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