Faith Venture

Sorry I missed the Tuesday installment. Only had a couple of reprimands, though. With all the travel I do, I am never able to achieve a good routine. It was a great day for my professional side, though.

I’m thinking again about the post I wrote from <a href=”http://www.northpoint.org/podcasts”>Andy Stanley’s latest leadership podcast</a>. He was talking about leadership through change in an organization. These ideas also fit us on a personal level.

Remember he talked about having a mission/vision, model and doing or outcome. In our personal life, as well as organizational leadership, we need to cultivate these things.

Do you have a personal mission? A vision of what you want to be when you grow up? As crazy as this may seem, from my youth I had a vision of myself growing old gracefully. Achieving a level of fitness. Keeping mentally sharp and perpetually curious. Add some darn good genes, and few people meet me and suspect my age (which I’m not sharing). I have others. Always wanted to write. I do that. Help others, especially young people and older people. Anyway, you get the idea. What’s yours?

I once heard a story about modeling. Just as I’ve been talking lately about how Paul describes what a good church looks like, we need to describe to ourselves what we should be like in our thoughts and actions. There is a story about a top football (American style) athelete, Herschel Walker. He was a fabulous running back in both college and in the pros. Athletes watch lots of videos. At the high levels–of themselves. Often with coaches criticizing how they performed. In Walker’s case, he watched only his good runs. They were then thoroughly embedded in his mind so that when he was called on to perform, his brain was progammed to do the right thing.

Just so, we need to program our minds and bodies to do the right thing so that when the opportunity arises for us to act, think and talk, we can do so in an appropriate way.

In Andy Stanley’s latest leadership podcast, he discussed leading through change. Many of you are involved in leadership roles at work. His thoughts are just as valuable there as in your leadership roles within your faith community.

He always goes back to lessons learned from Nehemiah. Leadership can be studied in three phases. Mission/vision, model, product/program. The leader must be on a mission with a vision of the objective. The leader will communicate that vision. Then the product or program must be worked on to achieve the vision.

The key question as you are working down from vision to doing is “What is the best way to …?”

Stanley is very bright, but he may be perhaps a bit optimistic about the business world. He said that in business it’s pretty simple. If it doesn’t sell, they quit selling it. They move on to something that will sell. Sadly, I’ve experienced businesses that stubbornly cling on, trying to sell something that the market doesn’t want. Just like the church leaders he discusses who, when a program doesn’t seem to be working, seek to blame it on external forces rather than changing the program to something that works better.

That’s where Stanley says you’ll run into the most resistance to change. At the “doing” level. When you ask people to change what they do every day, they get resistant and can fall back into old habits. We don’t have people signing up for the mission to women in Tijuana? Some say let’s keep trying. Others say, we need to do it differently. The ministry to youth doesn’t seem to be clicking? Instead of saying, “It’s just kids today,” say, “What would be a better way?” But then people have to change what they do during the preparation and “class” times.

People really won’t change how they do things until they are shown that there is a better way. Getting some small successes along the way reinforces the new “habit” and progress happens.

Communicate your vision. Lead people into changing the way they do things. Move your organization forward.