Jesus practiced the habits of solitude and retreat throughout his ministry (Luke 5:16).  As I recall, Jesus had only one extended retreat recorded in the gospels (Luke 4:1 and parallels).  He used it to reflect on his identity and crystalize his purpose, define the appropriate use of his power, and fix in his mind the need for absolute obedience to what Scripture reveals of his Father’s will.  We still benefit today from the work that Jesus did that flowed out of this one powerful retreat!  Throughout his ministry, Jesus regularly used short spiritual retreats to:

• keep himself grounded in his mission
  • Luke 4:42-44.  When the crowds demanded that he stay and continue to minister to them, Jesus went into seclusion and then announced that his purpose was to preach in other cities as well.  
• reflect on what was happening around him
  • John 6:14-15, 26-36. In this account, the crowds misinterpreted what the signs of Jesus’ ministry meant.  After seclusion, he came back to the crowds and corrected them.
• make key leadership decisions
  • Luke 6:12-13.  He chose the twelve apostles after a night of solitary prayer.  
• set the next phase of his leadership
  • We see this, for example, at key points such as the beginning of his ministry when the Spirit took him alone into the wilderness and at the end of his earthly ministry in the Garden of Gethsemane.
• meditate on God’s word
  • Someone I read just recently (sorry, I can’t find it again) suggested that Jesus must have meditated a lot.  How else would he have come up with the metaphors and parables he used to draw spiritual truths from everyday activities?

Based on Jesus’ use of retreat time, there is great value for us doing retreats as well.  I pray, study, listen, meditate and reflect as a regular practice,  but setting aside an extended period of time for a more intensive encounter alone with God provides an incredibly rich grounding for my leadership.  Look again at the list of what Jesus used his retreats for.  That list is just as important for us today.

There are lots of ways to do a retreat, so I am not prescribing how you should do yours.  I am sharing what I do, to spark your own creative ideas about what you might do.  Also, I think a key to a successful retreat is not to have any particular agenda as far as specific output is concerned.  I want God to control the outcome, not me.  My attitude is ”Let’s see how God will use this time.”  I intentionally set aside the time, use a general structure, have a starting place, but then stay open to how the Spirit leads.

I do a five-day spiritual retreat once a year.  I do it in the summer because in my circumstances:

• I get my performance review at the June board meeting. 
• I get the results of the Best Christian Workplace survey in June as well, giving me a window into how the staff evaluates the ministry’s work environment, and indirectly my leadership.  
• Our fiscal year-end is March 31, so by June the staff has evaluated our organizational performance over the last year. 
• At the June board meeting I get the board’s direction or suggestions for the next planning cycle. 
• Finally, management works on the strategic and action plans in the fall for the next fiscal year.  The retreat helps me  frame the discussions that we’ll have in the planning process.

My five days generally look like this:

1. Day 1 is spent reflecting on how well I as an individual am following Christ.  This has nothing to do with work directly, but if my personal walk is not pleasing to God, then my professional walk won’t be any better.  I owe it to the ministry to have a rich, personal, vibrant spiritual life.  The personal day could include these checks from The Making of a Leader by Robert Clinton:
   1. An integrity check – are you living out your stated values?  Are your intentions and motivations honourable?  Are you walking the talk?
   2. An obedience check – are you doing what God has asked you to do?  Following God’s laws and trusting his leadership?  Confessing, repenting and forgiving?
   3. A word check – are you able to perceive God’s truth and work it out in your own life?  Can you discern God’s guidance for you personally?  Being able to discern God’s guidance is a prerequisite to leading God’s people.
2. On Day 2 I reflect on my personal call and how well my leadership at CCCC reflects that call.  I have my personal call to serve the church, which takes precedence over my call to CCCC.  CCCC is simply the way I am currently fulfilling my call to serve Christ’s church.  I’m going to write a separate post on this, but the key point here is that there is a reason why God has placed me and not someone else in leadership at CCCC at this time in its life.  The board and I mutually discerned God’s call for my appointment, so there must be something about me that God wants expressed at CCCC.  I reject the personality cult of leadership, so it’s not about me, but it is about how God has prepared me for this role.  When I was offered the opportunity to come to CCCC I was at the same time in the process of looking for a church to pastor.  I was on a 7 day spiritual retreat and the issue at hand was which option was God’s will?  Was one a test for the other?  The short version is that I received the Lord’s direction that I was free to choose, but that if I chose CCCC my particular contribution would be to use the ministry’s mandate to protect Christ’s reputation by helping Christian leaders lead more authentically as Christians.  So, that’s why we have the Best Christian Workplace survey.  That’s why I write this blog.  That’s why we incorporate theology (hopefully free of denominational distinctives) into our stewardship training.  That’s why the conference workshop tracks were increased from six to eleven, to incorporate theologically-sound soft skills topics into the mix.  So I spend a day thinking long and hard about the unique contribution I can make to CCCC.
3. Day 3 is a reflection of how well CCCC is fulfilling the mandate that God has given it.  At the June 2003 board meeting, when I was appointed as executive director, they directed me to explore the edges of CCCC’s mandate.  We had been consumed for more than ten years with the clergy residence legal cases, and the last one was settled the week I arrived for work.  While that issue doubled our membership and earned us the gratitude of pastors across the country (I still regularly have people in the regional seminars stand up to thank CCCC for this huge thing we did for them), it did focus our attention pretty much exclusively on one particular program (the Legal Defense Fund).  My predecessor, Frank Luellau, did a remarkable job shepherding CCCC through that time.  However, we are now past that time, so I am free to use Day 3 reflecting on what our mission really means.  What else could we do to achieve our mission?  I think of all the people I have met over the past year, and review notes of our conversations, and pray about the issues our members are dealing with and how we might help them.
4. Day 4 is when I draw on traditional strategic planning resources to have a systematic approach to reflect on CCCC and its future health.  I’ll pull out the books and use the models.  This is also the day when I think of CCCC and its business model.  We are in effect an association.  Is this still the appropriate model?  Should we be a fee for service professional organization?  (No, but the question still needs to be asked.)   I use everything I have on association management and trend analysis for the association sector.  This day helps ensure I don’t overlook anything.  By the way, this day does NOT replace any of the planning that is done with staff.  It is only to help me prepare for that planning.
5. Day 5 tends to change each year according to what I feel the major need is.  Over the last year I realized the Lord is calling us at CCCC to be bolder.  To step it up.  To think big and believe that resources follow vision.  [IMPORTANT NOTE: I did not say that money follows expenses!!!  Unless God specifically calls your ministry to live by faith, he calls us to be wise in how much risk we should accept.]  So I spent the day this year praying, meditating on God’s provision and his promises related to courage and boldness, and reflecting on what boldness might look like for CCCC.  In previous years the emphasis has been on other aspects of our ministry, such as what it means for CCCC to be part of a community of ministries as opposed to a thinking of us only as a single organization.  That year I thought through issues of partnership, cooperation and competition.  I worked through how we could be open-handed and generous while at the same time preserving our financial viability.

This five day structure works well for me, and you can adapt it for your type of ministry.  For example, if you are a relief and development ministry, then on Day 4 you’ll be looking at best practices, trends and other aspects of your sector (both secular and Christian).

There is a lot of room for individual preference as to how you commune with God.  For me, I tend to do best by asking questions of God, and then waiting silently for a response (no distractions, no music, etc.). 

When the retreat is over, I don’t “come down from the mountain” with a fully laid-out plan to impose on staff.  I do come back with directional thoughts to discuss and test with staff, and then lay out specific plans.  I also don’t give them out all at once, because that could be overwhelming and sometimes the Lord gives ideas for me to steward over time, taking time to ruminate on them and share them at the appropriate time.

For those who want to read about the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude, which form the core of a spiritual retreat, I’m sure you’ll find excellent courses at your local Bible college or seminary which you might be able to take, or as a quicker alternative, the two main authors to read are Dallas Willard and Richard Foster.  Between them, they’ve written quite a few books on this topic.

Now, I know I’m not the only one doing personal leadership retreats.  Can you share your approach?  I’m open to experimenting next year with something different.

• 10:21 “the shepherds have become stupid, …therefore…”,
• 12:10 “many shepherds have ruined My vineyard”; and
• 50:6 “their shepherds have led them astray.”

There really are public consequences for what a leader may regard as their private, personal spirituality! 

The Bible sets a very high standard for the spiritual disciplines of a ministry leader.  Now I know that the spiritual lives of leaders and their team members really should be no different because we are all called to spiritual maturity, but there is no getting around the fact that the spiritual life of a leader has the potential for greater good or evil than an individual team member’s because:

• a leader shapes the culture of an entire ministry and has the greatest influence over its direction; and
• a leader is seen as the primary representative of a ministry by the public, and their perception of the leader greatly affects their perception of the ministry.

Just think about the churches that have withered after a pastor’s moral failure, or the good and faithful people who lost their jobs when agency leaders lost their integrity and the ministry lost donor support.

As Joshua stepped into leadership, the Lord made the key to successful leadership very clear to him.  Joshua was to carefully follow all God’s law, turning “not from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go” (Jos 1:7).  

In the next verse, the Lord tells Joshua the spiritual practices that will equip him to follow the law:

“This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success” (v.8).

So important and foundational is God’s law (or God’s ways), that Deuteronomy 17:18-20 contains this command for those who would lead his people:

“When he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests.  It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, to the right or the left, so that he and his sons may continue long in his kingdom in the midst of Israel.”

I think it is significant that when the people of Israel affirmed their acceptance of Joshua’s leadership, they replied “Just as we obeyed Moses in all things, so we will obey you; only may the Lord your God be with you, as he was with Moses!” (Jos 1:17).  One commentator says that the last part of this verse is more a condition of their allegiance than a prayer.  It was as if they said, “We will follow your leading so long as there is evidence that you are being led by God!”  What legitimates a person as a Christian leader is that the person is following God’s leadership.  The Israelites made the important point that God is the ultimate leader, not the human being who is his earthly representative. 

The landscape of Christian leadership over the millennia has been littered with people who wanted to lead but who did not follow God.  The result was lasting damage to the credibility of the church and a rejection of Christianity by people who need Christ.  Much has been done in the name of Christ that had nothing to do with Christ.  Lord  Acton said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Some Christian leaders have claimed to lead by divine right, interpreting that as an unconditional appointment to leadership, and believe they can then do whatever they want without oversight by any human (now that’s absolute power!).  The people of Israel apparently put a check on Joshua’s divine appointment to leadership that I think is quite healthy.  I believe God has placed me in my leadership role,* so yes, there was a divine appointment.  But that divine appointment still leaves me subject to the checks and balances provided by the Christian community, who have the right to test if my ministry leadership is godly (1 Thess 5:21, 1 John 4:1).  Saul was divinely appointed as king of Israel, but he lost his right to lead as he usurped the spiritual authority that properly belonged to the prophet-priest Samuel.  Saul’s personal spirituality eventually negated his call to leadership.

Many leaders start out in a close relationship with God and are Spirit-led, but some will start to think they are more responsible for their leadership success than God is.  God warned the Israelites about this attitude when he said in Deuteronomy 18:17-18, “You may say in your heart, ‘My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.’  But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth.”   A good start does not guarantee a good end.  Remember what got you started, and stay with it.  I followed God to get into my leadership role and my success as a ministry leader will be no better than my success in continuing to follow God.  My personal spiritual life is incredibly important to the ministry I lead. 

So, to provide good Christian leadership:

• The Bible says you need to know God’s law inside and out.  God’s law is God’s direction as to how to live a godly life.  It is the outward manifestation of God’s character.  If you claim to be God’s representative to lead your ministry, you’d better know how God would think about all the decisions you’ll have to make.  The biblical command is to study Scripture and meditate on it.  I suggest that you get a solid grounding in the meta-narrative of Scripture (the big picture) as these grand scriptural themes provide the best understanding of who God is and how he works.  Word studies, book studies and thematic studies can follow and show you how to apply what you have learned, but first you really need to understand the overarching history of God’s activity in our world, his goals, and his character.
• If you want to be led by God, you must give God room in your life to speak to you.  Prayer is a two-way conversation, so be quiet for extended periods of time and listen.
• Your first consideration should always be the state of your current relationship with God, not the state of your ministry.  Leadership starts with a confession to God of your own sins, an acknowledgement of your own shortcomings, and an admission that you cannot lead God’s people without experiencing God’s leadership yourself.  I’ve written about how you can structure a personal leadership retreat that walks you through this examination.
• What evidence should you look for that God supports your continued leadership?  That’s tricky.  If it was just a matter of identifiable results, then Jeremiah was a dismal failure.  Yet God approved of his prophetic ministry even though it had no fruit.  Results are important, but more important is how those results were achieved.  I think most importantly the evidence of God’s leadership in your life is agreement by those whom God has put in oversight (your board, congregation or whoever has the right to fire you) that your leadership is authentically Christian and pleasing to the Lord.  In the end, that is the real test of Christian leadership.

* I also believe that every person working for a Christian ministry has been divinely called.  Both leader and staff are called by God, but given different responsibilities.  This assumes there is a good discernment process in place to authenticate a call to ministry.

The truth is that I didn’t love it and didn’t have the passion for it and that what I was doing wasn’t my own voice.  I wanted to be a university president.  I didn’t want to do university president.  Now that was a huge lesson for me, because if there is one single thing I have found out about leaders is that, by and large if not every day, they seem to love what they’re doing…[The] question made me aware that administration wasn’t for me.  I found my calling as an advisor and a coach to leaders.  

Managing and leading are very different from doing.  Of course, all leaders do a mixture of leading, managing and doing, just as any doer can also do some managing or leading (even if informally).  It is just a matter of the percentage of time allocated to each activity.

You may be very skilled at doing, and you may be the best person on the team doing your work, but that doesn’t mean that you should manage or lead it.  Our culture promotes the idea of career progression up a hierarchy, so most people aspire to rise as high as they can in their organization rather than staying at a level they are better suited for. 

The problem with always seeking promotions is that you may be promoted right out of your areas of strength and into your areas of weakness.  This is the Peter Principle:  People are promoted to the level of their incompetence.  How many people who are team members say to themselves, “I could lead this team better than that!”?  They make the mistake of thinking that the ability to do is the qualification for the role of leader.  Far from it.  The skills for leadership are different from the skills needed for doing.  Team members can get promoted and have no idea what leadership is really about, and then they fail as a leader or have a miserable time of it because it is not the sort of doing that they love and are good at.

The sad thing is, when people are promoted beyond their competence, not only do you remove your best worker from the team and lose the related productivity, you also usually end up losing the person to your organization entirely because it seems the only way out of a leadership role is right out the organization’s door.  I’ve always thought this is too bad.  Surely there should be honour in recognizing your gifts and their limits and stepping down to pick up once again at the job where you were performing at your best.  But our culture doesn’t cope with such ‘failure’ very well.  I acknowledge that it would take a very self-aware person to be willing to step down to a different position (if a position should still be available).  The unfortunate reality is that usually all  you can do is go to a new organization.

So, should you continue in your leadership role?  If you are having difficulty, two key questions are:

1. Am I called to be a leader?  See my post on discerning your call.  If both you and your organization affirm your call to leadership, then persevere!
2. Can I become the leader this ministry needs?  It may be that you are called to lead, but for various reasons this ministry is not the place for you.  But if you are called to lead this ministry and yet are experiencing difficulty, then professional development is what you need.  I’ve written a number of posts about professional development, but The most daring case study of all is by far the best starting point.

If you are not yet a leader but aspire to be one, the questions you should ask are:

1. Am I really called to leadership?  Again, see this post for a good discernment process.
2. Have I already led, or could I arrange to lead, a project to test out my leadership skills before taking the risks of team or organizational leadership?
3. What am I really attracted to: the leadership role, the perceived perks and privileges, or fullfilling societal expectations about career advancement?  Do I have the right motivation?

The upshot is that every position in an organization is important, valuable and respectable.  One role is not better than another, it is just different.  There are different risks and commensurate rewards with various levels of positions.  Some are more demanding on your personal life than others, and some take their toll with heavier responsibility.  But all positions can be satisfying and intrinsically rewarding.  Which position that is simply depends on who you were made to be, what you have been called to do and your willingness to invest yourself in becoming excellent at what that role requires.  For some, the answer is a leadership role and for others, it is a doing role.  If you are not where you should be, the tragedy would be to not make a correction.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.  And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.  There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons.  But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good….But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.
1 Cor 12:4-7, 18

Any exceptional enterprise depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people – the #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline… If you have the right people, who accept responsibility, you don’t need to have a lot of senseless rules and mindless bureaucracy in the first place.

Marcus Buckingham, in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, talked about how poor performers stunt the results of top performers.  He said that star performers are often neglected by their managers because underperforming staff drain all the manager’s time away from their better-performing peers.  The best managers, however, support their winners with their time and help them do even better.  Underperformers must earn the right to have more of their manager’s time by improving their performance.

In Managing For Results, Peter Drucker addressed the opportunity cost of problems such as poor performance.  “Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems,” he wrote.  He said that the best one can do by solving problems is to restore normality.  Solving problems won’t take you to a new level of results.

These three observations raise concerns about how we as Christian ministries deal with underperforming staff.  In this post, my focus is on the cost of underperformance.  Sometime later I’ll write another post and discuss how we can work to improve staff performance.

I call dealing with performance issues supervision in distinction to leadership and management.  Leadership deals with vision, goals, values and culture, shaping corporate identity and mission.  Management deals with ways and means, providing resources and coordinating action.  Drucker said that both leadership and management are important because leadership is about doing the right things and management is about doing things right.  Leadership decides which wall to scale, and management ensures someone brings a ladder!  Leadership without management is chaos, and management without leadership is pointless.  The two go together.

So where does supervision fit in?  Hmmm.  Maybe it doesn’t.  The dictionary claims that  ‘supervision’ means oversight, but maybe it’s really just a polite code word for dealing with performance issues.  In Leading Self-Directed Work Teams, Kimball Fisher wrote that the job of supervisors is to control subordinates by telling them what to do and then making sure they do it properly (as opposed to team leaders, who facilitate, train and equip).

I associate supervision with old school Theory X management and lack of trust.  Surely we expect better from our staff than this!   I don’t want to supervise people this way and I can’t imagine that anyone wants to be supervised this way either.  If after training and coaching, you still can’t trust your employees to do their work correctly, well, you either haven’t done the staff development work very well or you have the wrong employees.

When performance issues persist and people don’t learn, there is a terrible cost of supervision:

• Their managers must invest time coaching them for better performance, checking up on their progress, and sometimes even fixing their work, instead of using that time to find new opportunities for the organization;
• The organization needs to put detailed rules and procedures in place for how to do things the right way, which starts to make the work environment seem heavy-handed, stifling and overly bureaucratic to those who perform well and don’t need those systems;
• Whole new systems are created to do nothing but ensure the results of poor performance don’t make it outside of your organization  (such as quality control);
• Organizational performance can start to drop as people settle for mediocrity and the environment becomes less motivational; and
• The salary and other expenses related to underperformance and supervision is wasted budget that could have been used to fund those opportunities that are now lost.

In The Wisdom Of Teams: Creating The High-performance Organization, Jon Katzenbach shows us a better way.  Teams don’t need supervisors, he says.  Rather, they need leaders to equip and resource their teams, manage the team boundaries (how a team relates to everything outside of itself), and then get out of the way and let the team do its thing.  To support such teams without having to have supervisors, Katzenbach says the organization needs a strong performance ethic that drives everyone in the organization to relentlessly pursue common performance results.

Stop for a moment and realize the significance of that last sentence.  Katzenbach is not giving team members license to do whatever they want.  There is an obligation for all team members to live up to a strong performance ethic.  When you hire, you hire people who have the same performance ethic as the team. (See my post Hiring with the Team in Mind.)

So if the organization’s leaders choose which wall to scale, and its managers make sure there is a ladder to get up the wall, then team leaders train their members to climb ladders.  But you shouldn’t need supervisors standing by the ladders making sure everybody climbs the right way.  All you need do is provide your staff with the goal (scale the wall) and the means (the ladder) and then let them do what you’ve trained them to do (climb).

While it may not seem too inconvenient to chip in and cover for poor performance, underperforming is a very serious problem.  Jim Collins (in How the Mighty Fall) writes:

“If I were to pick one marker above all others to use as a warning sign [of an organization starting the downward death spiral], it would be a declining proportion of key seats filled with the right people [those who take responsibility and are self-managing/self-motivating].”

Collins says one notable distinction between the right and the wrong people is that the wrong people see themselves as having a job while the right people see themselves as having responsibilities.  Certainly in your key positions, the ones the public sees, or the ones who achieve direct results or who represent the ministry to others, these positions must be filled with people who perform well.

I’ll talk about improving staff performance in another post.  Until I write that, if you have staff reporting to you, I suggest you begin working on defining the performance ethic of your team.  If you already have one, work at getting the team members to firmly adopt it as their personal performance ethic too.

At CCCC, we have two sets of statements that provide a very strong performance ethic that sets standards related to everything we do.  Our team values include:

• dependability, productivity, and quality,
• knowledge,
• competence, and
• initiative.

Our aspirations include:

• to provide accessible, practical and relevant services that offer high value to our members, and
• to be respected educators who create, source and share expert knowledge as we model how Christian charities should operate.

A final thought.  Everyone on staff is a team member and everyone reports to someone else (even the senior staff person reports to the board).  Why not take ownership for your own results and lead and manage yourself?  Make it your business to supervise your own work.  Make the team values your own values at work and be sure you work by them.  Study the organizational culture as promoted by management and adjust your work habits to fit it.  You’ll have a far more enjoyable work experience and be far more valuable to your employer.  Be self-directed and self-motivated and take responsibility for your results.  Your manager will love you!

When a leader requires without relating, the leader is seen as autocratic, demanding, hard-nosed and a bunch of other not-so-nice attributes.  When a leader relates without requiring, not much happens, but everyone has a really good time as the ship goes down.

I suspect that some leaders feel the tension between requiring and relating and struggle with doing both.  Some leaders may have difficulty with the relating part, believing that if things get mushy and touchy-feely the organization will fall to pieces.  And other leaders may not have the intestinal fortitude and confidence to insist on performance, so they avoid confronting poor performance in a misguided attempt to be nice.

This leader made two points about R&R that should help you lead with both strategies.

1. Don’t settle for an either/or approach to the two Rs.  The concept of requiring and relating, of demanding performance while at the same time showing care and compassion, is thoroughly biblical.  John 1:14 says that Jesus came “full of grace and truth.”  Randy Alcorn, in The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance, shows how Jesus demonstrated grace towards other people while at the same time not compromising the truth at all.  He welcomed the woman caught in adultery, but also said, “Go and sin no more.”  Grace is like relating, and truth is like requiring.  Jesus showed how grace and truth work together seamlessly to produce his desired result: they drive people to a decision point – will they, or will they not, live for God?  Requiring and relating can likewise co-exist in your leadership style to produce your desired results – accomplishment of your ministry’s mission.  So don’t be squeamish about insisting on performance, and don’t be shy about building strong relationships with your staff.
2. Requiring performance by clearly setting out the expected activities and results is simply good stewardship.  I thought this was a brilliant insight, connecting performance with stewardship.  After all, if you had a program that did not perform well, you’d either cancel it or redesign it to perform better.  You wouldn’t knowingly continue a program that was inefficient or ineffective, would you?  Of course not.  So why would you knowingly put up with inefficient or ineffective performance?  Both programs and salaries are funded by donors who expect you to make good use of their hard-earned donations.  And as a leader in ministry, you are accountable to God for good stewardship of everything entrusted to you.

But employees are accountable for good stewardship too.  Any paid worker in Christian ministry has two kinds of stewardship to think about with respect to their incomes.  First, in their personal capacities, they are to be good stewards of the cash they receive.  That is the normal way to think about stewardship.  But second, in their work capacities, they are to be good stewards of the time they traded for their income.  I don’t often hear people talk about stewardship of their work time.  Most often when stewardship of time is discussed, it is in the context of volunteer service.  But every person should think about how they are using their work time and ask the question, “Am I right now being a good steward of the time I have sold to my employer?”

And if leadership needs to help some people become better stewards of their work time, then that too is good stewardship on the leader’s part.  If we don’t address performance issues in order to be nice, well, just hear what Randy Alcorn has to say about that!  According to him, we’ve redefined Christlike to mean “nice” and with that definition, Jesus himself wasn’t always Christlike, because he confronted people with their sin.  Requiring that work standards be met may not always be seen as nice, but done well it is good stewardship.

In Shepherds After My Own Heart: Pastoral Traditions And Leadership In The Bible, Tim Laniak discusses the protection, provision and guidance that the Lord gave to Israel while he led them through the wilderness.  These three words are a pretty good description of leadership responsibilities, but it is the word guidance that I think is most closely related to the R&R style of leadership.  There are three Hebrew verbs used in the Bible that are translated ‘to guide.”  The three nuances Tim gives these words are:

1. gentle leading (which is shown in several verses as the Lord carrying Israel in his arms, or leading the nursing ewes of his flock);
2. leading, even against the will of those being led; and
3. capable, visionary leadership guiding a group toward its destiny.

Perhaps the best way to encapsulate what is meant by Require and Relate is that leaders should provide gentle leadership guiding people towards their common destiny, even when some prodding is required.

By the way, on a completely different topic, Alcorn’s book has a statement that just leapt off the page at me.  As a bonus thought, here it is:

“Most sinners loved being around Jesus.  They enjoyed His company, sought Him out, invited Him to their homes and parties.  Today most sinners don’t want to be around Christians.  Unbelievers tore off the roof to get to Jesus.  Sometimes they crawl out the windows to get away from us!  Why is that?”

Alcorn asks a great question that we all should carefully consider.

Christian Horizons is fighting to retain its Christian identity by appealing a ruling of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal that forces them to get rid of it if they want to continue to serve the public.  As I sat in a courtroom listening to the arguments, I was deeply impressed by the pervasiveness of Christian faith at every level of this organization.  The Tribunal argued that Christian faith, while it might motivate Christian Horizons’ employees, was not needed to simply feed people and care for their personal needs.  Christian Horizons countered, and the judges appeared to accept, that their Christian faith informed every decision they made and the manner in which they provided care.  They are not doing good deeds that anyone might do; they are doing Christian deeds for which they need to retain their Christian identity.  An external threat has endangered the faith-based identity of Christian Horizons, but history shows the greater danger usually comes from within the ministry.  If you think it couldn’t happen to you, think again.

Churches, denominations and evangelism ministries have a clearly religious mission and are less likely to lose their Christian identity, but even they face the possibility they could lose their particular heritage from dangers within.  If you think that would never happen, read a phenomenal PhD dissertation that analyzed the transformation of the United Church of Canada from its evangelical roots into the most liberal church in the country.  Kevin Flatt, the author, had full access to the official records (including personal papers) of the UCC archives and to the surviving leaders who led the UCC through the last stages of this tranformation.  Fascinating reading! And one of the key findings relates to the importance of words and their meanings.  The changes at the United Church originated at the top and involved very carefully-crafted messages with intended double-meanings.  Don’t ever think that words have no power!  They do.

Ministries that focus on extending God’s love to the world through compassion and development work that is also done from a secular perspective face a much higher risk of losing their Christian identity, because superficially at least, it appears faith is nothing more than a motivator for the good works the ministry does.  These ministries must be vigilant to ensure their Christian identity and mission are retained and continue to shape their programs and services.  This is a lesson we have learned from the experiences of several Christian ministries that are no longer Christian. 

Two college/seminary presidents recently recommended a book to me, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.  It is an analysis of how most Christian higher education institutions lost their Christian identity, and how Calvin College, Wheaton College, University of Notre Dame, St. Olaf College, Valparaiso University and Baylor University kept it.  There are a lot of factors related particularly to education, but the main factor that applies to us all is that the Christian colleges and universities that keep their Christian identity alive and vibrant do so by imprinting their stories on students and faculty, so that they know they are part of an ongoing narrative.  They have a communal memory of their Christian vision and ethos (the ‘way of life’) that is kept alive by leaders who frequently tell detailed accounts of their story, and who interpret its meaning for the circumstances they face in the present day.

Many of the Christian universities and colleges that became secular did not intend to do so, it just happened gradually because their leaders did not recognize the long term consequences of the many decisions they  made about education philosophy, the role of religion in education, and the content of their communal life.  Surprisingly, leaders of Christian higher education institutions were not able to adequately articulate the theology of their identity and mission.  

I have to say something here.  My dissertation research included a survey of 100 agency leaders that is relevant to this finding.  It showed that about one-half of the senior leaders of Christian non-church ministries have had no formal theological training.  So if you haven’t had a course in theology, I suggest that you do some continuing education to strengthen your ability to provide theological leadership to your ministry.

Now back to the book’s research.  The presidents lacked the theological resources and therefore slowly but increasingly accommodated the surrounding culture and lost their distinctiveness.  The faith of the founders became nothing more than their motivation for founding the school.  Pietism was another important factor in the secularization of Christian schools because it led to the separation of personal faith and religious practices from the intellectual and professional work of the institution.  Without well-developed theological resources to draw upon, the leaders accepted the secular idea that faith is personal and that it should not intrude into public life.

To keep the Christian identity strong, it must be made concrete in the vision, ethos and employee selection criteria.  All of the research in this book is encapsulated in the author’s statement that the Christian tradition must be the organizing principle for the identity and mission of the institution and that the Christian story as a “comprehensive, unsurpassable, and central account of reality must be held strongly and confidently enough to shape the life of the [institution] decisively in all its facets.” 

The senior staff person is crucial in setting the overall direction of the organization and is therefore crucial to the protection of the ministry’s Christian identity and its transmission to a new generation.  He or she must believe that the Christian account of life and reality is publicly relevant to all facets of the organization’s life.  Leaders are responsible for articulating a compelling vision of their ministry’s identity and mission to the board, staff and other stakeholders.  The leader is not just the senior pastor, superintendent or executive director, the leader is also the ministry’s Chief Keeper of the Story, who needs to be a storyteller par excellence.

Strategic statements such as vision and mission statements are like the theological formulations found in Romans and the so-called ‘teaching’ books of the Bible.  They are explicit statements of doctrine.  But all scripture is for edification and teaching, and that includes the narrative parts of scripture as well.  The creation account, the history of Israel and the ministry of Jesus are recorded in scripture because they have just as much theology crafted into them as Paul wrote in Romans, but it is implicit rather than explicit in most cases.  Narrative and declaration go together to teach us about God.  And your ministry narrative and strategic statements go together to teach us about your ministry.  The narrative puts life to the declarations.

So document the stories that illustrate your ministry’s mission, vision, culture and values.  Through stories, show how the Christian faith has shaped every aspect of the ministry.

I see it as my responsibility to keep the stories of CCCC alive and meaningful to a new generation of ministry leaders and staff.  My hope is that the Christian identity and ethos of CCCC will live on as others keep the stories in circulation and become part of the CCCC story themselves.  I rarely (if ever) tell a story just for the sake of telling a story.  There is always a point I want to get across.  Sometimes I might explain the point explicitly, but that usually takes the fun out of it for the listener.  Most often I tell the story and trust that the listener will figure out its point on their own.

So now you know how important your ministry’s stories are.  How do you craft and tell your strategic stories?  I’ll cover that in another post when I review a great book on creating stories for the work world.

World Vision Canada sponsors the “30 Hour Famine,” an annual event in which people get together as a group and go without food for 30 hours while doing a variety of fun activities and educational sessions on poverty and
hunger.  What theological statements could this program be making?  The design of the program speaks volumes: a simple donation is not enough!  Donors can’t simply use money to avoid confronting an unpleasant issue.  Rather, they are asked to share in the experience of hunger, to suffer alongside those who live with hunger every day.  Doing so, they might get a glimpse of God, not hovering dispassionately somewhere “out there,” but suffering along with humanity, being moved by our plight (e.g., Exo 3:7).  Participants are acting like Job’s three friends, who did one thing very well; they came and they sat silently with Job for seven days and nights.  They identified with Job’s grief and sympathized and comforted him by sharing in the grief ritual: they tore their own clothes, threw dust over their heads, and they wept with him.  A strong theology of suffering can be discerned in this program.  Observers of the “30 Hour Famine” might also get the idea that Christianity sees all humanity as one family, with responsibilities for each other.  All are made in the image of God and all deserve their fair share of God’s creation, regardless of their faith.  We can infer from the “30 Hour Famine” that indeed we are “our brother’s keeper,” something that Cain, holding a worldly perspective, rejected (Gen 4:9).

International Teams Canada has a “Ride for Refugees.”  This family-friendly event raises awareness of refugees and internally displaced people.  Participants have a choice of routes for a bicycle ride, ranging from 10 km to 100 km.  An observer might realize that all of life can be put to use for God, because the program is based on recreational biking rather than an overtly spiritual activity.  Participants can have fun while serving God.  By  offering routes that accommodate everyone from young to old, beginner to expert, single or with children, the ministry is modelling an inclusive theology that holds that everyone can be used by God.  Churches and charities that arrange rides in their local community are allowed to direct 50% of the money raised to a qualifying refugee, ethnic or immigrant ministry of their choice (including a program of their own).  An astute observer would see an open-handed theology of generosity that supports a spirit of cooperation between ministries, based on a theology of common mission and a belief that God will generously provide the necessary resources.

World Vision Canada and International Teams Canada may or may not have designed their programs with these  theological points in mind, but however they designed them, theological reflection reveals that they are well designed and make valid theological points.  

When you look at your programs, policies and practices, here are some questions to help you reflect on how well your espoused theology is reflected in them:

• What assumptions do they make regarding
  • values,
  • motivation, and
  • the root issue or problem?
• What are the relevant theological truths or doctrines for each one?
• What do they say about our view of God and humanity?
• How do they line up with our Christian responsibilities and ethics?

Scott Rodin, in Stewards In The Kingdom: A Theology Of Life In All Its Fullness, has a challenge that every Christian management team should take up.  His question relates specifically to stewardship practices, but it applies across the board to all organizational practices. He asks:

If we were to start from scratch, with no preconceived ideas with regards to what works in fundraising but only with a firm commitment to the ethics of the kingdom of God in which we live, what kind of development program would we build? What would it look like, what techniques would we use and, most importantly, what would be the assumptions upon which this program would be based?

Stories such as these cause me to ask, “I’m sure your ministry has a Christian mission, but is it a Christian ministry?”  If you believe that action speaks louder than words, and that we should preach the gospel at all times (using words if necessary), then what are you preaching through your ministry’s actions?  This is a really important issue because Jesus said in Mat 5:16, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”  If that’s what happens when they see our good deeds, what will happen when they see our bad deeds?  In my next post I’ll discuss how this idea applies to how you engage people outside of your ministry, but in this post I am focused on how you work with your own staff. 

In Ontario, holders of religious office are entirely exempt from the Employment Standards Act (which provides minimum standards for notice of termination).  Some churches think that because the legislation doesn’t apply to pastors, they can treat them any way they want!  But they forget that Common Law still applies and the result in court will be what is fair and reasonable, not the minimum set by the Act.  In another province I was told the church counted on the pastor not going to the courts to sue fellow believers.  But the bigger issue is, churches that terminate pastors without notice are showing that when secular restraints are cast off, this is how Christians choose to treat fellow Christians!!!  What a terrible witness. 

If you say you are a Christian ministry, then the way you work together as a team better be an excellent witness to what life is like in the kingdom of God.  This is not only your responsibility before God, but it is also your responsibility to every other ministry that works in the name of Christ.  Everything we do should reflect the righteous ways that God wants us to have with him and with each other. 

How can we transform society if we can’t get our own Christian societies right?  People should look at our churches and agencies and say, “I want a society that looks like that!”   All of our communities, whether a family, a church, a social network, or a work team, should bear witness to the kingdom that is coming and that has already broken in to our world.  After all, this is the Good News and I don’t want anybody to look at us and say, “Thanks, but no thanks!”

Job 31:13-14 says it all:  

If I have denied justice to my menservants and maidservants
       when they had a grievance against me,

what will I do when God confronts me?
       What will I answer when called to account?

There are times when employees need correction and development, and these should be done in the spirit of helping them better use their gifts and pursue their call, rather than punishing them.  After all, what employer doesn’t want all of their employees to be highly successful?  There are times when ending the employment relationship is the right thing to do, but this should be done in the spirit of helping them find a place that better fits what they have to offer.  I don’t know, but I expect that the cases that justify immediate dismissal for cause are far fewer than what many employers think.

My approach to difficult situations (of any kind) is to try to understand how God could redeem the situation for all parties.  As hard as it may be, especially when people are emotional, I have found that in difficult situations there has always been a way that leaves all parties feeling better about the situation.  I wish I could give examples, but for obvious reasons, I can’t.  All I can say is, it is worth the time praying about and reflecting on what would be a good outcome for the other party.   

In A passion for your mission, I said you need passion for the work of your ministry.  Well folks, this is my passion for CCCC’s mission:  that all ministries should operate in a manner that is worthy of Jesus Christ, in whose name we serve.  May what I do in leadership never, ever bring reproach to the name of Christ!  Amen.

Sabbaticals are based upon the biblical concept of sabbath rest.  There is the day of rest, the Sabbath day, but there is also the Sabbath year when the land lays fallow.  At the end of every seventh Sabbath year, God instituted the Year of Jubilee.  Observance of this fifty year cycle of rest years was meant to teach people not to be in bondage to endless work or greed.  They could enjoy the fruits of their labour and trust God for sustenance.

The Expository Dictionary of Bible Words reports that “in a redemptive-historical sense, the “Sabbath” day anticipated…ultimately, the heavenly rest of the believer.”  I find that exciting.  A number of people have written excellent biblical-theological studies on what heaven will be like, and it sounds to me like it will be filled with enjoyable, productive work in which you can bring to bear all of who you are in a way that will be  richly rewarding and deeply satisfying.  (Check out N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope for example.)

So in the biblical context, rest is not inactivity but rest from the aspects of life and work that cause you to toil and struggle.  At heart, a sabbatical should be a rest from the routine of work (so no contact with the office!!) and a time to refresh oneself.

The modern context for sabbaticals depends on the kind of organization that grants the sabbatical, because they have different ideas about the purpose or philosophy about what sabbaticals are for.  A quick Internet search for policies about sabbaticals reveals some trends:

• In the academic world, sabbaticals are usually used for research and writing;
• In the nonprofit world, they are to refresh and renew the leader;
• In the church, they are a time for personal renewal and study;
• In the regular work world, they are seen as a reward for long service and a time when people get a break from work to pursue some lifelong goal (such as to travel, to pursue a hobby or to achieve a big personal accomplishment) or to do something entirely different (such as to do volunteer work); and
• All employers that address the possibility of alternative employment during the sabbatical forbid it.  You can’t go work for someone else.

Four foundations that fund sabbaticals for selected nonprofit leaders did a research study (entitled Creative Disruptions) on how effective sabbaticals are.  They found that:

• Sabbaticals lead to new perspectives on the part of the leader that benefit the board and staff;
• They are an inexpensive way of preventing emotional, intellectual, creative and physical burnout;
• They rejuvenate mind and spirit and create greater leadership capacity for the executive director;
• They also benefit the second tier of leadership who have opportunity to temporarily take on new responsibilities and acquire new skills.  When the leader returns, often they do not return to the old routines but delegate more to staff.  This helps with succession planning; and
• Sabbaticals reconnect leaders with the reasons why they chose their work and leadership position in the first place.  Leaders report they crystallized an existing vision or developed a fresh vision for their organizations.

Sabbaticals may present some problems too, particularly if the organization has over-relied on the executive director (perhaps for fundraising).  The more a leader has been involved in the operations of the organization, as opposed to providing long term strategic leadership, the more the organization may suffer during the leader’s absence.  In a minority of situations, either the board or the executive director may realize there is no longer a fit between them.  Finally, without the leader, some organizations flounder if the second tier leadership isn’t strong enough (politics, lack of direction, etc.).

The Creative Disruptions study shows that the optimal length of a sabbatical (for nonprofits) is three or four months.  Less than that doesn’t have a restorative effect and longer than that, in a non-academic setting, creates a hardship on the organization that outweighs the marginal benefits to the executive director of a longer time away.  In academic settings, faculty typically get 6 or 12 months.

As far as pay goes, it seems that:

• Faculty get paid, but if they go for six months they get full pay and if they go for twelve months they get half pay;
• Some denominations have a fund at the presbytery level that ministers or their boards apply to for funding, or a church might be able to continue paying the pastor;
• Nonprofits will pay salary if there are existing staff members to assume the duties.  If they have to hire an interim executive director, then it depends on getting a grant if they cannot afford to carry the extra salary; and
• In business, it appears people save up their own money because the employer usually doesn’t pay for a sabbatical.  The trick in business is to get the employer to agree to keep your job (or an equivalent position) open for you.  When employees in for-profit situations want a sabbatical, it is often called an ‘adult gap year’ similar to the year a high school graduate may take off before going to university.

Putting this together, I think a sabbatical is a time to get away from regular work for a period of personal and professional development in order to improve my value to my employer.  It should refresh my vision for my personal mission and my employer’s organizational mission and equip me in some way to be a better leader.

So my quandary now (and a good one it is!) is to figure out what to do with a three month sabbatical.  I would really enjoy hearing from anyone who has taken or is planning to take a sabbatical, especially what you did or will do with your time.  I’d like to make the most of the time.  Perhaps you could also share what your sabbatical policy is or if your sabbatical was a one-off decision of the board as in my situation.

**UPDATE** You can see what I plan to do for my sabbatical here.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” Ambrose Redmoon

Over the last few weeks of travel, I visited 26 CCCC member charities across the country and asked how things are going.  There is no doubt that the economy has affected many charities, but the most notable observation I had from these visits was the lack of fear displayed by ministry leaders.  We are all human after all, and fear is a natural emotion that strikes everyone, even Paul (1 Cor 2:3 and 2 Cor 7:5).  Now, I’m sure that if leaders do have fear they try very hard not to display it, but I didn’t get a whiff of anything even approaching fear.  Many of these ministries have been affected by falling donations, grants and  earned income, and some have had to trim back their programs and reduce their staffing levels.  These ministry leaders have had to make tough decisions!  The topic of this post is how Christian leaders should handle fear.

Before going further, you should know the good news from a recent CCCC survey of 635 Canadian Christian charities.  In the current economy, 32% have had an increase in donations and 25% are unchanged from the same five month period a year ago.  A little more than half of the rest have had a decrease of less than 10%.

While fear is a natural emotion, it is important that it be mastered.  When Moses continually rebuts God’s call because of fear, we discover that finally ”the anger of the LORD burned against Moses” (Exo 4:14).  God expects us to deal with fear.  Moses did, and at the end of his life he was able to say with confidence to his people, “The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.  Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged” (Deut 31:8).

My daughter taught me something about mastering fear.  It was really hard to watch.  She was riding an ex-racehorse, and the horse was speeding up as he went over every jump.  After the first jump her feet were out of the stirrups, she hung on as she went over the second jump, but as he continued to speed up and round the far end of the arena, she slowly and inexorably began to slide off the horse.  As the horse rounded the other end she was flung right into the wall.  I heard the crack as her helmet hit the wood and I was out of my seat.  But she got up right away and started to walk back to the horse, who was now standing still.  After a few minutes of recovering from a bad shake-up, she was back in the saddle again.  She had to face her fear and get back on the horse!  Sometimes as leaders we get thrown by something and land on our keisters (that’s a technical, anatomical term!).  Like my daughter, somehow we have to get up, face our fear, and get back in the saddle.  But how?

Challenging circumstances that cause fear can grow gradually over time or crash into your world quite suddenly, but either way Dan Allender says in his book Leading with a Limp that such crises ”force leaders to make a choice — either to risk and suffer with courage or to crumble under the weight of fear and threatening circumstances.”  He points out that every crisis has both an external and an internal dimension.  The circumstances are external, but “every crisis has the effect of revealing something about the leader’s character and inner life.”

Courage is the internal resource we draw upon in the face of fear.  Oswald Sanders defines courage in his book Spiritual Leadership as that which enables us to “encounter difficulty or danger without fear or discouragement.”  Where does courage come from?  I think it comes from remembering your call, your mission, your past experience of God and your present relationship with God.

Your Call

Reggie McNeal, in A Work of Heart: Understanding How God Shapes Spiritual Leaders, says you should be driven by your call, not your fear.  Fear can manifest itself in many ways, including discouragement and self-doubt.  I was crushed by both for a time and I came through okay by remembering the specific call of God on my life (I talked about how I was called in the post Discerning Your Call).  I am determined that I will not allow any person or any thing to keep me from what God has called me to.  One of the authors I’ve referred to mentions David’s sense of personal destiny (related to God’s call) as a source for his courage during his kingship. Assuming that you and your board still agree that you are called to leadership, nothing should be allowed to frighten or discourage you away from that call.  Whatever the circumstances, God wants you where you are, and that is enough for me.  Perhaps there are things you can learn from adversity to further develop yourself, but don’t let anything stifle your call.

Your Mission

When circumstances threaten your organization, fear should drive you back to your ministry’s mission.  I experienced some fear once as I considered various threats in a SWOT analysis, until I brought to mind that we are working diligently on the portion of God’s mission that he has assigned to CCCC.  If we stay true to this mission, we are doing the Lord’s work and the Lord will look after his own.  (This is why I have reservations about traditional strategic planning as detailed in another post; strategic planning has its place, but keep it in its place!)

Rather than dreaming up ways to respond to the external environment that would be only peripheral to our mission, I erased the fear of threat by focusing on the mission given to CCCC by God.  Don’t let fear distract you from your mission!  As long as we faithfully perform our work to accomplish God’s purpose for us, we will survive.

Some of the people I visited over the last few weeks took their reduced resources as a sign to re-evaluate their ministries in light of their mission and strip away some of the good things they were doing that were not central to their mission.  When you have lots of money it is easy to add programs, but are they the best use of your resources?  Scarcity forces us to revisit our mission and our priorities, and make choices. I believe our ministry’s mission is protected by God, but not necessarily the means we have chosen to fulfill it.  I am committed to our mission, not our means.  The leaders I spoke with all believe that as a result of the pruning they have done, they are well-positioned to proceed effectively with their mission.

Your Past Experience of God

Read again how David got the courage to face Goliath.  When the whole army of Israel trembled and fled in fear, David went out alone to do battle against him.  Where did his courage come from?

David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep.  When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth.  When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it.  Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God.  The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (1 Sam 17:34-37).

I know what God has already done in and through me, just as you know the same about yourself, and those memories give all of us a rational basis upon which to take heart and be courageous.  Reflect on your experience of God over a lifetime and you will undoubtedly find places where he was training you for leadership.  Those lessons become a rich resource from which to draw courage when you need it.  The principle of God working in us in small things to prepare us for big things is an important lesson from the Parable of the Talents.

Your Present Relationship with God

We discover in John 20:19 that the doors of the place where the disciples were staying were shut tight because they were afraid of the Jews, yet in Acts 4:8-13 we see Peter and John confidently testifying to the leaders of the Jews.  What was the difference?  They were now full of the Holy Spirit, and we know from 2 Tim 1:7 that he gives us a spirit of power and not timidity.  Fifty-seven times in Scripture we are told “Do not fear” and seventeen times “Be strong and courageous!”

Keep your relationship with God vital and fresh.  Remember that Isaiah spoke prophetically to God saying that “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you” (Isaiah 26:3).  Psalm 118:6 affirms that “the Lord is for me; I will not fear” and of course Paul gave us that great builder of courage, “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38).  Nothing can prevent you from fulfilling God’s purpose except what you allow to come between you and God.

Benediction

Ambrose Redmoon, who gave us that great quote at the top, was a New Age beatnik who lived the last thirty years of his life as a paraplegic due to a car accident.  He must have learned a lot about courage by living so long with his adversity, but whatever his source of courage was, it pales to the source of our courage.  We have a divine call and mission, coupled with our experience of God and relationship with him.  When God calls us into his service to fulfill his mission, he strengthens and equips us to fulfill his purpose for us and our ministries.  So,

May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Hebrews 13:20-21