Leadership Lessons

My main task this summer has been working towards launching a new worship service. I’ve done this before, on a much smaller scale, but this time around I’ve been a bit more reflective and learned a few more lessons. Here are a few:

1. The success of this service seems to rise and fall on my ability to answer the “why” question. Asbury already has 5 Sunday services, why another one? Why shoot for the evening this time?  What I’ve found is that it took time for me to find the right words to use. I had this idea burning in my mind and heart on why we were doing this, but I didn’t have the words until I’d taken a few shots at trying to cast that vision to others. Articulating vision is much harder than I thought it would be.

2.  As we set out to search for a worship leader, I made a huge mistake. I overlooked one of my friends in the process of looking for a musician. The overlook wasn’t because of talent, the guy’s got a great voice and great guitar skills; the overlook was because I simply was not engaged enough to realize his ambitions and goals of leadership. While trying to keep the search pretty narrow, I excluded others (in my mind) from potentially living into God’s call for themselves. What is it they say when people assume too much “you make an ass out of you and me?” I was that ass. Trying to clean up the mess after the hire further complicated the situation. I had a big mess on my hands. One of my lessons here is how difficult it is to be in ministry with those you are friends with, especially when money is on the line. This is the biggest leadership lesson I’ve learned this year.

3. As I was looking for ways to verbalize the mission, I knew I had to find ways to seek to engage people in the tasks of the launch. Enter prayer. Meeting with Asbury’s prayer coordinator, I quickly learned that we needed to mobilize prayer for three reasons. I’ve put so much focus in the tangibles of success: staffing, marketing, verbalizing, recruiting that I’ve neglected so much of the simple side of praying for God to move. I needed to mobilize the congregation to pray partly because of my sin of self-reliance. After all, what do we say is the most important thing? As they pray comes the second reason we needed to mobilize. With people praying, God will be changing hearts and engaging people to his cause. Because I believe starting this service is God’s leading, I believe he would call those who needed to be a part of the service through mobilizing the people in prayer. The final reason I needed to mobilize people to pray, was that I needed to be challenged again to pray whole-heartedly for God to move. What better way to repent of self-reliance than through a community call of prayer?

We launch September 13, 6:30 in the Venue68. Worship will be led by Ben Kilgore. Preaching will be live by both myself and Todd Craig.