My attention was captured from the opening statement of this book. “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.” This single statement began the cerebral wheels turning for the lessons I absorbed throughout the next nine chapters.
The phase three concept of “inside the black box” intrigued me with the deep analysis process. Stepping inside the box and turning the light bulbs on to visualize the seen and unseen. I realized the importance of investigating team analysis. The priority of what needs to be done and what, too, is not working or has run its course and needs to be stopped.
Second lesson was the importance of “level five leadership.” Servant leaders are self-effacing and display the fierce resolve to do whatever needs to be accomplished to build Christ’s church. Studied up leaders are modest and willful, humble and fearless, and never let their egos or agendas get in the way. It reinforced the importance of “getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus.” This ensures time is not lost in motivating and managing people for the mission, vision and values. The right leaders will be highly motivated by their inner drive to produce something great for the kingdom of God.
Third lesson was the reality that “facts are better than dreams.” We must realize the necessity to lead in a way that does not de-motivate people by supplying those around us with false hope. Lead with questions and keep asking the questions until a clear picture is attained. Listen to those that challenge our ideas and engage in healthy productive dialogue that will better define the mission. Never give up, never surrender. It may take some time, but in the end the mission will prevail and it will be worth it for the cause is great. It’s the “Stockdale paradox” that says “retain the faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. And at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” This mindset helped Admiral Stockdale persevere through eight long years in a POW camp in Vietnam.
Fourth lesson was to take a complex world and simplify it. The “Hedgehog Concept” narrowed and employed the focus. It enlisted the importance of the three circles that ask three engaging questions. First was the importance of what we can and cannot be the best at. Stick with the things we do well then discipline ourselves to become great in that area. Second, learn what drives your engine - reaching people with the gospel, educating them in God’s truth and deploying them to missional living. Third is to understand what we are deeply passionate about. Good-to-great companies said “we should only do those things that we can get passionate about.” If I believe my passion is to live in a deeply intimate relationship with God, to grow in my knowledge of Him and to serve His agenda in life through missional living then my focus is narrowed and my mission and values are defined and clear. Everything breathes from this central passion and healthy balanced living is attained. Life in Christ becomes the greatest, most enjoyable love affair ever.
Fifth valuable lesson was the implication to make a conscious effort “to pause and reflect,” to use our brains and think through each decision. Slow, prayerful, thought out and discussed actions sustain a longer life-impacting change for the present and future. We are to ask how does it fit in to the three circles, the “Hedgehog Concept,” how does it meet our mission, vision and values.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Joy
Truly Walk with God, and get ready – it’s going to be exhilarating. Life will become a gift. With faith we live with our eyes wide open, even when we shouldn’t find joy, even when life comes at us hard-hitting, even when we have tremendous pain and disappointment and we have every good reason to lose our joy, deep in the core of our soul there will be an unshakable Christ fueled joy that keeps our motors running!This God-given life, this walk of faith, when lived with all our spiritual senses on full alert, we live life to the fullest, alive and able to experience the true pleasures of life. We are artists, explorers, believers, campaigners and Christian hedonist. Enjoy a full and fulfilled life in Christ!
Psalms 27:6 And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.
Psalms 32:11 Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!
Psalms 35:27 Let those who delight in my righteousness shout for joy and be glad and say evermore, "Great is the Lord, who delights in the welfare of his servant!"
Psalms 84:2 My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
1 Peter 1:8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, esv
Friday, September 4, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sign Up for the Team and Get Busy
In the world around us, we are facing economic crisis, a rise in crime, health issues, culture conflicts and rising inflation alongside spiritual poverty. At times in our Christian circles throughout history we, the church, have been known to paint the culture as the enemy. What if, just if, we took time and energy to engage the culture in a way that brightened eyes, opened ears and embraced hearts so that those in the culture might be spiritually transformed and physically cared for? It is during times of crisis and dilemma that we as Christians need to take time to evaluate our call and our purpose. Matthew 28:18-20 gives what we call “The Great Commission.” It is in this commissioning from Jesus Christ Himself that we are faced with our calling and purpose to go make Christ-followers of all people. No matter ethnicity, education, what side of the tracks, there is no them or those people, just people in need if a Savior. It says baptizing them and teaching them the truths of God. We are to use our God-given gifts in our communities and in our world to make an eternal impact. It can get messy at times and it takes cooperation and unity of like-minded and like-hearted Christians willing to sling some sweat and pull a few muscles to join together with their resources. It is in times like this that many Christ-followers seem to change their Christian clothes. There are no white Christians, no black Christians, no red Christians, and no yellow Christians. Just Christians called by God, drawn by God, for His glory and to fulfill His will. What insightful days for those in our communities when they open the paper, read the articles of churches, Christians from different backgrounds, different denominations, yet fulfilling one united cause to fulfill the “Great Commission” and the “Great Commandment,” to love God and their neighbor. To read of the churches involved in raising resources for food banks, serving the hungry in food lines, cleaning the streets of their neighborhood, offering after school ministries in all kinds of innovative ways to care for the assortment of needs. We too often chase the “new thing” when really we just need to reflect on an ancient thing. Grasp it and live it out in our lives. Acts 2:42-47 talks about the affluence and impact a body of like-minded believers in Christ can have on a community. Christians serving together, uniting for the cause of meeting needs and teaching God’s truth with God-glorifying motivated hearts does not trip out the Holy Spirit. Acts 2 is a testimony that the Holy Spirit knows exactly what to do in these situations. The question remains will we as spiritually blessed people sit the bench or join the team and continue to rise to the cause, meet the needs both physically and spiritually, find unity and peace that transcends barriers and be the church to a world in need of God’s Scriptural truth and care.
(A Mansfield New Journal – ViewPoint Article by Pastor John Stevens) Saturday July 18, 2009
(A Mansfield New Journal – ViewPoint Article by Pastor John Stevens) Saturday July 18, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Father's Day
Here’s a Father’s Day quote: ("The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." by Theodore Hesburgh) The Scriptures share in Eph. 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. - Let us as Fathers answer this call!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Alive 09 Fest
Well the AFTERSHOCK youth group is off to the 22nd annual Alive Festival today. Please be in prayer for all 46 attendees from CORE'S AFTERSHOCK Youth Group. This is a big event and adventure for the leaders and the youth. Pray for the speakers and bands as the teach and sing for our Savior and minister to the youth. Pray for the hearts of all that attend to be responsive to the gospel message that goes out.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening can be described as a revitalization of religious piety that blew through the colonies in America between the 1730’s and the 1770’s. This revival was part of a much broader movement taking place in England, Scotland and Germany. With these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the Eighteenth Century, a new age of faith arose to reaffirm the view that being truly religious was trusting and believing in God with the heart. In addition one must rely on biblical revelation and principles rather than human reasoning.
The First Great Awakening began among the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Reverend William Tennent, a Scots-Irish immigrant, and four other clergymen, all his sons led it. The Presbyterians also established a seminary to train clergymen whose heartfelt preaching would bring sinners to experience evangelical conversion. This college is known today as Princeton University.
Enthusiastic revivals spread from the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies to the Congregationalist Puritans of New England. By the 1740’s these churches and their preachers were holding revivals throughout the region. The same strategy was used that William Tennent used. There were emotional and even more powerful sermons because they were preached by extemporaneously preachers like Jonathan Edwards who could deliver vivid, terrifying images of the sinful corruption of human nature and the terrors that awaited the unrepentant sinners in Hell. Jonathan Edwards’ most famous hell, fire and brimstone sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The revivals in the Northern Colonies drew some to the calling of missionaries to the South. Another great preacher of the First Great Awakening was George Whitefield from England. Whitefield was an ordained minister in the Church of England, but he later joined with other Anglican clergymen who shared his evangelical bent. Among the clergymen were John and Charles Wesley. Together these clergymen led a movement to reform the Church of England, which brought about the founding of the Methodist Church in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century. Whitefield made several trips across the Atlantic to preach throughout the colonies. He would usually draw so many people that the meeting had to be held outdoors. His popularity grew quickly and Whitefield’s ministry appealed to such diverse personalities as Jonathon Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Whitefield preached what all the Calvinists had been preaching for centuries, but he presented the sermons in a rhetorically different fashion. He would make dramatic gestures, sometimes weeping openly, or thundering out threats of hell. The sermons became theatrical performances to draw sinners in.
Throughout the colonies conservative and moderate clergymen questioned the emotionalism and charged that the revivals were disorderly. They were upset with “itinerants”, ministers who, like Whitefield, would travel from one community to another preaching and often criticizing the local clergy. They were also upset with the fact that women and African Americans would set their social status aside to worship in these revival gatherings. The evangelical ministers and converts would retaliate by calling their conservative and moderate opponents, “cold, uninspiring, and lacking in piety and grace.” Battles raged within congregations and whole denominations over the challenges to clerical authority as well as the evangelical approach to conversion from “the heart” rather than “the head.”
We can see that the First Great Awakening left colonies torn apart along religious lines. Anglicans and Quakers gained many new members among those who disapproved of the revival’s excesses. The Methodists and the Baptists in the 1770’s made even more gains from the evangelical converts. The largest single group of churchgoing Americans remained within the Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, but they suffered division internally between advocates and opponents of the Great Awakening. The advocates and opponents were known as “new lights” and “old lights”. Civil government was now drawn into the struggles. “In the colonies where one denomination received state support, other churches lobbied legislatures for disestablishment, an end to the favored status of Congregationalism in Connecticut and Massachusetts and of Anglicanism in the Southern Colonies.”
The Second Great Awakening occurred in the Nineteenth Century in America. America contained a vast array of Protestant sects and denominations, with a wide range of doctrines, practices and organizational forms. By the 1830’s almost all of these sects had an evangelical emphasis in common. Evangelicalism became the dominant form of spiritual expression. What characterized this above all else was the pervasive sense of activist energy it released. This evangelical activism involved a doctrinal shift away from the predominantly Calvinist doctrine that was upheld in much of the Eighteenth Century American Christianity. The Nineteenth Century evangelicals, like Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher or Francis Asbury, were just as staunt in their emphasis on the terrible sinfulness of mankind, but they focused on sin as human action. They preached in their sermons, hell, fire and damnation. They also harbored an unshakable practical belief in the capacity of mankind to make that moral action and in mankind’s ability to turn from sinful behavior and embrace moral action. This belief was known as Armenianism, which emphasized the duty and ability of sinners to repent and renounce sin. The conversion was now understood as an experience. Not only did people live by faith, but also by something that happened to them. There was a real, intensely emotional event they went through, or a transformation. One must possess a genuine, heartfelt realization that they stood justly condemned for one’s sins and deserved eternal damnation. Conviction was considered recognition. The convicted person could not earn salvation, but could only fully repent and surrender unconditionally to God’s will and to serve him fully. “It was this act of repentance, surrender and dedication to serving his will that Finney meant when in his most famous sermon he insisted that “sinners are bound to change their own hearts”.” This moment of conversion was when Christ’s atonement for sin through a merciful God would bestow the grace on the repentant sinner.
The Second Great Awakening had a tremendous effect on society by the number of social reform movements. Finney was a great encourager of these. He believed the gospel did not just get people saved, but was also a means of cleaning up society. He and many of his followers worked to make America a Christian nation. Finney was a strong abolitionist and encouraged Christians to become involved in the anti-slavery movement. Christians became the leaders in many social concerns such as education, prison reform, temperance, Sabbath observance and women’s rights. The Second Great Awakening resulted in the establishment of numerous societies to aid in spreading the gospel. The establishments include the American Bible Society (1816), American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), American Sunday School Union (1817), American Tract Society (1826) and the American Home Missionary Society (1826). The large numbers of Christian workers for social reform became so influential they and the organizations they founded became known as the Benevolent Empire. The Second Great Awakening had a greater effect on society than any other revival in America.
by John Stevens
The First Great Awakening began among the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Reverend William Tennent, a Scots-Irish immigrant, and four other clergymen, all his sons led it. The Presbyterians also established a seminary to train clergymen whose heartfelt preaching would bring sinners to experience evangelical conversion. This college is known today as Princeton University.
Enthusiastic revivals spread from the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies to the Congregationalist Puritans of New England. By the 1740’s these churches and their preachers were holding revivals throughout the region. The same strategy was used that William Tennent used. There were emotional and even more powerful sermons because they were preached by extemporaneously preachers like Jonathan Edwards who could deliver vivid, terrifying images of the sinful corruption of human nature and the terrors that awaited the unrepentant sinners in Hell. Jonathan Edwards’ most famous hell, fire and brimstone sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The revivals in the Northern Colonies drew some to the calling of missionaries to the South. Another great preacher of the First Great Awakening was George Whitefield from England. Whitefield was an ordained minister in the Church of England, but he later joined with other Anglican clergymen who shared his evangelical bent. Among the clergymen were John and Charles Wesley. Together these clergymen led a movement to reform the Church of England, which brought about the founding of the Methodist Church in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century. Whitefield made several trips across the Atlantic to preach throughout the colonies. He would usually draw so many people that the meeting had to be held outdoors. His popularity grew quickly and Whitefield’s ministry appealed to such diverse personalities as Jonathon Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Whitefield preached what all the Calvinists had been preaching for centuries, but he presented the sermons in a rhetorically different fashion. He would make dramatic gestures, sometimes weeping openly, or thundering out threats of hell. The sermons became theatrical performances to draw sinners in.
Throughout the colonies conservative and moderate clergymen questioned the emotionalism and charged that the revivals were disorderly. They were upset with “itinerants”, ministers who, like Whitefield, would travel from one community to another preaching and often criticizing the local clergy. They were also upset with the fact that women and African Americans would set their social status aside to worship in these revival gatherings. The evangelical ministers and converts would retaliate by calling their conservative and moderate opponents, “cold, uninspiring, and lacking in piety and grace.” Battles raged within congregations and whole denominations over the challenges to clerical authority as well as the evangelical approach to conversion from “the heart” rather than “the head.”
We can see that the First Great Awakening left colonies torn apart along religious lines. Anglicans and Quakers gained many new members among those who disapproved of the revival’s excesses. The Methodists and the Baptists in the 1770’s made even more gains from the evangelical converts. The largest single group of churchgoing Americans remained within the Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, but they suffered division internally between advocates and opponents of the Great Awakening. The advocates and opponents were known as “new lights” and “old lights”. Civil government was now drawn into the struggles. “In the colonies where one denomination received state support, other churches lobbied legislatures for disestablishment, an end to the favored status of Congregationalism in Connecticut and Massachusetts and of Anglicanism in the Southern Colonies.”
The Second Great Awakening occurred in the Nineteenth Century in America. America contained a vast array of Protestant sects and denominations, with a wide range of doctrines, practices and organizational forms. By the 1830’s almost all of these sects had an evangelical emphasis in common. Evangelicalism became the dominant form of spiritual expression. What characterized this above all else was the pervasive sense of activist energy it released. This evangelical activism involved a doctrinal shift away from the predominantly Calvinist doctrine that was upheld in much of the Eighteenth Century American Christianity. The Nineteenth Century evangelicals, like Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher or Francis Asbury, were just as staunt in their emphasis on the terrible sinfulness of mankind, but they focused on sin as human action. They preached in their sermons, hell, fire and damnation. They also harbored an unshakable practical belief in the capacity of mankind to make that moral action and in mankind’s ability to turn from sinful behavior and embrace moral action. This belief was known as Armenianism, which emphasized the duty and ability of sinners to repent and renounce sin. The conversion was now understood as an experience. Not only did people live by faith, but also by something that happened to them. There was a real, intensely emotional event they went through, or a transformation. One must possess a genuine, heartfelt realization that they stood justly condemned for one’s sins and deserved eternal damnation. Conviction was considered recognition. The convicted person could not earn salvation, but could only fully repent and surrender unconditionally to God’s will and to serve him fully. “It was this act of repentance, surrender and dedication to serving his will that Finney meant when in his most famous sermon he insisted that “sinners are bound to change their own hearts”.” This moment of conversion was when Christ’s atonement for sin through a merciful God would bestow the grace on the repentant sinner.
The Second Great Awakening had a tremendous effect on society by the number of social reform movements. Finney was a great encourager of these. He believed the gospel did not just get people saved, but was also a means of cleaning up society. He and many of his followers worked to make America a Christian nation. Finney was a strong abolitionist and encouraged Christians to become involved in the anti-slavery movement. Christians became the leaders in many social concerns such as education, prison reform, temperance, Sabbath observance and women’s rights. The Second Great Awakening resulted in the establishment of numerous societies to aid in spreading the gospel. The establishments include the American Bible Society (1816), American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), American Sunday School Union (1817), American Tract Society (1826) and the American Home Missionary Society (1826). The large numbers of Christian workers for social reform became so influential they and the organizations they founded became known as the Benevolent Empire. The Second Great Awakening had a greater effect on society than any other revival in America.
by John Stevens
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