An Abundance of Courage…

Talk about an impossible assignment: Joshua had been tapped to be Moses’ successor.   

Moses had an amazing backstory.  He was saved as an infant, due to the shrewd thinking of his mother and the compassion of an Egyptian Princess.  He grew up in a palace, with the most privileged members of Pharaoh’s house.  Forced to flee after he committed murder, he met a girl, got married, and wandered the back country for forty years. 

Then God spoke to him out of a bush that burned, except it didn’t burn up.  God told Moses to go back to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let my people go. Moses went, reluctantly.  Ten plagues and several encounters with Pharaoh later, the people were set free. 

You’d think his problems were over, but they were just beginning.  The people of Israel had been slaves and didn’t know how to self-govern.  They had to learn, and Moses was their teacher.  He met with God on Mount Sinai, and spoke to God face to face, like a friend.  He gave the Israelite’s their law, the foundation of their culture.  He stuck with them through their rebellion and lead them to brink of the land God promised to give them.  Then, he went up on a mountain and died, seeing the promised land, but never entering. 

 Conquering this land would be Joshua’s job.  Joshua was born a slave.  No Egyptian Princess rescued him from the Nile.  He knew what it was like to get up every day and be treated different than other men because of his racial background.  He’d worked a slave’s job with a slave’s hours.  When Joshua first appears in the Exodus story, he is down in the valley, fighting hand to hand, while Moses is on the Mountain, holding up his arms.  Moses was doing important work, no doubt, but Joshua’s job was to be in the thick of it. 

 Joshua was on the fringes, waiting on Mount Sinai while Moses talked to God.   He would stay outside and guard the tent where Moses went to talk to God.  When a battle needed to fought, or when there was a spy assignment, the job went to Joshua.  A good man.  Someone you want by your side.  But he was not Moses. 

The problem with great leaders is they all die.  When they do, someone else has to lead.  For thirty days the people of Israel mourned Moses’ death.  Then they turn to Joshua.  He’s the new leader.  This is his time. 

There is a moment when God speaks to Joshua.  We don’t know if it was in Moses’ old “God Tent” or while he was walking around the camp one day.  We do know what God said.  He started with the facts: Moses is dead.  Seems like an obvious conclusion, but maybe it was God’s way of telling Joshua nothing would bring Moses back, and there was a new mission, a mission for which he had been chosen. 

His mission?  Cross the Jordan River into enemy territory.  Take possession of the land God promised.  Fight battles.  You will win them, but you still have to fight them, God said. Then God gives him a promise: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you.”  God is making a simple point: When an elephant and an ant cross a bridge and it vibrates, it’s not the ant that does it.   

Then God gives Joshua some orders.   They are not “Round up the army.”  They are not “Get ready for battle.”  They are simple: “Be strong and courageous.”  God tells Joshua this three times.  Must be important. 

To “be strong” means to have strength to hold your position.  To “be courageous” means to have the will to go forward.  Three times God told Joshua the key to winning any battle:  Be strong.  Be courageous. 

We are in a battle, battling against a mutation of nature.  I hear over and over this phrase: “Out of an abundance of caution…”  I get the need for caution.  But I’m not so sure this should be our mantra.   

I believe this is a time to be strong.  Stand strong against anxiety.  Be strong enough to resist hoarding supplies.  Be strong and pray for our country, for the sick, for front-line providers.  Be strong and do not think yourself sick.  Teach your children how to be strong. 

Be courageous.  Be courageous and  help your neighbor.  Be courageous and encourage each other.  Be courageous and accept medical instruction.  Be courageous and endure, for “sorrow last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.”   This will pass.  COVID19 is not forever.  Be courageous and know that the God of Moses and Joshua is with you.   

This is a time for an abundance of courage.  This is a time to be strong and courageous. 

Five Decisions (Not Resolutions) for Leaders for 2018

Already my inbox is full of blog posts telling me what resolutions I need to make for 2018.  Here’s the problem with resolutions: they’re often made, but seldom kept.  Andy Stanley put it best: “Direction, not intention, determines destination.”  Direction is a result of a decision.

Let me encourage you to make five decisions this week that will set the stage for a better 2018:

1.  Build Your Core.   Your core is what provides you with energy to lead.  Maybe you’re great at taking care of your physical core.  What about your spiritual core?  Maybe you need to strengthen your spiritual self by deciding to pursue a new spiritual practice, like fasting.

How’s your emotional core?  Every decision a leader makes contains an emotional element.  If you don’t know your emotional self, or if it is in shambles, dive into your emotional core to do what needs to be done.  Decide to see a counselor.  Go to a twelve-step meeting. 

The reason most leaders neglect their core is time.  Face this reality: neglecting your core will lead to burn out.  You are not the exception.  Your body, or your soul, or your emotions will flame out. 

Make the decision to take care of your core.

2.  Care deeper.  People want to know how much the leader cares before they care how much the leader knows.  Tom Peters has tried to teach us: “Do Management by Wandering Around (MBWA).”  Connect to the people you lead.  Go into work and stop by someone’s desk who recently lost a parent.  Ask: “How are you – really?”  Listen.  The ten minutes this stop takes will result in you being a better human being.  You can’t be a better leader if you aren’t a better human being.

I understand the pressure is on to get results.  I also know employees who know they matter are more productive.  I also know customers want to know they matter to you.  When is the last time you called a customer not to sell, but just to see how they are?

Face to face is best.  Calls are good.  Emails are marginal.  But the worst expression of care is the one that is never given.

Make the decision to care deeper.

3.  Coach wiser.  John Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach, did not win his first NCAA championship for ten years.  He led his team to the tournament five times before he won his first of ten titles.  What made the difference?  In his autobiography, They Call Me Coach, Coach Wooden shared how he analyzed his team’s performance over all their post season appearances.  He realized at the end of the season, at tournament time, his team was making more mistakes and had less energy.  Coach Wooden made a simple adjustment to his meticulous practice schedule, using scrimmages and drills that required less exertion. The next year, UCLA won the championship.  He coached wiser.

Every leader coaches.  This is the part of leadership that involves planning, strategy, and execution.  Often young leaders (and new head coaches) will brag about not being outworked.  It’s not how many hours you put in, but how you use those hours.  

Decide to analyze your organization and your role in it.  What do you need to stop doing?  What do you need to start doing?  If you were fired tomorrow, what would the new guy do?  Why don’t you do it? 

This requires time to work “On the business, not just in the business (Michael Gerber).”  A senior leader once told me, “The hour I spend each day in my rocking chair thinking about our church is my most valuable contribution to the team.”

Make the decision to coach wiser.

4.  Communicate Clearly.   I’m a speaker and a writer.  I must communicate clearly, right?  Not according to my wife, my kids, my administrative assistant, my direct reports, my supervising board…  You get the picture. 

The reason leaders garble their communication is the same reason they don’t take care of their core: time.  We dash off emails and letters and leave voicemails without thinking empathically.  How will these words be received?  Is this sentence clear?  Do grammatical and spelling errors get in the way of what I’m trying to say? 

Before you send, review.   Before you leave the voicemail, plan what you will say and how your voice will sound.  Don’t “wing it” when it comes to speeches.  Be intentional.  Every time you communicate, someone is encountering your voice for the first time.

Make the decision to communicate clearly.

5.  Be Courageous.  “Hope is not a strategy (Mark Miller).”  We can hope the two employees in conflict can work it out.  We can hope the dysfunction manager is just going through a phase.  We can hope the strategic environment will get clearer.  As important as hope is, it take courage to bring action.

Being courageous means facing reality.  It means facing numbers that tell unpleasant truths.  It means having the hard conversations that will never go perfect.  It means you apologize when you realize there was a better way to handle something.

It takes courageous leadership for an organization to thrive.  It is courage that claims new ground, that faces dysfunction, and that fights against the resistors.

Make the decision to be courageous.

Start 2018 off, not by making resolutions, but by making five key decisions:

1.      Build your core.

2.      Care deeper

3.      Coach wiser

4.      Communicate clearly

5.      Be courageous.

When is the Hill Worth Dying On?

We’ve all heard the question:  Is this a hill worth dying on?

During a recent conversation with a young man I’m mentoring, he asked me, “How do know what hill is worth dying on?”

Great question.  Simple answer: There are fewer hills worth dying on than you think.

More complicated answer:  there is a two part answer.

The first part:  what hill should you not die on?  Quick guidelines:

·        Don’t die on hills of tactics.  When and where are rarely issues to sacrifice yourself on.

·        Don’t die on a hill of strategy.  There are always multiple paths to achieve goals.  Yes, your way may be faster and less expensive.  Maybe your organization needs to do it the hard way first to learn something.  It can be such a little thing to be right.

·        When you are feeling anxious or rushed.  Anxiety distorts reality.  Does the decision need to be made now or can it wait?  People in anxious states become defensive and want to battle because they want to relieve the tension instead of winning the battle.  Often they lose the battle and get more tension.

·        When the hill is irrelevant.  The island-hopping strategy of Admiral Chester Nimitz in World War II was to avoid Japanese strongholds and let them wither on their own.  Instead, he located strategic islands to advance his mission to threaten the Japanese homeland.  There are programs you did not need to battle.  You need to wait for natural deaths.

·        When time is your ally.  In every organization there will be visionaries, early adopters, middle adopters, late adopters, and resistors.  If every hill is a battle, you will alienate the late adopters first, and then the middle adopters.  If you can be patient, the early adopters will convince the middle and late adopters that it is okay to get on board.

The second part:  what hill should you die on?  Quick guidelines:

·        Die on the hill of your mission, once you have buy in.  It takes a church about three years to buy into an understanding of its unique reason for being.  Once that is known, fight for it.  Protect your mission from the leaches who want to add one more thing.  Encourage people who want to do other things to find other churches or organizations to do their thing. 

·        Die on the hill of your core beliefs.  With all due respect to Martin Luther, if you have 95 core beliefs, you have too many.  There should be a few core beliefs that serve as anchors for your organization.  Fight for these.  For example, our church has four core values:  People matter to God, Church is a place of grace, people need to be like Jesus, and everyone has a purpose.  Are there other beliefs that are important?  Sure.  But these four are what we die for.

·        Die on the hill of organizational health.  It shames me that business leaders often feel more protective of their businesses than pastors do of their churches.  As a pastor, I answer to Jesus about the health of my flock.  When unhealth exists, it must be addressed and treated.  Cancers need to be understood and treated.  Some cancers can be eliminated.  For example, if your church has the cancer of poor communication, that can be treated over time.  Fight for that health.  Some cancers must be killed.  For example, if your core leadership says, “We just need to take care of the people we have, not go after new people,” then that cancer needs to be killed by teaching it to death.  Some cancers are incurable.  Jesus himself told us what to do: “If a town will not receive you, shake the dust of that town off your sandals and move on.”  If you are in a church or organization that is toxic, shake the dust off your shoes and leave.  As you leave, someone needs to know the truth about the cancer:  a key lay leader, the body of elders, or the body of deacons.

The Wisdom Challenge:  When the hill is disguised.

Early American pioneers headed west would see the Rocky Mountains rising on the horizon.  They would think they would reach the mountains the next day.  The hills from a distance looked like the mountains back east.  Weeks of travel later, they realized the these where not like the mountains they knew at all; these were mountains like they had never seen before.

The leader must be wise enough to know when the issue isn’t the issue.  An attack may come on a strategy, but it represents a deeper attack on mission and values.  Most “worship wars” present as strategy arguments, but are in fact attacks on mission and values.

Before dying on these hills, fight for clarity.  What is the conflict really about?  I once consulted with a church that had a major conflict between a deacon and the Music Director.  Toward the conclusion of the three-hour meeting, it became clear that the real conflict had to do with an incident that occurred years earlier.  The deacon had extended financial help to the Music Director and did not feel properly appreciated.  This hurt was harbored for years until a strategic decision at church became a flash point.  Once we clarified what the conflict was about, the two parties reached an understanding and reconciled.  A battle over a hill was avoid, because that hill was never the real issue.

Clay’s rules of thumb: 

·        If you are in moderately healthy church, you should face no more than two hills on which to die each year.

·        If you are in a dysfunctional church, you will face a battle to the death that will result in someone leaving.  Decide in advance if it will be you or them.  Don’t fight the battle until you are sure you know the outcome God desires.

·        If you are new in a position in a church, try to put off battles to the death for at least two to three years. 

·        If you are constantly fighting on hills worth dying for, you have a major spiritual issue you need to address.  You probably need the spiritual fruit of patience.  You may be expressing anger stored inside you in an unhealthy way.  Find a mentor, see a counselor, but don’t take it out on your church.

Braving the Wilderness:

Title:  Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone.

Author: Brene’ Brown.  Connections: University of Houston; Conference Speaker, Author of Daring Greatly. 

Summation: We all long to belong. 

Big Ideas:  The world is in spiritual crisis of dis-connection.  How to solve it: People are hard to hate close up, so move closer.  Speak truth to bullshit but be civil about it.  Hold hands with strangers.  Strong back, soft front, wild heart.

Value: Inspiration

Takeaways:

·        P. 5 – Take us with you into that story. 

·        P. 5 – Maya Angelou – “You are only free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all.  The price is high.  The reward is great.”

·        P. 15 – “Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories – stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.”

·        P. 25 – “I can confidently say that stories of pain and courage almost always include two things:  praying and cussing.  Sometimes at the exact same time.”  WCS:  preachers always need to remember this teaching on prayer.  It mirrors the Psalms and Job.

·        P. 33 – People want to be part of something – to experience real connection with others, but not at the cost of their authenticity, freedom or power.  WCS:  Do we think about groups in church this way?  Why not?

·        P. 37 – “True belonging is not passive.”  WCS: Words for relationship with Jesus and group life.

·        P. 38 - To brave the wilderness and stand alone in yourself requires:

o   Boundaries

o   Reliability

o   Accountability

o   Vault – a place to keep confidences

o   Integrity

o   Non-judgment

o   Generosity.

·        P. 40 – “True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”

·        P. 40 – True belonging is the paradox of being with and being alone.

·        P. 51 – The more we segment and sort ourselves into groups we identify with, the great our loneliness.

·        P. 56 – “Terrorism is time released fear.”

·        P. 59 – “Ideological bunkers protect us from everything except loneliness and disconnection.”

·        P. 68 – “Anger is a powerful catalyst but a life-sucking companion.”

·        P. 73 – “Successful dehumanizing … creates moral exclusion… Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images.”  WCS: I’ve seen this in more theological debates than I care to admit.

·        P. 80 – “What is the conversation about and what is it really about?”

·        P. 83 – One of the most courageous things to say in an uncomfortable conversation is “Tell me more.”

·        P. 92-93 – A false dichotomy: If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.  WCS:  That’s why Jesus said, “Love your enemies.”

·        P. 107 – “If leaders really want people to show up, speak out, take chances and innovate, we have to create cultures where people feel safe – where their belonging is not threatened by speaking out and they are supported when they make the decision to brave the wilderness, stand along, and speak truth to bullshit.”  WCS: Does your leadership team feel safe to speak truth?

·        P. 121 – I’ve taught my kids that attending funerals is critically important and when you’re there, you show up.  You take part.  Every song.  Every prayer.

·        P. 122- In the age of YouTube, being there in person is so much more powerful.  WCS:  Why church attendance matters!

·        P. 135 – “The connection that we forge by judging and mocking others is not real connection… But the pain it causes is real pain.”

·        P. 136 – “Common enemy intimacy is counterfeit connection and the opposite of true belonging.”

·        P. 138 – “A woman in her mid-forties explained: ‘I can go to church and have the most amazing experience of spiritual connection.  I feel part of something that transcends difference.  I can also go to church and leave feeling enraged after my priest uses the homily for a platform to talk about politics and endorse candidates.  Those experiences are becoming more and more common.  At some point it won’t be worth going back.”  WCS:  PREACHERS, HAVE EARS AND LISTEN!

·        P. 144 – “It takes courage to open ourselves up to joy.”

·        P. 145 – “I can’t find a single example of courage that didn’t require vulnerability.”

·        P. 156 – “The key to joy is practicing gratitude.”

Buy? Yes, if you're comfortable with ruthless, cussing, Texas honesty.