I want God to work in me. Not so people can say anything about me, but so I can come out on the other side more like Jesus and with a deeper love and commitment to serve others. We have learned a lot in out Land Between, and as far as I know we still have several months to go. When in that land, we can either get bitter or better. Our faith will either die or take a great step forward.
It would have been easier to have “wished away” my land between, but I really believe we will be better because of it. I already feel like I have learned so much, and I pray daily for God to teach us, and use us to reach others.
I spent some time in a junkyard Sunday afternoon. That is not my normal Sunday afternoon routine, but circumstances on Saturday led to a trip to the automotive graveyard on Sunday.
You see, on Saturday, my oldest son decided to do a little work on his 1998 Mustang. Those models are plagued with seat belt retractors that wear out in short order, and that bothered my son. He inherited his annoyance of insignificant things that do not work from me. Little squeaks and noises I hear while driving my car drive me nuts. So much so that I have been known to pull off the road and find the source of the annoyance and irritation, or walk to my destination if I cannot find it.
He has more ability than I do when it comes to mechanical things, and decided to pull the seat belts apart to fix them. In the end though, he was not able to fix them (to his credit, he worked on them several hours and it was a tuff job). We were left with two seat belts that were broken and in need of replacement, which was expensive according to the dealer. So, after church my son was off to the junkyard. Over an hour later he called me to let me know he was stuck and unable to get a couple of seat belts off of a deceased Mustang sitting in the yard, so off I went to assist (remember, I suck at this). I got there, and tried using the tools that he had brought with him to remove the bolts that were holding it all together (these were my tools… and I have very few of them, so his choices were limited). There was no way the tool I had was going to work. It was just NOT the right one for the job. We ended up leaving to go and get the proper tool for the job, and 20 minutes after we got back to the junk yard we had the two seat belts removed and left to go home to install them. The right tool made all the difference.
I used that last line to teach my boys a life lesson. Get the right tool for the job, it will make it easier and is more efficient at getting the desired result. Lesson learned. But I just want to mention an application for the church as well: use the right person for the job to be done.
From the very beginning, God designed the church to have many parts, or many “tools” to use to build His Church and His Kingdom. The Scriptures teach us that each tool has its place or task, and that all the tools are necessary for the church to be effective and to be efficient to achieve the desired result.
Having the right person in a staff position is key. Most people in the church realize this. Andmost churches think that hiring the right staff is all they need to do to get the job done. We tend to overlook that when it comes to filling volunteer positions, but it is just as important to have to have the right people in those positions. They will make or break your program or ministry. After all, the only thing worse than having no one in the position is having the wrong person in the position. You are asking for trouble when you get up and announce from the platform that you need someone to step up and lead a program or ministry. You will likely end up with someone who is not gifted in that area of ministry or someone who does not have the ability as far as skill or leadership is concerned. We have all seen that happen, and it never ends well for either party.
Having the right tools made a world of a difference in getting my sons car fixed. It also makes a difference in this world having the right people leading and doing ministry in the church. You have to have the right tool for the job!
Friday Links
By ·Been a couple of weeks since I posted some links from great leaders. Take a few minutes and read a few of these posts. I know they will add value to your ministry and life. Hope you all have a great weekend!
- Good ideas take time to develop, and sometimes that means saying “no” now so you can do it right. Carlos Whittaker talks about this in his post “Good Ideas Deserve You Saying NO To Your Pastor.” That is hard to do, especially if you are a people-pleaser by nature (as I am). Sometimes, being able to “pull it off” is not the best road to take. Most folks know when something needed more time. And God deserves that from us!
- Mark Beeson talks about the choices, actions and outcomes and what the Bible says about how all three are related in his post titled, “Watching My Son Fish Got Me Thinking.”
- Loved the post by Pete Wilson, who actually quoted another post from Keven DeYoung. The last line is SO true, yet so opposite of what many people want to hear as they strive for success in ministry. Here it is: “Daily discipleship is not a new revolution each morning or an agent of global transformation every evening; it’s a long obedience in the same direction.” Take time to read the post titled “Plodding Visionaries” at Pete’s site.
- Seth Godin has so many good posts! Just take time to read “Exploration and the Risk of Failure” and “Avoiding Momentum.” Both are great reads, and both tackle an issue many church leaders struggle with: making changes.
- Tony Morgan didn’t know he was writing a blog post for me on my birthday on July 30th, but he wrote one just for me on something I struggle with all the time. Read his post “Are You Addicted to People Pleasing.” And I hope you are pleased with it.
Ok, that is enough. Really, I hope everyone has a great weekend! Enjoy the last few weeks of summer!
Quotable Tuesday
By ·Today I have another quote from the Global Leadership Summit that impacted me. This one is from Christine Caine. She had a lot of great things to say, but one that stuck out to me was this one:
“Many church leaders spend a lot of time praying for a miracle but will not step into the place where miracles happen.”
As I look back at my life and ministry, I can see times that I longed for God to move in a big, even miraculous way. Now that I am on this side of it, I can also see that there were times that God was already working, where He was ready to do something big in my life or the life of my church, and all I (or we) had to do was step “out of the boat” for the movement of God to happen. My own faith, or I should say, lack of faith, can be the reason why God at times seems to hold back the miraculous. He wants to move in big ways… He wants to show Himself strong in my life, and in the life of His church. But until we step out, in faith, where the miracles can happen, we will never see them happen.
God, help me to step out!
