Karen on our staff has been asking Cheryl to do a guest post for the Grace Community Church website for months and she finally agreed. She chose the title “Who me – a pastor’s wife?”. Let me say that I believe one of the most important jobs in the church is that of the pastor’s wife. I’m thankful I have such a good one. For more of my thoughts on Cheryl, click HERE or if you want to know how to honor a pastor’s wife, click HERE.
Last Saturday I started encouraging dream Saturdays. You can read the first post HERE. As I shared before, I believe that dreaming is a healthy exercise. I think God encourages big dreams. I even encouraged couples to dream together in Monday’s marriage post, which you can read HERE.
Recently Josh had a career decision to make. He wanted to wrestle through it with me. He actually took my advice. He honored me greatly, not by taking my advice, but with a text he sent me later, which said, “You are my new mentor!†He probably was joking, but he doesn’t know how much that comment resonates with me.
One of my weaknesses in leadership is failing to give enough details. I am skilled at painting the big picture. I have tons of ideas. I can usually get people motivated, but often they have no idea what they are to do next. Knowing this about myself, I must constantly ask if people around me understand what I am trying to communicate. This doesn’t come natural for me, but it is something I have tried to practice in my leadership. (You’d have to ask someone on my team if I’m any good at it.)
The team at Seacoast is packed with sharp people and Mac Lake is one of their best. Mac and I have never met, unless the world of social media counts. If it does we’ve met frequently. I’ve enjoyed our emails, Twitter, blog and TokBox correspondence. Mac is a deliberate and strategic thinker. I don’t know anyone currently more passionate about developing leaders than Mac Lake.
I have tried to practice this principle in my marriage. Cheryl agrees with this principle also, but being the one better wired for dreaming, one year I gave Cheryl a set of large letters for her office that simply spelled the word DREAM. It serves as a reminder to her that we want to continue to dream together as a couple.
Moses was used of God to do incredible things for God’s glory, yet Moses, more than many leaders I know, questioned his own abilities. He lacked confidence and would have probably never volunteered for the job. His reasons might have been:
I believe dreams help us heal from negative emotions, stretch our imagination, and encourage us in the midst of difficult times. Sure dreams alone won’t solve the problems we face, but they may help point us towards a positive direction…and who knows…we may just head our life towards attaining some of them.
I think where I have landed, at least for now, is that bigger than the issue of evaluation, is the issue of continuance. The fact is that I really do believe growth is occurring in individual lives, not just in the total numbers of people. We are accomplishing our objective to “make growing disciples of Jesus Christâ€. I still want to consider ways to validate that belief, and I have some ideas I’m working on there, but the key word for me now is sustainability. I want us to be able to continue doing what we’ve been doing.
I realize before that any line of thinking that involves evaluation in a spiritual context is controversial at best, but evaluating now will help us continue to grow and stay healthy and enhance the future growth that we experience. I personally believe that the church must be evaluating progress towards objectives, as any healthy organization should do.
