I Should Practice Rolling My Rs

From a favorite book AND movie of mine. I remember Dr. Beeners reciting the final line of his sermon in Speech class at SFOT:

2019 Leadership Defined

Dale Burke, in his excellent book, How to Lead & Still Have a Life, suggests:

An exercise you may find very helpful is to get a piece of paper and ask God to help you write a description of what kind of leader you want to be 10 or 20 years from now (p. 65).

In twenty years, I’ll be seventy, so I thought I’d better go with ten years out. What kind of leader do I want to be in 2019?

I want to be an unhurried leader, someone who exemplifies the harpoonist of Eugene Peterson’s illustration, who sits in the bow of the whaling boat, calm, patient, while all around him is frenetic activity...and he does this in order to leap into action when the moment comes. It is effective action born out of purposeful tranquility.

I want to to be a focused leader, doing a few things extremely well. I want to be prayerful. I want to be the absolute best preacher I can be. I want to train new leaders, preachers, and prayer warriors. I want to be focused most of the time in my areas of strength and allow others, like Aaron and Hur, to shore up my many weaknesses.

I want to be a healthy leader. I want to be an example to the flock in my marriage. In my relationship with my kids and grandkids. In my eating and exercising. In my friendships. In my mental and emotional health.

I want to be a missional leader. I want people to look at me and say, there’s a man who is fulfilling the Great Commission, and intent on and effective in helping others to fulfill.

I want to have a rhythm as a leader. I want to stop feeling constantly under the gun, “with ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go,” to quote James Taylor.

I want to be a leader who successfully passes the baton to others. I’ve witnessed the suffering of churches whose pastors hold on to position too long, long after they might have passed it on with great results for the Kingdom of God. I don’t want to make that mistake. I want the wisdom and humility to recognize when the moment is right to pass the baton to my successor(s).

Alas, it will be quite a task to make that happen, as I don’t think any of those things is true of me and my leadership now. But God is a God of miracles, and I will pray for these six miracles to be performed in me between now and 2019.

A Pastor's Daily Prayer

For the last couple years at least, I have included in my morning prayers “A Prayer to Begin Every Day,” which sometimes (when I’m cooperative) helps me begin my day in the right frame of mind, with the most crucial petitions on my lips. It goes like this:

Lord God, Abba, Father,
thank you for this day,
and for all the promise and challenge it holds.
Help me to fulfill its promise
and answer its challenge.
Make me mindful of your presence all day;
remind me constantly that you are constant;
deliver me from temptation;
save me from stress caused by small faith;
help me to greet every turn in the path today
in the awareness that nothing surprises you,
nothing overwhelms you,
and nothing is too hard for you.
Grant me the peace that comes
from single-mindedness:
I have nothing to do today
except follow you as closely and faithfully as I can,
and the rest--all the results and ramifications--
is in your hand.
Amen.

Church of the Week: Peter's House

This week's church has got to be one of the most unusual and unique in all Christendom.

When the lovely Robin and I first journeyed to Israel in 1987, we were hugely interested to learn that the site of Peter's house in Capernaum is one of the most well-attested Christian sites in the Holy Land. Above is how it looked in 1987; the room contained within the central octagonal shrine appears to have been part of an insula (a complex of small single-story residential rooms and courtyards) that toward the end of the first century was put to public use, possibly as a domus ecclesia, a private house used as a church. The plastered walls of the enshrined room were found to be scratched with graffiti in Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Latin, containing the words "Jesus", "Lord", "Christ" and "Peter".

When we made our second trip to the site in 2001, we were amazed (and a little disoriented at first) to find that the Franciscans (who have owned the place since the 19th century) had built an unusually-shaped modern church over the site of St. Peter’s house. Hexagonal in shape and rather spaceship-like in appearance, it is elevated on pillars and has a glass floor, so that visitors can still see the original church below.

I was really disappointed at first. I much prefer archaeological sites to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox habit of plopping a church down on every meaningful piece of land they can find....BUT, you gotta admit, them Catholics sure know how to build churches! Despite the intrusive exterior, the church is beautiful inside...and does preserve the pilgrim's ability to see the actual house of Peter through the glass floor.

"Don't Hate" Church

From one of my favorite blogs, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks:



So many questions, so little time.

3 Steps to Fighting Discouragement

From CatalystSpace:

As a leader, discouragement is one of your biggest enemies. It will cause you to feel defensive, defeated, de-motivated and make you less effective.

Discouragement often comes when your expectations are not met or your desires are not realized. Maybe things didn't turn-out the way you had hoped, or you didn't get the thing you wanted, or something terrible went wrong.

When one of these happens, these steps might help you get un-discouraged:

1. Remember that God is in control of all things
Just like with Job, He allows us to suffer challenges, difficulties, pain. His ways are not our ways - He LOVES us so deeply, but our goals often do not line-up with His - so if things don't work-out the way we want, remember, they DO work-out the way He wants, and what He wants is actually best for us.

2. Remember God works all things for your good
Not only is God in control, but He's actually on your side. As it says in Romans 8:28 - God works all things together for the good of those who love Him... Also, He disciplines those He loves (Heb 12:6, Rev 3:19) - so negative things happening to you may be discipline to mature you. Maybe you wanted something or an outcome that's not for your good. Trust God that He really does this - look for it and you might even see the positive things He's doing from what was discouraging you. His ways are not our ways - but His end result is for our good.

3. Praise & Thank God
"...and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance" - Romans 5:2-3. We have much to praise and thank God for. Cultivating a heart of praise and thanks - especially when you're discouraged - helps you get out of yourself, realize that your life is but a vapor, and our Amazing, Glorious God is doing something wonderful in history, but He's also meeting your needs every day, and giving you some pretty great stuff to enjoy too! Furthermore, according to scripture, we can even thank God for suffering, because it's for our good!

It's fun to wallow in self-pity. Our flesh loves to feel wronged or like things are unfair. There is something alluring about despair. But this is all a lie that the enemy uses to destroy us or make us ineffective.

But God's way is better! Rejoice in your disappointments, praise and thank God, remember that He's in control and working it out for your good! Seek first His Kingdom, and all will be added unto you.