Nancy Ortburg

"If the ceiling on the gospel in your church is you, we might as well all go home." We to recruit others better than ourselves to lead with us from in front of us when we can find them.

Where is God when I'm Scared

I'm having my quiet time with Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato and two of my grandsons. They (Bob and Larry) have a tremendous video out (if you don't have kids or grandkids you may not be familiar with Veggie Tales) that deals with fear management. It's called "Where is God when I'm Scared".

The lead song is "God is bigger than the boogeyman and he's watching out for you and me."

When it comes to fear managment and walking by faith, that just about says it all. "Out of the mouth of babes . . ."

What is the boogeyman that you need to turn over to God today?

Fear and Faith

I attended a great retreat last week with a dozen wonderful church planters. My sense, again, is that leadership is all about fear management. When we walk by faith we are either walking into the unknown (which we all dislike doing) or into something that we know includes risk.

The beginning point of fear management is to identify of what we are afraid. This may be harder than it first appears. As in sales, the easiest identified fear may not really be the real reason we are afraid. The reason for this being that if we solve a psuedo-fear, we can still harbor our real fear (sounds kind of strange doesn't it) and still keep in reserve a good reason to not walk by faith.

Being honest with ourselves about what we really fear is often embarassing. We think more loftily of ourselves, but most of us have garden variety fears--failure, embarassment, fear of pain, fear of consequences, fear of ridicule. The old playground wisdom, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me" is totally false, even though we wish it were true.

Seth Godin in Tribes paraphrases the Peter Principle as leaders rise to their level of their willingness to assume risk.

Every leader is afraid. Good leaders identify their fears, lay them before God, and continue walking forward anyway by faith.

Heb 13:9 "It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, . . ."NIV

Good saying

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

Heard it this morning on a Zen sportstalk radio (it's Northern California--give me a break).

Years ago, Dr. Bryce Jessup, after one of my wild-eyed vision talks, gently said to me, "What is your plan?" "A vision without a plan is only a pipe dream." Those words have served me well.

Vision casting and more importantly, vision fulfillment always requires hard work, sacrifice, commitment and dying to self.

For church planters, it's often easy to have vision. I often must be reminded to count the cost before I start building the tower. By disciplining myself,(which is not as common as I'd like, I am able to avoid vision-hopping. When I don't I find myself jumping from one dream to another and nothing gets accomplished except frustrating those around me.

Tribes

I've been reading Tribes, by Seth Godin. I'm a big fan of Seth, I like what he writes. I also like most of Tribes. If it is read in the vein of servant leadership it can help change the face of the church for the better. If it is read in a spirit of self-centeredness, what can I get, then I'm afraid of some of his followers.

And that is the crux of the matter. Many times followers of authors or disciples of leaders, take the themes to extremes.

I have watched this past couple of years, from very close proximity, 6 or more church coups. It seems that the spirit of Absalom is alive and flourishing in our culture. I will grant that there are some old guys (my age) who have decided to hang on rather than grow. But the tragic part is that always there are people lost to the Kingdom of Christ by the strife that happens.

For the next week, I am going to reflect on Tribes. I encourage your dialogue because I'm not always the most critical reader.

In the meantime, I suggest reading one chapter of Philippians for every chapter of Tribes.