Tag: leadership

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4 Things Church Planting Has Taught Me (so far)

So we are 4 weeks in to this experience called The Collectives Church. And to be honest it has been a wild ride. God has been incredibly faithful in so many ways. As we continue to press forward, here is what I have learned so far.

  1. God is faithful in unexpected ways.

We have seen God do what he would say he would do. Yet, it has not looked how I expected it to look. God has faithfully provided the resources, the people, the place. Each one of those resources came in the most unlikely of ways. It as if He is pressing not just on my trust that He will do what he says, but teaching me to trust the process of how he will do what he has promised. I think we try to script the role of God in our life and circumstances. We try to guide him in doing what he said he would do just in the way we are most comfortable with him doing it. God looks at us and says “hold my Communion juice”. Then shows up in a way that is completely unexpected.

2. People are the greatest resource.

I cognitively knew this. I have experience this in leadership before. Yet, this has been a reminder of how valueable God’s people are. We have been given thousands of dollars and that has helped immensely (if you’d like to give you can here), but the greatest capital in the Kingdom of God is his people. Are team has faithfully served and sweated, quite literally as the air conditioning went out the last two weeks. The continue to serve and give of themselves. The continue to pour themselves out as an offering not just for our house, but for the Lord. We would have never reached this point without them.

Church is not an organization or a building. The Church is the people who are serving well, loving well, and glorifying King Jesus. We did more than plant a church, we believe we are planting people who will grow into leaders of the church.

3. People are hurting, but God is faithful.

This seems like a downer, but this is a lesson we are learning and one we knew all along. It is one of the reasons we pressed to start The Collectives to begin with. We live in a busted and broken world that has taken its full shots at individuals. A lot of people walk around wounded. A lot of people carry years of hurt with them.

While this is true, the reality is the Lord is still in the business of healing hurting hearts and mending broken lives. We are believing for miracles.

4. We believe in this generation.

If you join us on Sunday night, our stage is filled with twenty-somethings. At the door will be young adults and teens smiling and offering you coffee and a snack. If you linger around after, you will see young adults scatter like ants to tear down and reset the space we use. With all the berating of this generation, we have watched them step up and step into leadership. We have watched them fill the rows and lift their hands and hearts in worship. We have seen them respond to the call to lead.

It is as if they were just waiting for someone to ask them to lead.

Don’t mistake it, I realize we are really early on in this process and there will be more lessons to be learned. Yet, I am so glad we were courageous enough to step into where God has called us. Lives are changed, families are impacted, and individuals entire trajectories are being established as we keep reaching the lost, raising disciples, and releasing them into their purposes.

Go Be The Collectives!

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Mentoring Matters

So communicate these things with the sort of exhortation or rebuke that carries full authority. Don’t let anyone look down on you.
Titus 2:15

If youth is wasted on the young, I am starting to believe that wisdom is wasted on the old. Somewhere in the in-between is where I find myself. Youth has since passed. Old age is still several strides away. Caught in the middle of middle age is the tipping point of life. It gives me the energy to run after life and the wisdom to know what not to chase. It would be easy to claim that these are things I have come to on my own, but that would just not be true.

My good friend, mentor, and last semester’s professor, Dr. William Lamb infused these 6 words into my life that he was handed as sacred “freely you have received, freely give”. This expression is pulled from the Gospel. Jesus exhorting his disciples to take the lesson learned, the power infused, the wisdom hand down, and he releases them to go do what he has taught and shown them. While Jesus was Messiah, he was also Rabbi and teacher. He was constantly pouring in the oil of knowledge and wisdom of the Father into the twelve and those disciples walking with him daily.

Mentoring matters. Mentoring is kingdom. Mentoring was modeled by Christ.

Mentoring means first being a recipient. It is impossible to give away what you do not first receive. To have capacity to give something away first presumes you have been given something. If you attempt to draw water from an empty well, you simply just fill the bucket with mud. If we are going to pour in living water into others, the first posture of mentoring means being a mentee. There are a couple ways we receive:
1) Mentored from a far.
There are voices in my life that will never know the impact they have made. I may never get the chance to thank Andy Stanley for the books he has written on leadership and communication that shaped so much of me. Yet, he has mentored me. As have many other phenomenal leaders and authors and communicators where as a student I have allowed their words and works become investments into my life and resources to share. Some may never know their impact except on the other side of this life. Yet, each voice, each author, each leader has left something of value in my being.

2) Mentored from up close.
This is the most common way we see mentoring. This life on life experience. Sometimes this is formalized through a specific course or study, but most often it is just window time. “Window time” was a concept taught to me early in my ministry. If you are going somewhere take someone with you. This plays out in the literal and the figurative. More can be taught and caught in a ten minute car ride and walk through the local bookstore than any formalized moments. I am an advocate for both. Yet, most of the moments that mean the most to me from my time of being the student did not come in an office or scheduled meeting. It was in a car or walking side by side with a mentor and learning a lesson in the moment. We see this model by Jesus so often. Pointing out the local farmer, the fig tree, the nearby river. So often his teachings were localized in the moment of something visible to the learner.

3) Go first
Sometimes you have to be the initiator of the relationship. Sometimes you have to go first. Leaders want to give away what has been given to them. They may not realize that you are willing to be a student. So ask. Set up an appointment. Send an email or DM. Put it on them to say yes or no. You may be surprised by their response.

Most moments have a lesson wrapped in them. A good mentor is teaching even when the student does not know they are learning. They are using the Mr. Miyagi method.

Where the process often breaks down is the student stays a consumer. The student stays in a posture of taking and never giving. Let’s reflect back on those six words of Christ – “freely you have received, freely give”. What is implied in this passage is the unspoken “now”. The disciples of Christ were not responsible for what they did not know or contain, they were simply responsible to give away what Christ had given them. Here is how we live that out.

1) Go back three steps
This, friends is not rocket surgery. Simply look over your shoulder and see who is not as far along the journey as you are. Then, and this is the sticky part, simply give away what has been given to you. Warning: do not attempt to be the expert. No one wants to sit in an inauthentic relationship. Your role is simply to offer what you have been given – in life, in faith, in relationships, in Biblical understanding.

Let me give you a huge permission. It is okay to say “I do not know”. Here is the rub with that, it also sets you up to go find out.

2) Share your story
Remember those mentors from afar. You may be one. Leverage your influence to have real influence. Share your story. Share what you are learning. Give away the insights you are gaining from your personal study. This can be done on whatever format or platform you are lead to use. Leverage Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, or even the old school art of writing a book. Or break it down even simpler, sit with someone and tell them. Your growth is what you want to give away.

3) Do this in real life
I think we have a gift in social media, but nothing will ever replace that life on life, in the same room and space impact. Get in the room with some people. Take them with you. Where you go let them go with. It may just seem like the mundane minutia of your life, but there are rivers and fig tree moments all around you. There are teachable moments that have to be seized and may only come via some window time.

Mentoring matters. Ask any leader and they will tell you the same. Their life, leadership, and success have been built on the foundations of the men and women who have poured so much into them and taught this this single principle: you are responsible simply to give away what has been given to you. So what are you waiting for, go give it away.

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Lonely At The Top?

The trouble is not dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.
Mark Twain

Leadership is lonely

I was once told by a pastor that it was hard to lead and have friends. It was percieved as a badge of honor to climb the ministerial ladder of success and found yourself at the top alone. That seems almost in paradox to who Jesus was. While Jesus walked this earth, leading, healing, teaching, and ultimately dying for the sins of humanity, he invited others into his space.

In reflection, not everyone got the same backstage pass. There were moments the twelve and the crowd were given access. There were other moments the twelve and those that traveled with him got a more intimate view into who Christ was in the green room. There were even other moments where Peter, James, and John were given glimpses into the fullness of his glory as they toured for three years.

The very few times we see Jesus retreat to be alone was to be with his Father. The retreat to prayer always seemed to be as a place of refueling and refreshing for the work ahead.

What I am driving it is that Jesus as a leader, was on another level. Jesus as the divine man was on level with those around him. We see Jesus celebrating a wedding, dining with friends, and making connections with people from all walks of life. He was a man of the marketplace more than the ministry in the synagogue. He was available, accessible, and open. A man without a home always seemed to be inviting himself to sit at the table of someone else’s. Often the table of someone the religious snubbed their noses at.

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 

John 15:13-15

In the famed moment, Jesus says “there is no greater love than this, than to lay down his life for his friends. Tonight, I call you friends.” Jesus looked at those with him and calls them friends. In this moment we see the humanity of the man Jesus. These men and women who had walked with him across the Jewish countryside through the cities for the last three years, sleeping in fields and borrowed beds had become the closest people on the earth to the Messiah.

Those of us who lead, we need the Peter, James, and Johns of life. We need a Mary Magedalene to walk with us. We need people where we can sit in our most vulnerable moments and trust that they are still with us. I need that.

Leadership does not have to be lonely.

On the other side of the coin is the caution of who you select to let into those spaces. Not everyone should be invited into every room. From the gospels you see the crowd, the twelve, and the three. At times, you just see Peter. Other times, John calls himself the “disciple Jesus loved”. The crowd was not invited into every life moment. The twelve, while in most, was whittled down to three in certain circumstances. Occasionally, there is just the one on one, deep life restoring conversations with a friend that need to take place.

So use caution on who you let in where, but let people in. Leadership is hard. Carrying the weight of ministry is heavy. It is impossible to do alone. Find some friends. Do not live lonely. If as a leader you are battling loneliness:

  1. Find some faithful friends to rely on. This can often be in peers who are doing ministry. Other ministers in the community or ministers from your tribe in a nearby community.
  2. Seek wise counsel or seek counseling. There is no shame in asking for help.
  3. Tell someone you are lonely. Hidden loneliness is the most dangerous.

Ministry is hard enough, do not walk through it alone.

Jeff

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Heart Conflict

“Harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few.”
~ Jesus

Jeff Pitts

“The world is going to hell in a hand basket.” I am not sure what a hand basket is or was, but that is what I was often told. The implied meaning of the idiom is that they (the cumulative world) are on a fast track away from the moral center we had lived with. Jesus took a differing perspective. Instead of seeing wasted wheat that was dying, he saw a harvest in need of being picked.

My conflict does not lie in perspective, but lies in the very thing I love and some times loathe, the church. I spend a good portion of my time in and around college students on a Christian college campus. And as the American church, we are in a serious conflict. The world is getting younger, our churches and those leading them are getting older.

Generation Z is expected to be the largest generation in US history. Over taking the Boomers, to which they (Gen Z) will reference as anyone out of high school. As this current generation comes of legal age, the oldest of which is turning 21, according to most who study generations, those leading them in spaces of faith are qualifying for AARP. Below the info graphic from Barna shows the shift and loss of young leaders leading congregations.

Barna Inforgraphic

I recently asked Larry Osborne, one of the pastors at North Coast Church in Vista, CA how we address this. His answer was simple and complex. “Build the kingdom, not more castles.” So I pushed back with a follow up question, “do we plant more churches?” In his laid back Southern California style, he simply said “why not.”

Larry is a Boomer. Yet, Larry has learned that he had hand the baton to others. He is an unique co-pastorate with a young leader, that he says is less a model for others and just something that was a fit for their church.

I lack the evidence to back up my assessment, so it lies more with personal observation than hard facts. There is a rise in church plants not simply out of a heart for the harvest, but maybe because older leaders are not letting young leaders labor in their fields. Accompanied with youthful energy is new methods of ministry. It is often methodology rather than theology that becomes a dividing line between generations of leadership in the body.

The Millennials generation, which is turning 40 with the turn of the decade, is impatient and will not simply stand by and wait their turn. Due to their persistence, a steady rise of non-profit and social justice organizations have taken flight. While what they do may not look like church, do not get it mistaken, it is tending the fields that are ready to be harvested. It is picking ripe wheat out of sex-trafficking trades, inner-city poverty, and loving wandering refugees who have no home. Life change has happened because young Christ followers did not wait their turn.

Yet, I am old school in this, the local church is still the vehicle given to us to fulfill the Great Commission. Last week I stood awestruck by the site of 65,000 young adults, no older than 25, overcome with worship and praise to God. In moments of such as this, I am certain the Holy Spirit whispers callings into hearts. Callings to preach. Callings to pastor. Callings to lead.

I struggle with the question “where will they find space to lead? From what field can they reap a harvest?”

I acknowledge there is some pieces of the puzzle we are not seeing. Young leaders are getting opportunities. They lead youth groups, kids ministry, small groups. Yet, there is a rising tide of lack of space to be the one who speaks for God to the whole congregation. My information filled brain combines this aging leadership with the gaping hole in the boat we see of those age 18-25 leaving the church. Data still is lacking on whether like their Gen X parents, Gen Z will return to the house of God with kids in tow or if their exodus is for good.

All this pieces together to say what Jesus already said “the harvest in plentiful, the laborers are few.” This seems ever more true. Yet, I push that those who we find willing to labor need space to do so. Not sent to a musty church basement to just teach the kids. No, we need to give them space to lead, to preach, to teach – no matter the age, the gender, the experience, or how skinny their jeans are.

The fields are too ripe to not use them.

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