Build Church: Know Your Comfort Zone
Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace [Matthew 28:29 Message]
There’s a lot of talk about getting out of your comfort zone and I get that. We fill our days with so much stuff which in reality is of no eternal purpose, both individually in our Christian life and corporately as the body of Christ. We are very comfortable in our faith.
A better focus might be to know our comfort zone. To learn the unforced rhythms of grace Jesus wants to walk and work with us in. To find our best fit. To discover our unique calling and to then ride this wave with all of our effort and determination.
Anyone who know me well enough should know that after Jesus, other than my family, there are two main things which have my heart – raising the next generation of leaders and building local church. I am on the journey of discovery still, even after so many years that to be fruitful for God in both of these will no doubt involve the following…
To get into my zone I first have to get out of my comfort.
I have to give the Holy Spirit permission to convict me to move me.
Once I am in the zone, only I am the one responsible for putting the right kind of effort in to it.
To bear the best kind of fruit, the God-given destiny kind of fruit, my life has to be about more than just the fruit of my own labours.
I am not there yet. Let’s be honest, there have been good days and not so good days. I have frustrations. Yet the only person getting in the way of me building anything of eternal significance with my life is me. So best get over myself, repent, remind myself that my preferences are for laying down and just get on doing what it is I feel God is asking me to do.
Lead Well: Think Things Through
For three days this week I was at a Conference in Peterborough with some of the Xcel Leaders. The topic this time was mission and evangelism. In reality the topic of conversation is not important. Instead, it’s the principle of what we were doing which is more important.
If we want to lead well in life we have to be willing to give time to thinking things through. And to do so the following 3 step process we were encouraged to use may help.
1. REALITY: Whatever the focus of thinking, how are things right now? What’s working, not working? Be honest. One good thing to do is give yourself a score between 1-5 (where 5 = good).
2. POSSIBILITY: Take some time to think about all the possible ideas. What could you do? This provides a great opportunity to dream, create and innovate, alongside the seemingly obvious stuff too.
3. ACTION: From all the possibilities choose no more than 3 which you could work on. Attach milestones to each one, dates for accomplishment and metrics to measure success.
This process for helping our thinking process could be used for just about any issue. In the end it creates some focus for our energies which have the potential to bring about the much needed turnaround or transformation.
What do you think? How could you make this work for you?
My Leadership for 2015
I count it an absolute privilege to get to do what I do. I thank God for entrusting me to a role and allowing me to put to use all that He has gifted me with.
My prayer therefore has to be something like this, ‘Help me Jesus to do this leadership thing right’.
Bearing all this in mind my leadership focus for 2015 is quite simple…
I want to be a leader who serves others better.
I have talked about this before. Too often I can get caught up in the doing and being of leadership. All that stuff is important and needs to be done but not at the expense of others, people, connection, reaching out, helping, caring, listening, opening my world and serving.
What will be your leadership focus for 2015?
Check Out the Old Posts
Just being honest here – I think I am a true blogging geek. Been checking the stats at the half way point of October and I am really enjoying the fact that some of the old posts are being read. Probably started happening because of the ‘search’ widget I put in my sidebar.
Top 5 ‘Old Posts’ that have been checked out the most in the past 7 days:
5. Getting the Right Consistency
4. Bad Choices, Wrong Decisions and a Lack of Wisdom
3. A Change of Season
2. The Purpose Test: Questions
1. Why People Come & Stay at a Church
If I’m honest, I think they are full of great stuff. Leave me some comments – thanks.