Wow, everyone is writing something about Steve Jobs – I better join the parade before I get left behind. Well, sort of – I’m not a parade-kind-of-guy – more of a do-it-because-it-is-the-right-thing kind-of-guy. So, here’s my angle on Steve’s legacy and what the church can take away (the answer is “almost everything”).

One of the things noted in several of Jobs’ obits is the reference to his faith, Buddhism, and how he kept a very simple, if not spartan, lifestyle. Nothing on the walls of his house, a bare bed, little furniture, etc. He didn’t accrue a lot of material things – even though his wealth afforded him that luxury. That same passion for keeping things simple transferred to his work ethic. Several months ago I read the story of the first iPad – the presenters explained how you could do something in about four or five steps. He handed it back to them and said, do in one step. They argued that the technology wasn’t there yet but he refused to accept their response. A few months later they handed him the iPad that met his specifications – clean, simple, and easy to understand and use.

I have a passion for keeping things simple, too. Just ask my kids – “it must be in the recycle bin, I’m sure dad threw it away” is repeated often in our house (even when I’m not guilty!). Several years ago I worked for a community foundation where I got to manage $125 million (that was fun) and I learned about “style creep.” Style creep is when you hire a fund manager to invest your money in a certain financial style (growth, value, mid-cap, small cap, etc.) and that manager begins to move the money away from how you directed into areas that are not of your choosing. If not watched, fund managers can really mess up your investments – read your investment statements.

Mission creep is when the church begins to lose focus on what it is supposed to do. The church starts out with good intentions and really plans well what it should do and how it should plan its resources (buildings, people, and finances) to meet that need. Then, somewhere along the way, someone comes up with a need and the church agrees to create a ministry to help with that need. Then, another need comes up and another one, and pretty soon there are dozens of needs and respective ministries. The church is now allocating closets, money, people, and scores of volunteers to take care of those needs. Guess what, you’ve been hit by MISSION CREEP.

You are no longer focused on the one (or two or three) things that caused you to come into being in the first place. The church decided to placate a few people by funding these extra missions. Now, I’m not saying these extra needs shouldn’t be met, I just don’t think that the church is the place to meet every need. I know there are other organizations out there that are meeting those needs. When a member comes requesting the church to create a ministry that will lead to Mission Creep, the church leadership needs to find a local ministry and then encourage that person to volunteer at that ministry. There is no need to duplicate things – it can only hurt the true mission of the church.

Be cautious about Mission Creep – keep an eye out for it at every turn because it is there. Help your membership understand why the church cannot do everything for everyone – that is the value of partnerships with local organizations/ministries. Keep your church laser-beam focused on keeping things simple and true to the original mission (see Matthew 28:19-20 for clarification). Do not succumb to Mission Creep (and RIP, Steve Jobs).

Lead On!
Steve

I read this post Christmas 2010. It is an outstanding example of leading a church – the church didn’t know where it was going but the pastor/leader pointed the way and the members got behind it. What David Platt did with his church is not just leadership, it’s audacious leadership. And history shows from Alexander the Great to Judas Maccabees to Jesus to Charlemagne to Napoleon to Hitler that people will follow audacious leaders (both good and bad). We just need more audacious leaders.

Why My Church Rebelled Against the American Dream by David Platt
David Platt, Ph.D., is the author of the New York Times bestseller Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream and is senior pastor of the 4,000-member Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama.

We American Christians have a way of taking the Jesus of the Bible and twisting him into a version of Jesus that we are more comfortable with. A nice middle-class American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who for that matter wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings comfort and prosperity to us as we live out our Christian spin on the American Dream. But lately I’ve begun to have hope that the situation is changing.

The 20th-century historian who coined the term “American Dream,” James Truslow Adams, defined it as “a dream… in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are.” But many of us are realizing that Jesus has different priorities. Instead of congratulating us on our self-fulfillment, he confronts us with our inability to accomplish anything of value apart from God. Instead of wanting us to be recognized by others, he beckons us to die to ourselves and seek above all the glory of God.

In my own faith family, the Church at Brook Hills, we have tried to get out from under the American Dream mindset and start living and serving differently. Like many other large American churches, we had a multimillion-dollar campus and plans to make it even larger to house programs that would cater to our own desires. But then we started looking at the world we live in. It’s a world where 26,000 children die every day of starvation or a preventable disease. A world where billions live in situations of such grinding poverty that an American middle-class neighborhood looks like Beverly Hills by comparison. A world where more than a billion people have never even heard the name Jesus.

So we asked ourselves, “What are we spending our time and money on that is less important than meeting these needs?” And that’s when things started to change. First we gave away our entire surplus fund — $500,000 — through partnerships with churches in India, where 41 percent of the world’s poor live. Then we trimmed another $1.5 million from our budget and used the savings to build wells, improve education, provide medical care and share the gospel in impoverished places around the world. Literally hundreds of church members have gone overseas temporarily or permanently to serve in such places. And it’s not just distant needs we’re trying to meet. It’s also needs near at hand.

One day I called up the Department of Human Resources in Shelby County, Alabama, where our church is located, and asked, “How many families would you need in order to take care of all the foster and adoption needs that we have in our county?” The woman I was talking to laughed. I said, “No, really, if a miracle were to take place, how many families would be sufficient to cover all the different needs you have?” She replied, “It would be a miracle if we had 150 more families.” When I shared this conversation with our church, over 160 families signed up to help with foster care and adoption.

We don’t want even one child in our county to be without a loving home. It’s not the way of the American Dream. It doesn’t add to our comfort, prosperity, or ease. But we are discovering the indescribable joy of sacrificial love for others, and along the way we are learning more about the inexpressible wonder of God’s sacrificial love for us. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my country and I couldn’t be more grateful for its hard-won freedoms. The challenge before we American Christians, as I see it, is to use the freedoms, resources, and opportunities at our disposal while making sure not to embrace values and assumptions that contradict what God has said in the Bible.

I believe God has a dream for people today. It’s just not the same as the American Dream. I believe God is saying to us that real success is found in radical sacrifice. That ultimate satisfaction is found not in making much of ourselves but in making much of him. That the purpose of our lives transcends the country and culture in which we live. That meaning is found in community, not individualism. That joy is found in generosity, not materialism. And that Jesus is a reward worth risking everything for. Indeed, the gospel compels us to live for the glory of God in a world of urgent spiritual and physical need, and this is a dream worth giving our lives to pursue.

Lead On!
Steve

Many years ago I saw a documentary in which Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter spoke about how and who they surrounded themselves with. They readily acknowledged that everyone that works with the president of the United States is eager to say “yes” to every idea the president has. No one wants to question the president much less confront him (even in a nice way) – on anything.

That is the nature of leadership – the people around the leader want to please him or her. That is why they are there, especially in churches. Most staff members have no desire to become the senior pastor; we’re pretty content being the second chair (see “Leading from the Second Chair,” an excellent book by Bonem and Patterson). Pastors need not be threatened by their staff and most of them are not. However, pastors rarely get the unvarnished truth from their staff. Staff often go out of their way to avoid telling their bosses what is really going on with the staff and/or with the members whom they see. Staff don’t want to tell bad news to their superior. Staff will do almost anything to shield their leader from reality. Why?

Several reasons:

• they don’t want to get punished as the messenger of the bad news.
• they might be asked to dig deeper into this and that might cause them to find even more unpleasant things
• they don’t know how to tell their boss bad news

Presidents Ford and Carter gave a solution that is both simple but exceedingly hard. The answer, according to them, is to surround yourself with people of integrity AND to empower them to tell you the honest, sometimes brutal truth, even when it comes out harsh. The balancing act is to permit them to say it to you, the leader; to say it judiciously (not being a dark cloud all the time but using those rights in a wise way); and especially for the leader to receive it in a positive manner (constructive criticism). How the boss receives the information will completely determine how that person and others on staff respond the next time there is bad news to be shared or when a leader needs some excruciating honesty.

I can tell you it begins with the leader – as these two presidents stated. The leader must get the right people, give explicit rights to certain members of his/her inner circle to speak very frankly as needed, and then receive that info as info (not as criticism) in a way that will invite further honesty. After all, a leader must have people of integrity around him/her all the time – anything less hurts the organization and its purpose.

Lead On!
Steve

I follow the stock market. Doing fairly well but only about 15% of the way to what I need till I retire. There are two big things I know about the stock market:

• Don’t follow the herd
• The market hates uncertainty

I might spend another blog post on the first one but let me speak to uncertainty here because church members hate uncertainty too and it will show up in their support of their church – in their generosity of their time and the money.

Church’s must have goals – targets at which they’re aiming. Unless a church has one thing that unites them, then everything will divide them. Church members want to be part of something larger – that’s why they joined and participate in a church. They want their church to be on mission to do something, go somewhere, be leading in some way. If their church is not, then it quickly becomes a social club. Country clubs (I’ve never joined a country club and won’t, either) have no function except to serve their members – at least from my perspective. Church’s are not country clubs – they are churches.

Get rid of the uncertainty in your church. Find a mission/purpose and charge that vision with everything you’ve got. Plan for it strategically and tactically (notice, I said “plan”!) and then fulfill that plan of attack.

Your church is like a ship. There are places it cannot go easily like a ship cannot easily go on dry land. But two-thirds of the earth is water so your church/ship can go to more than half the world. The church are crew members, not passengers. If your church were passengers then you’d have a cruise ship which goes out to sea each Sunday morning and returns to the safe harbor before sundown. But your church members want to sail the high seas – they want a purpose in their church. They want to aim for the horizon and THEY WILL PAY GLADLY if their leader will take them to the far side of the world. Don’t underestimate your church – give them the adventure of their lives – the adventure that God promised each of us when he asked us to be fishers of men and women.

If you rob people of the chance to sail into deep and scary waters, then you’ve created uncertainty. No one knows where the cruise ship will head this week, what are our goals (to have a better meal than last time, a better Sunday morning show?), where are we going together and why are people leaving our church/ship for other places or even leaving the faith altogether. Don’t create uncertainty – create a vision. Clothe, feed, and nurture that vision every two or three weeks (Bill Hybels says that vision must be cast every 28 days or less). Be specific, be challenging, be big in your dreams, be willing to work with other organizations, be more God-sized in scope. Give your church a purpose and you’ll be amazed at the number of people clamoring to get on board.

Lead On!
Steve