Empowerig Leadership: Avoiding Making Leadership a "Bottleneck"
Today I heard a story that supposedly comes from the Kaballah (Jewish Mysticism). There was a poor uneducated man who prayed to God in his own simple way. But then a very spiritual man came to him who told him he was praying incorrectly and that he needed to pray differently. Later on the "spiritual" man came back to see how the man was praying. He answered, "I am not. Praying correctly is too difficult and the way that I used to pray is not good enough, so I just stopped." The "spiritual" man then told him to pray his own way because that was good enough.
I have been working on a new membership course for New Life West, our church in Amsterdam. However, my slogan has been KISS: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. I want to empower people to worship God and do church in a way that is highly reproducible and sustainable. I want to equip people with the basic essentials so that no one will think they have to be super gifted or super spiritual to form new churches.
John Maxwell states that the companies that make it over the long haul are the ones who keep things simple. I too, want to make following Christ and starting new churches simple.
Today I heard a story that supposedly comes from the Kaballah (Jewish Mysticism). There was a poor uneducated man who prayed to God in his own simple way. But then a very spiritual man came to him who told him he was praying incorrectly and that he needed to pray differently. Later on the "spiritual" man came back to see how the man was praying. He answered, "I am not. Praying correctly is too difficult and the way that I used to pray is not good enough, so I just stopped." The "spiritual" man then told him to pray his own way because that was good enough.
I have been working on a new membership course for New Life West, our church in Amsterdam. However, my slogan has been KISS: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. I want to empower people to worship God and do church in a way that is highly reproducible and sustainable. I want to equip people with the basic essentials so that no one will think they have to be super gifted or super spiritual to form new churches.
John Maxwell states that the companies that make it over the long haul are the ones who keep things simple. I too, want to make following Christ and starting new churches simple.
Comments
Hey nobody leaves comments about what you blog. So I'll start with this one.
Joel Osteen has made following God simple, fun, and a great way to make money. But I am sure that you are not wanting to demean God in such a way. We are here not to live an easy life as Christ followers, but instead, to take the high road that brings us trials and hardships.
I do agree that starting a church should be simple. Here in America we tend to require diplomas for church. We don't really care about super spiritual or super gifted but look for super intellectual and multi dimplomas.
Then again, in Latin America, we find super spiritual and super gifted people lacking in doctrine and preaching ignorance to a crowd of zombie followers.
With this being said;
I agree that we should tear the walls of legalism that bind contemporary christianity and let anyone that has a love for Christ and an understanding of the Bible start churches.
Following Christ is about relationships and being open to his will. Small groups FTW!
I was trying to think of super effective small groups and this came to my mind. It is a little disturbing. But, anyway, LOL, you know how terrorists have small groups of people working here and there, terrorist cells I think they call em. Well, these groups are effective since it's a small operation working in conjunction with the big picture. Small groups FTW!
-Appendix