Leiers as volgelinge van J esus en modelleerders

1. Leiers as volgelinge van Jesus en modelleerders “A Work of Heart” - Reggie McNeal

2. Introduction • Basic heart shaping occurs in 6 significant arenas. The development and convergence of these story lines script the leaders life message. • Culture • Call • Community • Communion • Conflict • Commonplace

3. Part 1: How God shaped Moses, David, Paul and Jesus for Leadership • We tend to see things in others with greater clarity… than we see them in ourselves.

4. Moses – a heart on a mission (1) • Moses as leier, t.o.v. sy • Kultuur • Roeping • Gemeenskap • Verhouding met God • Konflik • Dag-tot-dag lewe

5. David– a heart after God (2) • Dawidas leier, t.o.v. sy • Kultuur • Roeping • Gemeenskap • Verhouding met God • Konflik • Dag-tot-dag lewe

6. Paul– a heart captured by God (3) • Paulusas leier, t.o.v. sy • Kultuur • Roeping • Gemeenskap • Verhouding met God • Konflik • Dag-tot-dag lewe

7. Jesus– the heartbeat of God (4) • Jesus as leier, t.o.v. sy • Kultuur • Roeping • Gemeenskap • Verhouding met God • Konflik • Dag-tot-dag lewe

8. Jy? • Dink aanjouself as leier, t.o.vjou • Kultuur • Roeping • Gemeenskap • Verhouding met God • Konflik • Dag-tot-dag lewe

9. Part 2: Recognizing God’s shaping work in our own lives

10. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • We are not born into a vacuum. We enter the world into a stream of the human family and human experience. Language, race, geography, demography, and economic status all influence and shape the world we live in and define our connectedness to it and our distinctiveness from it. We depend on culture to give us a beginning point in understanding ourselves. - 73

11. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • …. We are also more than products of culture. The development of the leaders heart also affects the leaders culture. • Spiritual leaders exercise a significant stewardship in their response to culture. Through their choices, they instruct those they lead. What they accept, their followers accept. What they reject, others do too. What they change cast their shadow, through others, through history. This responsibility is especially challenging for today’s leaders. - 74

12. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • …..Leaders integrate these insights (of culture) into their life mission. This integration occurs through the work of culture in: • Forming leaders • Confronting leaders • Challenging leaders to connect the culture that has formed them with the culture that confronts them, without shutting down.

13. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • The heart’s tasks of leaders in relation to culture are: • Knowing where you come from • Knowing where you stand • Knowing where you want to go and take others with you.

14. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Knowing where you come from: • How did God shape you early? • What gifts from your beginnings have you come to treasure? • Have you reflected enough on the whole culture of your forming to gain freedom from acting out hidden scripts? • Have you come to terms with your past? • Do you need to let yourself out of jail? • Are you holding others hostage to your own past? • Have you grown to respect the heart-forming foundation in others? -p78

15. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Knowing where you stand: • Heightened spirituality across the board. • The challenge of the church involves helping spiritually hungry people experience classic Christian truth. • The relocation of authority and power. • People increasingly will abandon the kind of ministries and ministry leaders that seem more interested in institutional concerns than in assisting individuals to develop spiritually. • The collapse of the Newtonian Worldview. • We have assumed that learning is linear and analytical. The new world values resource people who can put things together, not tear them apart.

16. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Knowing where you stand: • The Cry for both community and distance. • Many people experience the growing sense that they need to belong to someone….. On the other hand, the harried lifestyle of most people and families allows them very little discretionary time for themselves. • The return of Apologetics • The similarity between the current religious and spiritual landscape and that of the apostolic era calls for a renewal of apologetics. • The role of technology • Christian leaders will need to be careful to champion appropriate use of technology. But to fail to be technologically relevant will limit ministries from being able to intrigue younger generations.

17. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Knowing where you stand: • The collapse of the Church Culture • Jesus is hot. Church is not. Organized religious efforts holds less and less appeal.

18. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Knowing where you want to go: • The refuge response to Culture • Christian leaders who adopt refuge thinking go to three places: • Withdrawal-reactionary destination. • Denial. • Cultural accommodation or even capitulation. • The mission response to culture • Leaders who want to transform culture seek to build as many bridges as possible to the world outside the faith.

19. Culture: Meeting the world (5) • Where are you going? • What cultural influences in your early years have shaped you most significantly? • How have these influences fashioned your uniqueness? • Are you a student of culture? Do you know what is going on in the world? • Do you look for ways to connect with the culture or seek ways to escape from it? • How comfortable or angry are you with those outside the faith? • What is your track record of influencing people toward Jesus?

20. “The decision of how you will engage culture is ultimately yours. That decision will determine your legacy.”

21. Call: Figuring out why we are here (6) • God shapes the heart of the leader through the call. The call is a divinely orchestrated setting apart of the leader for some special task. God’s part of the call dynamic is to initiate, position, and intervene. The leader’s part of the call is to hear, respond, search, and order or re-order life. -94

22. Call: Figuring out why we are here (6) • A leader with a clear sense of call represents a formidable force. The sense of destiny emboldens, energizes and empowers the leaders, as well as those who are part of the leader’s coterie of followers. Leaders convinced of their call do not easily succumb to disappointments and discouragements. Nor do they calculate odds in the same way as those who are not operating from a call basis. Leaders secure in their call will charge hell with a water pistol. A divine unction fuels their determination. -96

23. Call: Figuring out why we are here (6) • First things first: Have you been called? • A career and a call are two very different things. • The call is not invented. It is revealed. • What did you answer the Call to do? • MISSIONAL • KINGDOM CONSCIOUS • TEAM PLAYERS • ENTREPENEURIAL • SCHOOLED BY THE BUSINESS CULTURE • PEOPLE DEVELOPERS • VISIONARY • SPIRITUAL

24. Call: Figuring out why we are here (6) • People who feel called should examine what they bring to the table. A refusal to engage in significant evaluation of competencies and gifts abdicates the stewardship of the call. - 109 • Do you have an Audience of One? If not, the call is in jeopardy of being compromised, no matter how slightly or innocently your ticket sales for grandstand seats have been altered. -113

25. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • Leaders are not shaped in isolation. Leaders are shaped in community. And they are shaped by community. Leaders cannot be separate from the processes of community….. God deliberately and intentionally shapes the leaders heart through community. • No one suffers more from the lack of spiritual community than leaders themselves. -115

26. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • The Leaders family of origin. • All leaders limp. Leaders become leaders, in part, because they are willing to wrestle with who they are, who they want to become, how they can overcome some deficit in their own lives. They often need to achieve, need to be admired, even loved, need to bring order to some chaos that is within them. And almost always, these vulnerabilities are established in the leaders family of origin, the early community that begins to shape the leaders heart before the young child can even speak.

27. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • The Leaders current family. • The leaders who learns to be a nurturer, an encourager, a blessing at home generally extends this character to the public ministry. Being a blessing becomes a way of life, not just a function occasionally done. • The community of the family in the leaders world becomes a powerful way to influence the culture and live out the calling of ministry.

28. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • Watch your love life. • What is your own history of being encouraged? • What formative experiences have shaped your capacity to risk loving others? • What circumstances make it difficult for you to express your love? • Do you choose to forgive?

29. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • Friends • Many Christian leaders report a lack of significant friendships in their own lives. • Emotional health, however, consistently tracks with the number of meaningful relationships in life. • Sometimes those in Christian leadership find it easier to bond with an audience or a ministry constituency than with a peer in a heart-to-heart relationship.

30. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • 6 Essential Qualities of friendships • Integrity • Vulnerability • Humility • Willingness to listen • Reasonable expectations • Sensitivity and responsiveness -129

31. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • Intentional learning in community • A critical intellectual capacity for twenty-first century leadership success will be the ability to build knowledge together with other colleagues. The rate of informational growth, coupled with the collapse of the Christendom paradigm, makes it no longer possible to prepare for ministry challenge through traditional preparation processes. Academic, conferential, and self-guided learning must be supplemented through a peer-mentoring process for debriefing life and ministry experiences. - 131

32. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • Intentional learning in community • The leader prepared for the challenge of the new century will be a learner. However, this learning will develop differently than in traditional methods that are linear, didactic, privatized, and parochial. Learning in community is non-linear, layered, and experiential.

33. Community: connecting with others’ hearts (7) • 5 Issues that retard the development of team ministry: • Prevailing church culture. • Fear. • Control. • Risk of failure. • Competency.

34. Communion: rehearsing for eternity (8) • Leaders often neglect communion more than any other heart shaping arena…. Out of touch with command, the leader begins to operate from the memory of previous orders and directives. As time goes on, they seem increasingly unrelated to more immediate issues. Activity replaces productivity. Genuine missional enthusiasm and purpose give way to maintenance and routine, with an accompanying loss of joy and rise in self-doubt. -139

35. Communion: rehearsing for eternity (8) • Practicing Sabbath • Christian Sundays are often chock-full of religious activity. Church calendars wear out adherents to the faith. It takes enormous stamina to be a church member. The elevation of one’s participation in church activity to being a litmus test for true Christian piety might be the most ingenious ploy of the enemy ever. • Spiritual leaders need to recover the ancient meaning of Sabbath, it’s original purpose as envisioned by God. - 142

36. Communion: rehearsing for eternity (8) • Communion ultimately exposes leaders for who they are. Over time, those who crave God’s heart-shaping work in this arena also become more transparent, more available to others and more open to displays of the heart of God.

37. Conflict: learning to die so we can live (9) • The decision to serve as a spiritual leader signs one up for conflict. This fact comes as a shock to many spiritual leaders. The conflict they encounter blindsides them. • God uses conflict to shape the leader’s heart.

38. Strategies to endure in conflict: • Get over it. • Choose your pain. • Examine your critics. • Weigh them, don’t count them; • Listen behind the criticism; • Evaluate critics’ motives. • Look in the mirror. • Do critics have a point? • Is criticism pushing hot buttons? • Get good advice. • Be kind and honest. • Forgive! • Make a decision.

39. Commonplace: discovering that the ordinary is extra-ordinary (10) • Leaders whose hearts are shaped through commonplace have trained themselves to look for God…. Everywhere.

40. Commonplace: discovering that the ordinary is extra-ordinary (10) • Fostering commonplace habits: • Look for God – everywhere. • Keep learning – out of everything. • Say yes to God. • Stay grateful.

41. Conclusion: • Sincerely work through the questions on pages 188 – 191. • Leaders choose to grow or not to grow. Both decisions are ultimately deliberate.

42. “As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects a man.” Prov 27:19