growing in greatness

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, community, leadership, missiology, pastoring, reflections
• Date: Mar 26,2008

On Tuesday, I had the privilege to be a part of a unique event that ultimately ended up being one of the most transformational times in my spiritual life. I was a part of a recording for the first of Shapevine’s forthcoming Active Learning Podules series with Reggie McNeal. I don’t know much about the Active Learning Podules other than that they will be used on Shapevine as ‘curriculum’ for online training of some kind.

If you aren’t familiar with Shapevine, it is a rich-media, social network platform that brings together many of today’s progressive authors and leaders and connects them to you. It is the brainchild of Lance Ford [former Director of Glocalnet and the Northwood Church Multiplication Center and SENTralized - an emerging network of missional communities in the St. Louis area] and Alan Hirsch [author of The Shaping of Things To Come and The Forgotten Ways].

Shapevine really is a great example of the flattened world the internet has produced, and particularly with this site, it brings us access to the great minds within evangelicalism today. One of the best things about Shapevine is the free web broadcasts with folks like Sally Morgenthaler, Len Sweet, Ed Stetzer, Bob Roberts Jr., and Darrin Patrick. Additionally, the social networking aspect of the site, in my opinion, is more functional and useful than even Facebook, by far. You can do video conferencing, video blogging, video emailing for free by simply registering.

Okay, back to Reggie. Most know him from his books Get a Life!: It’s All About You and This Present Future. Reggie currently serves as the Missional Leadership Specialist for Leadership Network, director of the Leadership Development Office at the South Carolina Baptist Convention, as well as a consultant to local church, denomination, and para-church leadership teams. Reggie called himself an “imaginative futurist.”

There were only fifteen of us – including my friends Jonathan McIntosh, Trey Herweck, and Matt Grube – with Reggie in the intimate setting of the Discovery Cafe at Discovery Church in St. Peters – a bedroom community to St. Louis – where he unpacked the principles of his book Practicing Greatness. And this unpacking was a profoundly transformative time for me. One that honestly blindsided me but in a profoundly good way. I believe God used this time with Reggie to providentially redirect my thoughts about leadership and how it impacts my current and future ministry.

What I learned from Reggie:

• Great spiritual leaders distinguish themselves from good leaders by truly blessing people because the kingdom is flowing through them; they ‘raise up’ a group of people

• Jesus serves people with a much greater bandwidth than towel/basin; he ‘serves’ by engaging them on multiple levels to catalyze their efforts – probing questions, challenging stories [parables], righteous anger

• Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-knowledge and self-awareness isn’t self-awareness until it goes all the way to producing responsibility

• Our talents in leadership is knowing what we have to offer in our leadership; our talents can be diluted if we focus on strengthening our weakness or if we are simply unaware of our true strengths

• Having ‘balance’ in our leadership is a myth and pursuing it actually enforces mediocrity

• Our strengths are our needs – if we aren’t feeding our strengths, we won’t be who God has created us to be

• Passive controllers are the most dangerous boundary breakers and guilt is their bait

• When you shift your boundaries, you can’t trust your emotions

• You may have conflict because you are doing something right. Find courage in a team, prayer, and the Psalms.

• Leaders know why they are on the planet and prosecute it with passion

• Knowing what you should say ‘no’ to is what helps you protect your mission; it is your decision-making matrix

• Employ structures that impede the church from defaulting to a pure attractional model

• God wants to bring us back to the plumb line of the eternal – away from the temporary – through sabbath, extended aloneness, and wilderness experiences

• Great leaders know how to be quiet enough to hear God

• Great leaders embrace the wilderness’ lessons; they trust God with the timing and the way out – only God brings the rescue

• There are some things that only God will say in the wilderness

In the breaks between recordings, Reggie answered questions that the group had about worship, church planting, decentralized leadership, etc. This was where he was at his best. He is one of the funniest futurists I heard speak live. Okay, he is the only futurist I’ve heard speak live.

Future recordings are in the works for this summer with folks like Ron Martoia, Dan Kimball, and Alan Hirsch. If I had to make a short list of folks that have informed and transformed the way I think about ministry, leadership, worship, etc., Shapevine is hitting it out of the ballpark with their webcasts and these Active Learning. Podules. I am so blown away at the opportunity to get to be a part of this unique project that Shapevine is undertaking. I’ll keep you updated…