Category Archives: Leadership

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Invest In Your Spirit

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happe

In a world that is inundated with the clanging noise of daily life, it can be easy to overlook the most important aspect of our being: our spirit. In the midst of the chaos, investing in our spiritual formation and well-being often takes a backseat. However, just as we invest in wisdom and in our physical health, nurturing our spirit is equally important.

Invest In Your Spirit

The concept of spiritual disciplines is core to Christianity, and has been since the beginning. We must create and maintain practices and habits that cultivate our relationship with God, and help us to become more and more like Christ. Digging through the pages of the Bible, we can find several such practices, and three are worth mentioning specifically.

However, our spiritual formation is of such critical importance that I find it necessary to identify and inspect many more disciplines and practices. For some time, I have been working through many of these disciplines in a series of posts entitled “Establishing Spiritual Disciplines.” Many of these are found in Scripture, and several more come from the rich traditions to be found studying the history of Christianity. All of these can be assets in our desire for spiritual formation.

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Invest In Health

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happen

Last year, I identified four areas in which we should invest in our lives, especially as leaders. The first area I identified was wisdom, which is the ability to gain knowledge, and then put it into practice. The second area where we should make an investment is into our health.

Invest In Health

I have to admit, this is not an area of life where I excel. I often have good intentions, and sometimes, I follow through with them. Most of the time, I don’t. This is an area where I must become more focused and intentional.

Why? Because our physical health has an impact on every other area of life, and when we make our physical health a priority, the effect is almost immediate. Our minds sharpen, our strength grows, our emotions stabilize, our relationships gain strength, and our spiritual life is impacted as well. Taking the time to address this quadrant of life has a tremendous ripple effect into every other area. And frankly, that amazes me every time I stop to consider it.

But the opposite is true, too. When I either neglect my physical side, or when I work it too hard, all of those other areas suffer as well. Taking the time to invest in our health has to be a top priority.

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions by John C. Maxwell (New York, NY: Center Street, 2014)

I am always looking for ways to increase my leadership capabilities. I serve in a position of leadership within my church, and have discovered over the years that this is a critical area of my growth that I must intentionally focus on, or it just won’t happen. Because of that, I strive to read several good resources each year, take in a conference or workshop, or find an online event or resource that I can utilize to help me grow as a leader.

I have been a longtime fan of John Maxwell for this area of my growth. He recently launched an online resource called LILO: Lead In, Lead Out. This is kind of like the Netflix for leaders; it is filled with short videos and resources that you can take a few moments here and there to learn something and improve your abilities. I subscribed, and have been extremely satisfied with the content.

In one recent video I watched, Maxwell referenced his book, Good Leaders Ask Great Questions. I was immediately interested, since this is a book I had not yet read by Maxwell. So I ordered it, and started digging into it last weekend. The premise is simple: if you want to grow as a leader, you need to learn to ask good questions, questions that will help you learn, questions that will help you connect with others, questions that will challenge you to grow, and questions that will help you develop better ideas.

I have long said that I know I’m not smart enough to have all the good ideas, and I need to surround myself with other who can help me grow, and stimulate my thinking in ways that I don’t normally. Questions are a great way to capitalize on that. Asking questions is critical to growing, but you also have to know how to ask good questions.

I am convinced that this will be a book that helps take my leadership to a new level, and will help me expand my thinking as I strive to grow. If you are in a leadership position, you should check it out as well. You can pick up a copy for yourself on Amazon.

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Opening Up After Quarantine

A Cautious Approach To Regaining Equilibrium As A Church

The past several weeks have been difficult for our nation, and even our entire world. COVID-19, the Coronavirus, has brought us to our knees and complete disrupted our lives in almost every single area. And finally, it seems like it may be time to start opening things back up. To that end, here is our proposed plan for Parkview.

Opening Up After Quarantine

We heard it from every avenue: the Center for Disease Control, the federal government, the state government, our own county health officials and city leaders. Stay home. Close down anything that isn’t essential. Stop the spread. Flatten the curve.

As a church, such restrictions are extremely difficult. The church is designed to be in community, not isolation. And we have been apart for almost two full months. That has been hard.

Now, with Missouri’s governor opening things back up, albeit slowly, and our own local authorities doing the same, we have a plan for how we will reestablish our physical services, with a strong eye towards the safety and security of everyone.

In doing so, our leaders have weighed three equally important truths: the call from God to meet together (Hebrews 10:25), the requirements given in Scripture to obey our government (Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17), and the safety and security of those people under our watch (1 Peter 5:2).

To that end, we have developed a plan for reopening and meeting together as the body of Christ. Our target date is this Sunday, May 24th. But in order to make sure our services are as safe as possible for those who are at a higher risk, or for those who are more worried about the state of the pandemic at this time, we are taking every possible precaution and safety step that we can, and we are asking a few things from our church as well to help us out.

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Keeping A Kingdom Perspective

Seeing The Bigger Picture In The Midst Of Change

Things change. They just do. And sometimes that change can be hard to understand, and even harder to view with the proper perspective, a Kingdom perspective. But that’s something that we have to strive for continuously.

Kingdom Perspective

In early October, I spent a week outside of Colorado Springs at Bear Trap Ranch. This is an annual event that I utilize for my spiritual life as sort of a “spiritually fiscal review” of my life for the past year, and for the year to come. This is a cornerstone event for me, impacting my spiritual growth in ways that I cannot even fathom sometimes.

God uses that literal mountaintop experience to help form a spiritual mountaintop experience that helps me navigate through my life and ministry in the months to come.

It’s not the only thing that I intentionally plan through out the year. I also incorporate single day retreats, called Personal Retreat Days, to review my life and ministry, spend time in prayer, and seek God’s continued direction. I strive to do this at least every six to eight weeks through the year. And it helps, being built upon the foundation of the week in Colorado, to maintain a Kingdom perspective.

That was the theme for Wilderness this year. We looked deeply into the Sermon on the Mount, seeing how God is calling us to be Kingdom oriented people. He didn’t call me to “do” ministry. He called me to “be” a Kingdom person, in my life, in my family, in my ministry, and in every other aspect of my life.

Conceptually, that’s pretty easy. I can conceive what that looks like in an academic fashion pretty easily. But when the rubber meets the road, when life throws some things my way that don’t fit into my routines, that don’t align with my regular, day to day, life flow… Then what? How do I keep a Kingdom perspective in the middle of things like that?

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The Full Focus Planner

Achieving More With A New Planning Tool

I have always seemed to struggle with keeping a calendar consistently. It has just seemed to be an area where I could not maintain any continuity, and every system I tried failed. Until now.

Full Focus Planner

Keeping a calendar has always been hard. I started off in college by using the DayTimer system. I initially used the small, pocket sized planners. But eventually I “upgraded” to the Desk size, and purchased a few different leather covers to go with it over the years. It was a good system, but I struggled to keep it with me, and found that when I needed it, it was either at home or at the office… wherever I wasn’t. And, over time, I just stopped using it.

I moved to jotting things onto a wall calendar, hanging by my desk, and then to a deskpad type calendar. Those seemed to work for a while, but I ran into the same problem. I never had it with me when I needed to check something.

When I got my first BlackBerry, and then later moved to an iPhone, I thought my problems were solved. I started using the calendars on those devices, eventually settling on Google Calendar, which synced across all my devices. This seemed to be much more effective, but I had one small problem. I love writing, especially using pens, and specifically, using vintage fountain pens. While Google calendar was effective, I still struggled to use it. I just forced myself to use it, because what other option did I have?

And while Google does a great job of keeping my appointments, it doesn’t help much at all with my tasks or goals. It still wasn’t fully what I needed.

Several months ago, I discovered a new planner, a paper planner, and a full-feature planner. I was intrigued, but skeptical. So I started digging. I found others who used it, and looked over how they implemented it. I watched videos about it. I read blogs about it. Finally, I decided to pick one up and try it out.

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Getting Things Done With Todoist

Implementing A New Productivity Tool

For the last few years, I have used an online task manager to keep track of all my projects, tasks, and other items to be done. But recently, I have made a switch that has helped tremendously.

Todoist

Since 2011, I have used a task manager called Nozbe. Even though I have switched, it’s not because this was a bad product, or something I didn’t like. I have just found a few things that work better for me. Nozbe is a great product, and a great company. The only drawback in my experience is the expense. They are one of the more pricey task management systems out there.

A few months ago, I started using a new planner, which has become the most effective tool in that regard in my life. It has been a game changer. I’ll share more about it in a later post.

But, from that change, I also incorporated a hybrid task management system, with a fresh start in a new piece of software. I have made the switch to Todoist, and when paired with my planner, this has become a highly effective tool in my arsenal.

Todoist allows me to incorporate my task list into projects (Nozbe did as well, but Todoist seems easier to use). Those projects are the things that I need to get done to advance my work and my personal tasks and goals. I have set this up in almost every area of my life, from goals like growing in my skill as a guitarist, to weekly tasks, like sermon preparation, which contains several sub-tasks.