Category Archives: Courage
Committed Action (part one)
Imagine the impact on the United States if Christians here were known – first of all — for being people of action.
If we were regarded as people who leap when there’s an opportunity to help others.
People who jump at the chance to undermine injustice?
Those who are swift to relieve suffering?
What if Christians were known for bravery?
For generosity.
And for personal integrity in doing the kinds of things Jesus did?
What if we were vigilant in our intolerance of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and favoritism—especially in ourselves, and then, in society as a whole?
And, what if, winsome, courageous, and humble—our way of living invited the entire community to be like this, more and more?
What then?
Christianity, for many, has been boiled down to an intellectual acceptance of religious premises. It’s been reduced to a fairly flimsy apprehension of select promises—while we disregard many other promises that deal with obedience, sacrifice, and judgment.
What’s become of the confidence of the early church that Christ – through us – will change the very fabric of society? “…if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors…” [2 Cor 5:17-20a]
What has become of our embodying the hope of the world? “…God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” [Col 1:27b]
Or, being the light of the world? “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” [Mt 5:14-16].
Or just being light? “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.” [Lk 11:33]
Maybe it’s that the Protestant Reformation was so intertwined with the Renaissance that we’ve become transfixed on defining the Christian faith intellectually, cerebrally, and propositionally.
What if we committed to be the change Christ promised to make in the world?
Coaching Distinctions #13
Throwing my Body into the Middle of the Room (part two)
Last time, I introduced the phrase: Throw your body into the middle of the room and see what God does with it. Let me clarify.
When you’re surprised by life and find yourself frozen in uncertainty, the pervading impulse is to stop.
Ponder.
Evaluate.
Assess.
Trouble is, often life’s reality won’t give you the luxury of opting out. Action is required—and it’s the last thing you want to do.
So, while my brain is screaming: “Stop!” “Wait!” “Protect yourself.” “Stay safe.” another option appears: Kirk, throw your body into the middle of the room…
Trust God and leap into the chaos.
I imagine myself picking my body up and – literally – heaving it into the midst of whatever it is that has stymied my brain. It’s a decision of my will – my heart – overriding the cautioning calculations of my head.
Once I’m there, in the middle of all that mess, God seems to show up. Options appear. Resources seem to arise. And, maybe best of all, I’m 100% alive and awake looking for God to step in.
Driving home from work, I come upon an accident. It’s just occurred. Broken glass, twisted metal, a stunned, vulnerable fellow amid the wreckage. I leap toward his car… An hour later the police have left. He and I are talking about Jesus who has preserved this young man’s life… I’ve thrown myself into the middle of the room.
We’re in Washington, DC touring with our young sons. The hotel room phone 
rings and I learn that my brother Glen, on a short-term mission trip in Irian Jaya, is dead. Malaria. We didn’t even know he’d been sick…
Without hesitation, I book a flight to tell my sister and parents the horrible, terrible news. They must hear it in person. I am the one to tell them. I throw myself into the middle of the room, trusting that God will be there in the brutal, painful hours that must follow.
Our word crisis comes from the Greek. It means “to decide”. In moments of crisis you are thrust into conditions where you must decide—right away. To hesitate is to decide. Not to decide is a decision. Each has repercussions.
All through life you are training yourself, preparing yourself for an uncertain future.
It can be no other way.
Practice throwing yourself into the middle of the room. The more you do, the more effective you’ll be when you don’t have the luxury to sit and wonder and weigh and ponder.
Throwing my Body into the Middle of the Room
A while back I was training in an evocative character development ministry. Central to my struggle — in that training process and in life—was my reluctance to move, to leap into action, before I fully knew what to do. And, more importantly, if it would turn out. I’d trained myself to make plans, and back-up plans, and sometimes, plans to back-up the back-up plans.
The night of my conversion to Christian faith on the Baker Library lawn, I discovered that my penchant was borne of the unwillingness to trust God with my life and the most important parts of it. At that moment, I knew it was really important to God. The surrender that accompanied my conversion was deep and thorough and whole-hearted.
A bunch of it didn’t last.
Years later, in the midst of that deep character work, I was challenged to consider how much our culture loves to analyze, to assess, and to reflect. We in the Church have just about perfected the art— reducing a vibrant, adventuresome life following Jesus to sitting, listening, learning, pondering, evaluating, judging, and isolating ourselves with those who most closely have reached the same conclusions. Christianity isn’t so much a way of being in life as a series of ideas and ideals we agree with. Sad.
Friends in that ministry who I respect and trust challenged me to throw my body into the middle of the room and see what God does with it.
To do whaaaat?
The “middle of the room” is where the action is. It’s where the messiness is. It’s where God’s provision is needed most.
When uncertainty invites me to stop and study and analyze and consider and hedge my bets – I stop moving. Ceasing to move had become a way of life. As I’ve aged, life’s become more intricate, interwoven. As my career advanced, the challenges have become more pernicious. As my children have grown, so has the complexity of their difficulties. All this entices me to stop, to evaluate, to assess … to not take action.
What about you?
Life is meant to be lived in action. When you’re in motion, learning accelerates. Discoveries come quickly. Feedback is instantaneous. Mid-course corrections yield immediate results. The provision of God that you are is added to the mix. As you engage, trusting God, divine resources appear—sometimes through you, sometimes not. Often, they surprise everyone.
When I don’t know what to do, the last place I wanted to be was the middle of the room. Funny thing is, that’s exactly where God’s waiting to meet me. My friend, Dan Tocchini told me: if I will give all that I am, God will make up whatever I lack.
I’ve found this true too many times to doubt it.
What about you?
Compendium (part ten)
Leadership Courage Series # 44
Go first!
Leaders go.
They take action.
They leap.
Managers, strategists, futurists, idea practitioners, educators, and visionaries can all get by without going—and particularly without going first. Leaders, however cannot.
Leaders lead. It’s just what they do. That what Jesus did. The apostles, too.
Somehow, as Christianity has passed from generation to generation the profile, role, and expectations of the local pastor has morphed—radically.
I work with pastors. Lots of them. These pastors can exegete the biblical text, minister the sacraments, craft and deliver a sermon, counsel, comfort the hurting, and coordinate the dozens of moving parts that go into a weekend service. All these things they do well. Seminary prepared them. Others modeled how it’s done. And they are busy, busy, busy with ministerial commitments of all kinds.
And yet, it doesn’t seem to be working. Offering a pretty wonderful worship experience, a variety of ways for friendships to flourish, and reasonably good religious education and entertainment options are not provoking the kinds of life-change we intend. Christianity in the US is not growing. Our influence in society is waning, too.
Remember Tom Skerritt’s character in A River Runs Through It? That brand of pastoral ministry just won’t do—not in this day. The “Reverend Maclean” of today has to be a leader and one who draws, develops and deploys leaders who advance the Kingdom of God in the community outside the local church. To lead like this takes risk. And, risk involves pain.
My friend and mentor Ennio Salucci says that fundamentally, there are two types of pain in life: the pain of sacrifice and the pain of regret.
To go first, with all your chips in play, trusting Jesus to rescue you as you attempt God-honoring exploits … this is to experience the pain of sacrifice.
To sacrifice the comfort and safety of what’s familiar for the danger and uncertainty of the unprecedented. To live the life God’s given you — with your whole heart engaged — is to be fully alive, awake, and influential.
To pull back from this to settle for what’s safe, easy, and predictable— is the short route to the pain of regret. You know people in their later years who are going through the motions… asleep to the amazing life God’s made them for.
Think about the movie Rudy. The conversation between Daniel Ruettiger Sr. and his son: “Chasing a stupid dream …causes nothing but you and everyone around you heartache…” his father intones, half-awake. You see the pain of regret all over this man’s visage.
As American society becomes increasingly anxious and intolerant of difficulty and challenge, the Church can leap into the fray—led by pastors who have grounded themselves in the fidelity and goodness of God, who’ve learned to govern their emotional reactivity, and who are willing to lead by going first.
Will you?
Compendium (part nine)
Leadership Courage Series # 43
Reintroduce yourself to the adventurous life. This is the eighth of nine characteristics necessary to lead the Church well today.
Notice how little risk-taking the Church does today? Other than making a bold “leap of faith” to finance a 400-seat sanctuary for the comfort and convenience of their own people, when did any church you’re aware of attempt anything great for anyone?
For what greatness are we admired in society today?
As a young believer, the Signs & Wonders and Church Growth video series by 
John Wimber inspired me. It challenged me to believe that God would “confirm his word by the signs that accompanied it.” [Mk 16:20] when sharing Christ with those outside the Church.
Wide-eyed, I watched people receive prayer and several being healed of various medical maladies. Soon after, Annie and I signed up to be trained in “Power Evangelism” … the adventure was on!
Within weeks of the training, several of us were in Times Square chatting with pedestrians and offering to pray with them. I’d never done anything like it before. Many entrusted themselves to Christ and even more were miraculously healed: a punctured lung, alcohol addiction, paralysis, and other conditions were remedied before my astonished eyes. What an adventure.
Returning home, fearing we might’ve left behind the ability to minister God’s power, we threw ourselves into caring for the poor in our town—bringing groceries and offering to pray for anyone about anything. People began experiencing forgiveness, freedom, restoration, and healing. Uncontrollable hemorrhaging, severe infections, cancers, spinal meningitis was healed. Each encounter was a new adventure. We were walking in brand new territory. Biblical, but new.
Someone suggested we throw a Christmas Day banquet for the homeless, the poor, and those with no place to go. Without the time or resources, we leapt at the chance. People from all over town donated turkeys, hats, coats, and mittens, the use of a commercial kitchen, and a community center to hold it in. Adventures like this invigorate everyone. It’s now an annual event—where thousands are fed, clothed, and loved.
A couple years ago, somebody decided to “blow up” Vacation Bible School– realizing that by having it at a church almost all who attended were churched kids. That first year, against all odds, “VBS” happened in almost 30 locations off the church campus in parks, garages, driveways, community centers, and back yards across Orange County.
Of the nine hundred kids who took part, more than 70% were unchurched.
Adventures like this aren’t easy, comfortable, or predictable. When you are trusting God and taking leaps for the benefit of others—especially those who are not Christian—you are “living as Jesus lived” [I Jn 2:6] Jesus, in his humanity, got to trust the Father as he took risks—with the woman at the well, Lazarus, the Gadarene, etc, etc. He lived the adventurous life.
What about you?
Compendium (part eight)
Leadership Courage Series # 42
The seventh of nine leadership characteristics needed in the Church today: Disengage from an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.
Let me ask you: How reasonable was Jesus when confronting opposition, faithlessness, and cowardice?
Consider his arrest, in Gethsemane. Jesus is betrayed with a kiss by one of his closest confidants, an armed mob seizes him, binds him, and Peter hacks off the guy’s ear.
Jesus is in charge.
He’s not reasoning with his captors—he’s in the moment, training his disciples about spiritual warfare and teaching the mob about God’s sovereignty: they are powerlessness to oppose the Father’s will. Would you call this reasonable behavior, in light of Jesus’ circumstances? [Mt 26:46-57]
Thomas, I suppose, is a premier example of faithlessness. 
Hearing about Jesus’ appearance from the disciples, he’s unconvinced. A week later Jesus steps into the room and begins to soothe poor Thomas in his doubt and distress: “Sheesh, Tommy, I know how hard it must’ve been for you to believe these guys… here, let me give you a hug.” Reasonable, in light of the circumstances, right?
No, Jesus expected Thomas to believe. “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” [Jn 20:25-28]
Maybe most unreasonable is the Lord’s response to cowardice. The term appears only once in the New Testament:“To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” [Rev 21:6-8]
Scripture portrays the human race as engaged in a very real, very important, very high-stakes struggle between the forces of darkness — which conspire to enslave us in destruction unto death — and the power of God which offers to free us to “life that is truly life”.
Those who understood this were unreasonable women and men.
Moreover, God’s intent is that we grow into the way-of-being of God’s Son. To this end, God is continually pressing us beyond the limits of what we know, what we can do, and what we can control. So that, like his Son, we’ll trust God more and more confidently, immediately, and unwaveringly.
Reasonable?
Sure.
If you’re trying to make Christians to be people who live like Christ.
Compendium (part four)
Leadership Courage Series # 38
We’re reviewing nine traits essential to lead effectively in a Church caught in a culture of cowardice. Three: Promote healthy differentiation within the church or system you lead.
Healthy differentiation means to take full responsibility for your own being and destiny. Pastor, this means that you will discard the ministerial malpractice of taking responsibility for others.
You and your members can’t both be responsible for their well-being and destiny.
If you take responsibility for them, they won’t. Soon, you begin to over-function. Your over-functioning undermines the impulse toward initiative of your people. Edwin Friedman writes: “When one over-functions in another’s space, the existential reality is [that] it can cause another’s being to disintegrate.”
Here’s a shock: Every over-functioner does it for himself. Over-functioning is selfishness. Self-indulgent. Self-serving.
Sure, you’re exhausting yourself in the service of all those around you. The lie you believe is that you do it for them. Peel back the onion and you’ll find that you prefer it this way. You love the control, the self-satisfaction, the esteem, maybe the sense of superiority it provides you.
Trust me. I know.
When you take responsibility for your congregation’s emotional being and destiny, you assume a role Jesus didn’t. Jesus lived with his disciples as if they were responsible before God for their own being and destiny. The storm at sea [Lk 8], healing the epileptic [Mk 9], Peter walking on water [Mt 14], feeding the multitude [Jn 6].
Jesus saw challenges, not as threats from which to shelter his people, but as opportunities for growth to maturity.
Second, a well-differentiated person knows who she is and who she’s not. She doesn’t look to her career, her friends, or her children – important as they are – to determine her value, identity, or well-being. The opinions, expectations, and preferences of others don’t define her.
She is clear. Not arrogant. Confident in who God has made her to be, and clear about the difference she gets to make with her life.
As pastor, you’re a champion of your people’s secure identity. You get to champion them to stand in well-differentiated maturity.
The best way is to be with them as if they are…
Compendium (part three)
Leadership Courage Series # 37
We’re making a brief, final lap through nine traits called for from pastors and influencers in the Church in North America. The second is: Take full responsibility for your own emotional being and destiny.
Pastor, more than you know, you are the model of what maturity in Christ is. Regardless of your age, the congregation looks to you to see how to “walk as Jesus walked”. [I Jn 2:6]
Paul urges Timothy to “set an example for the believers in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity…so that everyone may see your progress.” [I Tim 4:12b, 15b] Notice that only one of these has to do with the sermons you devote all those hours to, each week.
How you live is far more influential than what you teach. That’s why, when you blow your stack one time with a parishioner, it eclipses decades of faithfulness in the pulpit.
Doesn’t it?
In a Church culture teeming with cowardice, you model spiritual and emotional maturity. So, how completely do you take responsibility for your emotional well-being?
These are dispiriting days for many ministers. Once-vibrant congregations are aging. Dying. 
Young adults stay away en masse. Social and political winds are blowing cold and hard in the face of the evangelical church. Clergy are viewed with disdain, churches with suspicion, denominations with contempt. Giving’s dried up, budgets slashed, staffs cut. And there’s no turn-around in sight.
How completely have you taken responsibility for your emotional well-being?
Were you more confident when there were 20 more cars in the parking lot?
More sure of God’s favor when giving was $2,000 a week more?
Are you grumpier, more stressed, less gracious now than six years ago?
What meaning have you attached to your circumstances that you’re not unaware of?
Just yesterday a pastor shared a string of difficulties he’s been in. An insubordinate staff member, a church split, and a financial decline. He wondered if pastors have a “shelf life”. Maybe his has expired? The meaning Mike attached to these challenges was that they somehow indicated that God was “done” with him at his church.
What assumptions are you holding as if they were true?
Perhaps you see yourself as victim to a poor economy, squabbling elders, resistant congregation, or denominational freefall. Does your emotional state bound from pole to pole based on Sunday’s headcount, the offering, or whether so-and-so is leaving or staying at your church?
When my world is spinning, here’s a practice that works. First, I remind myself that God was not caught off-guard by the troubles that snuck up on me.
Next, I ask myself: “Kirk, does God have you?” “Are you sure?” And, “Does God have … 
[your child, your finances, your congregation]?” I ground myself in the truth that God has me, you, and it all under control. Not my control. God’s.
We’re held.
We’re loved.
We’re secure.
We’re good.
Then, I consider my destiny. I am bound for heaven. That is sure. As long as I’m pursuing Christ, there’s no doubt. So, I check myself… repent where needed… turn toward Christ and follow all-in.
Simple.
Effective.
Important.
From a place of security in Christ, you can lead. Without it, you’ve got no shot.
Compendium (part one)
Leadership Courage Series # 35
This series on Leadership Courage began more than a year ago. Inspired by Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve, I set out to do two things. First, to establish the context: the Church in North America is, as they say in the South, “eat up” with anxiety.
Chronically anxious, the Church exhibits a culture of cowardice in hundreds of ways.
Unwilling to stand with clarity and self-differentiation, the Church has surrendered much of what makes Christianity distinctive.
And for what?
For the chance to have a seat at the table with the cultural elites. Trouble is, those at the table tolerate our being there only as long as we toe the party line. In other words, the Church must surrender what makes Christianity Christian. And, have you noticed, the cultural progressives keep moving the “line”.
Farther and farther from Christian orthodoxy.
And, as they do, the Church keeps surrendering truth so it can stay at the “table”. What some fail to see is that as the Church prostitutes herself in this way, the greater culture, more and more, views us with disdain, not esteem.
Our chair’s been moved to the children’s table… and we don’t even seem to mind.
Compromised.
Capitulated.
Silenced.
Adrift of our biblical moorings we float aimlessly downstream along with the culture… a culture that’s destroying itself with self-indulgence.
Second, my aim is to invite you to embrace the kinds of leadership that are most necessary for the Church, in this condition, in this hour.
Again, Friedman’s genius has been my guide.
Nine leadership distinctives were offered. In a season of immense challenge, of unprecedented pace of change, and of undeniable urgency for Christian ministers to step into the leadership void, nine essential leadership traits will define those who will lead the Church out of its decades-long regression.
Here they are:
One: Courageous leadership is not about skill, technique, or knowledge. It is, most of all, about the presence of the leader as he or she moves through life.
Christian ministry is people development.
We are called to “equip God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may … become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” [Eph 4:12-13]
That Christian leaders misunderstand the primacy of developing mature disciples may help explain why the Church is impregnated with immaturity in this hour.
Our job, as Christians, is to make mature disciples of Jesus. Not to run programs that educate and entertain receptive religious folks.
Do you live to champion people into Christ-likeness?
So they live like Jesus would be living if Jesus were living in their place.
The most important person for you to champion to maturity in Christ is you.
Go First! (part six)
Leadership Courage Series # 34
Last time, I used the phrase “do what’s right because it’s right, whether it works or not.” I learned this from a friend, who says he learned it from the Lord. His wife had lost both her parents to cancer. One after the other. Suddenly. Unexpectedly.
The impact was devastating. She was always the strong one for her parents and siblings. Amazing everyone, she stood like Gibraltar: an emotional and spiritual fortress in a storm of incalculable ferocity.
But, after the second funeral her scaffolding rocked, then teetered, and collapsed. When it did, my friend found himself in court-ordered isolation.
Banished from his home, his wife, and his children.
With tears in his eyes, Tom promised me that he’d do what was right for his wife, because it was right, whether it “worked” or not.
Whether he’d ever be able to move home. Ever hold his wife again. Ever have a meal at with his children at their table.
Leaders go first.
Which means they do GO. Leaders move into the unknown. They realize they cannot afford to wait until there’s no risk left. Guided by their values and attending to their functioning moral compass, they move.
This is what Tom chose to do. To respond tenderly, mercifully, patiently, lovingly, forgivingly, kindly. While facing a great threat to his and his family’s future. There was no MapQuest with navigation instructions. No one he knew had faced something like this. Nothing about it made sense.
It didn’t have to.
His commitment was to do right by his wife.
Courageous leaders have learned to govern themselves, to manage their emotional reactivity, to restrain their impulsivity. Like, the impulse for revenge. To employ terrorist tactics. Or zero-sum strategies. And the ever-present impulse to resist another’s resistance.
Instead, she surrenders herself to integrity. Her integrity. And, she entrusts herself to God, being obedient, as best she can, to what she knows to be right.
Right?
A Christian leader cannot afford to be capricious, impetuous, or mercurial. If they are, those they lead cannot follow. And, leaders are only leaders when people follow them.
It’s incumbent upon leaders in the Church to do what we know to be right. Because, when we don’t, we compromise ourselves. When you compromise your own integrity, you commit moral suicide.
When you fail to do what you know to be right, you immediately lose esteem for yourself. The antidote to low self-esteem is not the empty pumping up of those who live without integrity. It is to live a life that you yourself esteem. That you respect. To quote my friend Tom, you do what’s right.
One tragedy of Christian leadership in our day is that far too many suffer from this malady. Collapsing on what they know to be right, the erosion of esteem begins its inexorable advance.
Confidence is undermined.
One collapse breeds another.
Compromised, the leader looks outside to determine direction. Like the politician taking cues from polling data, she’s straining to sense the political winds rather than standing on the moral certitude of doing what’s right.
The question is no longer “what’s right?” but “what’ll work?” And, adrift of one’s ethical moorings, the tragedies mount up.
Don’t they?
And, this is what passes for leadership in a culture of cowardice.
What if the Church in our nation determined to do what we know to be right, simply because it is right? What if honor and integrity supplanted expediency and political advantage?
How might we then live?
How might our society respond?
