HSM Confession

This last Sunday in HSM we were finishing our series called “Wipeout,” a series where we addressed the things that cause high schoolers to wipeout spiritually, emotionally, and physically.  This past Sunday was centered on Addiction and what it means to be addicted to anything but God.

Part of the worship set that set up our HSM pastor Steve’s message was a confession, written by one of our HSM students.  I felt like a service where we recognized our addictions to drugs/popularity/good grades/sex/appearance/etc needed a confession as part of our worship – something like a confession in a liturgical service.

But I didn’t want to simply read a confession that is normally used in more liturgical settings.  Instead, I wanted the confession to come from one of our students so that HSM students could deeply connect with the ideas and imagery and vulnerability of one of their peers.

I asked Zach Roush if he would write it, and when he said yes, I sent him some examples of confessions that I found online – for him to use only as a springboard.  I’ve known he is an incredible writer for a long time, and I wanted to see what he could come up with.

I’ve posted what he wrote below.  To be honest, reading this confession as part of our HSM worship service was one of the deepest moments of worship I’ve had since returning to Cornerstone Fellowship six months ago.

Great work Zach…

My father,
You’re love, it burns
Casts out my ensuing darkness
You deliver me from the shadows that stalk me
The lion crouches at the door
You hold the key to that sunken wreck
A ship crushed in the waves of my disobedience
So unlock that trove
Take all that you find
My secret skeletons are there
In that hidden closet of mine
Bury them away, in a distant dimension
As far as heaven reaches
And as deep as hell falls
From now on, when thy Spirit teaches
Your child shall listen
Your sheep shall follow

Weakness and Leadership

I was at leadership gathering more than a year ago, and Nancy Ortberg said,

“A leader must be the most self-aware person in the room.”

In and of itself, it’s a great leadership principle that challenges leaders to be acutely aware of not only the other personalities in a room but also acutely aware of the general vibe of a conversation, meeting, or basic interpersonal interaction.

However, the place I see that principle most effectively used is when a leader is intensely aware of his or her own weaknesses.

While I’m a huge believer in strengths based organizational stuff, there’s almost nothing that changes the dynamics of a team like admitting weakness.

As an exercise, this exercise greatly helps communication among a leadership team, forcing the team to articulate important facets of their personality to each other within a non-threatening environment.

More, this exercise develops trust within a leadership team.  And deep trust at that.

Firstly, as a leader, when you reveal your weaknesses, you are being vulnerable and honest to your leadership team, admitting to them that you don’t have it all together – a difficult but good thing for any leader to do.  By doing that, you reveal that you are a normal human being who has faults just like everybody else.  And more, you admit that you are aware of your faults, acknowledging that you have reccurring patterns of negative behaviour that you are working on fixing.

That type of honesty and self-awareness is magnetic in a leadership situation.

But I’m not saying make this exercise into some kind of sappy therapy session.  I’m saying you acknowledge where you fall short so that your organization can move forward!

Perfect example:  I often times care more about getting things done than I do about people.  People become a means to an end, where I’m all about task and not about relationship.  It’s a terrible facet of my achiever personality.  I NEED to be aware of this, as do the leaders on my team.  Why?  Because our organization could suffer greatly if I, day in and day out, only connect with people when I need them to do something for me.

Like I said, admitting weakness is not about group therapy (although it might be in some instances); admitting weakness is about acknowledging that, I, as leader, have weaknesses that could hurt our organization.  And I don’t want to my weaknesses to hold my organization back.

Secondly, your divulging of your weaknesses also gives your leadership team the freedom to admit their weaknesses as well.  You give them the opportunity to be vulnerable and honest, to be known and understood.  You give them the chance to reflect on who they are, where they fall short, and share that openly.  How often do you think the people on your team get to do that?  This could be a watershed moment for some of your team members.

And as a whole, you get to know the nuances of your team members, learning how each of you can cover each other’s weaknesses so that your organization can move forward in a healthy way.

All in all, acknowledging weakness develops deep, deep trust.  And trust is paramount when working in a leadership context.  I’m not perfect.  You’re not perfect.  Let’s get that out in the open, accept it, and make changes so those imperfections don’t hold us back.

I did this with my leadership team this last week, and I’m already seeing huge results from it.  Our conversations, emails, and text are different – more sincere, deeper in emotion and understanding, more poignant, more honest – and our work as a leadership team is much more focused.  We’re beginning to know each other!  We’re beginning to trust each other!  And we’re stoked about moving forward as leaders and as friends.

So, in closing, I would just encourage you to make a point of doing this exercise with your team.  It will change the dynamics of your team immediately.

Leading With Silence Before Action

“I undervalue my silence too much.  Too often I move from action into silence instead of the other way about.” – R. Morrison

My days have become a steady barrage of meetings, emails, texts, and phone calls as our team wrestles through the foundational ideas for our ministry as it moves forward.  It’s been a workout, to say the least, but a GREAT workout – something that I’m extremely thankful for.

I’m thankful because we have a team of people that deeply care about where Student Ministries Worship at Cornerstone Fellowship is headed.  I’m thankful because I’m not making these essential decisions alone or in a vacuum.  We have intelligent and experienced team members that bring insight and experience and passionate opinion to discussions.  I cherish these things.

But, amidst all of this, with my mind generally moving 100 mph, I can’t get the above quote out of my mind: “I undervalue my silence too much.”  And more, “Too often I move from action into silence instead of the other way about.”

Those two lines stop me in my tracks.  How often, within a leadership context, do I remain silent before action, to spend time in solitude and prayer before moving forward with any kind of decision making.

So I challenged my team this past week to move from silence to action, not the other way around.  I challenged them to listen, to ponder, to let their thoughts and actions be swayed by times of quiet and rest and aloneness.

Silence first and action later is generally not the order I move in when I lead.  But it needs to start being that way.

Worship Leading Is Not Performing

In the early part of the 19th Century, Soren Kierkegaard made the argument that worship leaders should be facilitators, not performers.  He put it this way:

 

We often think

God is the Prompter

Worship Team is the Performer

Congregation is the Audience

 

What We Should Think

Worship Team is the Prompter

Congregation is the Performer

God is the Audience

 

First, it’s nice to know that performance during worship was an issue just as much in the 19th Century church as it is in today’s church.

Secondly, Kierkegaard’s argument is especially important in our current culture of consumerism that exists both outside the church and within.  We devour media all day long, via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, live and DVD’d concerts, movies, TV series, and Netflix (the list could go on and on), which in part makes us passive as we sit back and let the talented, creative few dictate the influences in our society.

Consumerism during a worship set on Sunday morning is just as rampant, as people think that the worship team is supposed to do the hard work of preparing and executing worship while the people in the seats sit by, take it all in, and join in here and there on the parts of the songs they like. Huge lights and HD cameras only exacerbate the sense of divide between the band and the congregation.

So we have to work against that.

While I’m all for musical excellence and spiritual depth expressed by the worship team, it’s just as much the congregation’s responsibility to come ready to be the worship leaders every Sunday service.

The band should be the prompters, not the performers.

The people are the performers.

God is the audience.

It’s about the congregation worshiping, not about the worship team performing well.

3 Things I HAVE To Tell My Worship Team

Our worship team has been growing for a while now. We have renewed and refined our set lists, established our culture, grown the numbers of musicians and production team members, begun to write our own songs and introduced our own arrangements, and seen some seasoned musicians bring their experience to our young team. And we’ve even found time to hang out with each other and grow our friendships amidst all of it.

All of that means that we’ve accomplished some great things these last couple of months.

But there are three things that I HAVE to tell my worship team, things that some friends helped me understand recently, things that are very important to us as a team as we move forward.

They are:

1) Progress is a process not a destination. We have to enjoy the now and not miss the good of today because we’re too consumed with the goals of three/six/nine/etc months from now. This is especially important for me to remember because I’m an achiever – meaning, I LOVE achieving goals but often forget to recognize the small goods that happen each step of the way on the way to major destinations. All that to say: Don’t let me be a task master!! There is good in every week that we grow together as a team!!

2) We, as a staff, appreciate you guys (you musicians and production team) outside of your talents that make Sunday mornings happen. You are people first – more, friends – before you are worship team members. I hope I communicate enough to each one of you that your development as men and women of God is a much higher priority to me than whether or not you sing the right harmony or play the right chord or cue the right lyric or lighting change on a Sunday morning.

3) Leading worship is very different than playing good worship music.  I would much rather have a team that leads worship well (ie authentically leads a room of people into a deep experience of the living God) than a team that just plays worship music well.  Musical excellence is a high priority for me, and there’s nothing worse than a worship team that distracts because they haven’t put in the hard work (years usually) that enables them to play their instruments well together.  HOWEVER, musical excellence is almost meaningless if the team doesn’t know how to usher others into the presence of God. It’s just as distracting as a team that plays horribly.  LEAD WORSHIP, don’t just play good worship music.

So, those are my thoughts.  Hopefully they provide some insight into what our priorities are in worship in Student Ministries at Cornerstone Fellowship.

KGC

Learning from the Gilbreth’s

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My great grandfather was a man by the name of Frank Bunker Gilbreth. He was an efficiency expert, one of the foremost in the United States during his lifetime. When he suddenly passed away in his 50s because of a heart attack, my great grandmother Lillian Moller Gilbreth (Ph.D in Psychology, UC Berkeley) continued his business and is remembered by TIME magazine and other publications not only as one of the first female working engineers in America, but also as the first true industrial/organizational psychologist in America. You can read how those efficiency principles were applied to their family of 12 children in my grandmother’s wonderful book Cheaper by the Dozen, a #1 bestseller on the New York Times in the 1950s that was made into a movie in the 50s as well as two contemporized remakes with Steve Martin the 2000s.

I say all this because efficiency is in my blood. It’s always been that way. Wasting time is not only a pet peeve of mine, but something that goes against my family history.

You’ll understand where I’m coming from when I say that efficiency is paramount for me as I think about helping lead an organization. Efficiency is incredibly important when it comes to my line of work (church work). A ministry functions at its best when volunteers are utilizing their abilities at high capacity for the furthering of God’s kingdom.

Volunteers are the backbone of every church. But how often do we church workers study the ways in which we deal with and utilize the abilities of our volunteers? Are we efficient? Ineffecient? Do we save our volunteers’ time or waste it? Can we improve the efficacy of volunteer hours?

Everybody that I know here in the Bay Area has a crazy schedule. Kids with a million commitments (sports, the arts, travel, school), parents shuttling those kids to all their activities while also finding time for themselves and their work, college kids working three jobs while going to school full-time, twenty something’s working full-time while doing graduate degrees while trying to find time have a social life and date seriously – on and on.

And I know the Bay Area is not unique. These are realities for the people that walk in the doors of our churches.

Our congregation doesn’t have time to waste. EVERYTHING we do as a church that utilizes these people’s talents needs to be as efficient as we can make it as a means of serving the people we do church with.

It’s a church staff’s act of service to not waste the time of its congregation and, instead, facilitate the doing of the God’s kingdom by the most efficient means possible.

At least that’s what I think Great Grandpa and Grandma Gilbreth would say.

Where We’re Headed

“On the day the Tabernacle was set up, the cloud covered it. But from evening until morning the cloud over the Tabernacle looked like a pillar of fire. This was the regular pattern—at night the cloud that covered the Tabernacle had the appearance of fire. Whenever the cloud lifted from over the sacred tent, the people of Israel would break camp and follow it. And wherever the cloud settled, the people of Israel would set up camp. In this way, they traveled and camped at the LORD’s command wherever he told them to go” (Numbers 9:15-18).

“Where do we go from here?”

It’s probably the question I most often ask as I lead within our organization.

“We’ve accomplished x, y, and z in such and such amount of time… Now what?”

I’m a task-oriented person who finds workplace fulfillment in measurable results that I reevaluate with every organizational success.  To put it more clearly, I don’t get content very often – if ever – and when I do, I quickly move on towards new goals.

That drive can be good for some things.  But that drive also creates a constant need to be moving forward/getting better/achieving more/taking “it” to the next level, whatever “it” is.

While Numbers 9 doesn’t say that my achiever mentality is wrong, it does paint a picture of a group people that move when God moves, who go when and where God goes – a kind of dependence and flexibility that is crucial to a life lived in relationship with God, and especially crucial as a church worker or any Christian leading within any type of organization.

“We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

Maybe the question I should ask is:  ”What does it look like to move forward with the LORD determining our steps?”

Come Together: A Guest Post from Matt VanCleave

In spite of the fact that it may not always feel and look it, God created His church to be one – to be together, in harmony, united in thought and purpose. It’s an incredible feeling when a group of people are united and everyone is going the same direction.

On the other hand, nothing is quite as frustrating or challenging as when a group, a church, a community, a family, or a team is supposed to be going the same direction, but they don’t.

There’s a great movie starring Denzel Washington that I’m sure many of you have seen. Washington plays Coach Boone in the movie, “Remember the Titans.”  It’s a true story about a coach who inherits a high school football team where egos and apathy and racism and hatred rule.

Where there is supposed to be unity in the team, there is divisiveness and hate. A turning point comes early one morning at their training camp when the coach gets all the players out of bed and leads them on an unexpected run.

Coach Boone says, “Unless we come together, on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed.” The great news is they do come together and they make history, by winning the Virginia State Football Title and, more importantly, by bringing reconciliation to the whole town. It’s a true story.

We need to be reminded that Jesus Christ died so that we not only could be reconciled with God but remarkably, also with each other. The unity of any group and especially the church can be incredibly powerful. I’m asking myself this question today, “Am I doing my part to make sure this is happening in my church?”

What’s the Point?

“The kingdom of the heavens is like where something of extreme value is concealed in a field.  Someone discovers it and quickly covers it up again.  Overflowing with joyous excitement he pulls together everything he has, sells it all, and buys the field” (Matthew 13:44)

“What the kingdom of the heavens is like is illustrated by a businessman who is on the lookout for beautiful pearls.  He finds an incredible value in one pearl.  So he sells everything else he owns and buys it” (Matthew 13:45-46)

I wonder how many of us walk into a church service and think, “What am I doing here?  Why am I here?  I mean – musicians and pastors and lighting rigs and stage designs and sound systems and prayers and bowing of heads, etc. – what’s it all for?”

I.e.  What’s the point?

I.e. Maybe there’s a giant elephant in the room that I, as a worship leader, am not addressing.

I wonder how often I communicate the importance of worshipping God, of spending time connecting to and giving honor to the immediately available Personality that designed us all to be in perfect, constant relationship with Him.

I wonder how often I articulate the availability of the Kingdom of Heaven to the people that I lead and connect with – a spiritual kingdom that, once we enter, enables us to experience an eternity of the life we were built to live.

Jesus tells two stories in Matthew 13 (quoted above) that teach us about the condition of the heart that connects with God and His Kingdom – an almost desperately searching heart that leads directly to God Himself and causes the searcher to give up everything because the value of God and His Kingdom is so eternally great.

The connecting phrase between the two illustrations is “sells it all” or “sells everything” – as if we are to give everything we’ve got to everything that God is, in some kind of deep, spiritual, eternal, very real exchange or negotiation.

And to bring it back to the initial question: this exchange is why Sundays matter, why the services are what they are.  The team of people putting on the service are (hopefully) 100% focused on facilitating the giving of ourselves to the God that has given Himself and His Kingdom to us.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, if you’ve ever walked into a church an not gotten the point of it all, you’re not alone.  I’ve thought that many times before.

But I’m reminded when I read about Jesus and His preaching about His Kingdom, that a Sunday service is meant to prompt us toward a deep connection with God Himself.

He’s the whole point.  And He is desperately sold out for You.

Now it’s time for us to sell out for Him.

The Person You Are Becoming

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“Prayer as kingdom praying is an arrangement explicitly instituted by God in order that we as individuals may count, and count for much, as we learn step by step how to govern, to reign with [God] in his kingdom” – Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

There is great power when we become who we are supposed to be.

Truly great artists produce their best work when they create out of a steadily practiced understanding of who they are at the deepest recesses of their being

Professional athletes have their best games when they play “their kind of game,” the kind of game that takes years and years to learn and perfect.

The remarkable writers find their voice and then spend a lifetime fashioning that voice into articles, short stories, and novels.

In all of these instances of high productivity, an individual takes the time to understand his or her gifts and make up so as to create and perform in such a way that is indelibly him or her.

True greatness, in some respects at least, comes from being intrinsically you at the deepest physical or mental or creative levels.

Yet, that same greatness is available to us, not in regard to art or sports or writing, but in regard to our eternal personhood. I’m talking about our spirit, our personality, that part of us that is immaterial, beyond our creations or performances.

Willard says that prayer exists so that we would “count” when it comes to the spiritual, eternal realities.  At its heart, Willard’s notion of prayer tells us that, in the spiritual kingdom created in Genesis and worked out up to the present, God has given us prayer as the means to become the heirs that we were designed to be.  That is to say, God originally designed humans to rule with Him over His creation, and prayer is the practice that we have available to us in order to relearn that perfect personhood we once had.

Now, you might think, “How can that be?  I’m so messed up that there’s no way that I would be worthy of working in perfect partnership with God!”  The reality of the Kingdom that Jesus preached about during His time on earth is that perfection has already been handed to us.  We have been given the means by which to become the perfect beings we were originally designed to be.

And that “means” is a person: Jesus.  Not a set of rules, not a handful of sacrifices, not a bundle of knowledge.  A person.  A Personality.  A human.  And God Himself.

And prayer is how we connect with Him.  Simple communication between two eternal beings.

Don’t ask me how it works.  I couldn’t begin to explain that.  But this is the crazy truth that the Bible puts forth.  Relationship with God equates to spiritual perfection, which equates to an eternal life with the God through His Son Jesus.

We can count for something for all of eternity.  We can find our style or our game or our voice as eternal beings, and fully embracing it to perfection through Jesus Christ.

It’s something worth practicing.  And maybe even becoming.