“Now there was a day…” Job 1:6, 13

Have you ever heard of the Bible character Job? You don’t have to be a Bible student or scholar to know the name Job. Usually it is applied to some of the hardest times of life…times that often seem to come suddenly and from nowhere. It’s a book of the Bible that many of us would avoid reading, especially if doing so means that we will have to live a “Job” kind of life. The book, however, has some valuable principles about life, faith, and God, because the truth is, all of us have seasons of life where we feel like Job is our story.

This week at Grace Community Church, we launch a series on the book of Job. We are encouraging our church to read Job during their quiet times this month, talk about it during small groups, and listen to teaching centered around the book each Sunday. There are 42 chapters in the book of Job and this is a 6-week series. That works perfectly to 1 chapter per day. This will be a great opportunity for our church to be unified around one book, one theme, and one direction in Scripture.

Have you ever had a “Job” experience or season in your life? Are you there now? What did you learn or are you learning about God during that period of life?

Recently I attended the Story Conference in Chicago. It was a two day conference for the creative-minded packed full of the best ideas available to communicate our story to the world.  It was a well-planned and scripted time and Ben Arment, the conference founder, is to be commended for the event.

The greatest moment for me, however, happened in a split moment.  To understand the moment you need to know that the conference venue, Park Church is strategically located in the heart of Chicago. They have a beautiful renovated building. The worship center can be made extremely dark, but there are windows in the room that face the city. At one point, we were singing a worship song about spreading the news of Jesus to the world and suddenly the curtains opened to the city of Chicago. In a split second, we had the vision that our mission was clear.  We were to take the love we have for Christ to the people outside the walls of the auditorium.

I was talking with one of the leader’s of the conference after this experience and he told me that it was a split second decision to open the curtains.  It wasn’t planned.  The greatest moment, for me at least, wasn’t scripted ahead of time.  It reminded of an important life and leadership principle.

We must always allow time and grant permission for the spontaneous moments to occur…the interruption…the unplanned bursts of genius. I’m a planner, but spontaneity can often be the spice of life.  All of us need to leave margin enough in our calendars for God-moments and times of spontaneity. 

Here’s my question:  Is that easy or difficult for you to allow margin for the unexpected to occur?

I was privileged to blog live from Catalyst Conference this past week.  Here are the posts from the notes I took in the order they appeared:

Craig Groeschel – Generational Tension

Craig Groeschel Interviews the Devil

Perry Noble – Don’t Give Up!

Beth Moore – Dealing with Insecurity in Church Leadership

Seth Godin – Everything in this Economy has Changed

Christine Caine – Passion for the Lost and Human Trafficking

Daniel Pink – Author of Drive on What Motivates

Scott Harrison Shares About Charity Water

Andy Stanley – Tension for More

Gayle Haggard on Grace and Forgiveness

Pete Wilson: Plan B for Church Leaders

You may also want to read the posts from Tony Morgan, Kent Shaffer, Scott Williams, and Tim Schraeder.

Did you attend Catalyst? Have you before? What have you gained from the experience?

This was a heavy week of blogging, thanks to the opportunity to blog for Catalyst this year.  Thanks for reading.  I appreciate the links, comments and Tweets you are gracing me with these days.  I see this blog as an extension of my ministry and you are helping expand that vision by your support. Here are the posts you read the most this week:

8 Ways to Lead People Younger than You

Developing a Leadership Vocabulary

Grace Community Church Goes Multi-Site

Positional Versus Relational Authority

A Secret Your Husband Needs You to Know (But Won’t Tell You)

God Will Allow More than You Can Bear (Alone)

Andy Stanley – Tension for More

Is there a subject you wish I would cover on this blog?

Seth Godin is possibly one of the most influential authors, bloggers and leadership thought changers in the world today. His anticipated message at Catalyst began with Seth sharing how he made a $40 billion mistake.

In 1992, Godin was a book packager with an Internet company when the Internet was still new. Godin had an idea. He packaged it into a book. He sold the book for $70,000. The book sold 850 copies. Not bad…at the same time, however, a start-up company named Yahoo was implementing that same idea. He was trying to write a book. They were trying to change the world.

That type of attitude shown by Yahoo is what it takes these days to make a difference in this new economy.

Using his classic wisdom, Godin encouraged the audience with continuous, rapid and quotable nuggets of wisdom. Here are some: (Understand, Godin spills this stuff out fast…so these are as close to what he said as I could type.)

• We have to teach people to be able to solve problems.
• A revolution is destroying the industrial revolution.
• Institutions embrace compliance. Compliance doesn’t work
• We are more connected than ever before…it’s connection that makes a difference…not compliance…
• You don’t win by being complaint, you win by being connected…
• Boring doesn’t work…
• If you want to succeed, you have to be prepared to fail…
• Art is a human act that changes someone…
• We need people willing to make a change even if they have to face set-backs and failures at first.
• We should be rewarding those who are willing to make a mistake.
• You need to learn to make decisions on your own and not wait for a boss to tell you what to do.
• Change is made by individuals who eagerly accept responsibility, but don’t demand authority.
• You have to quit trying to fit in…instead you should try to make a difference.
• Maybe you should fire people that always do the right things… they are not failing and playing it safe.

Andy Stanley asked a powerful question at the end of this talk. What do you do if you are in a bureaucratic environment? Seth’s answer: Stop lying. You’re not in a communistic environment. You have the flexibility to help make one change a day.

Leaders need to hear this talk, but especially young leaders and those who want to make a difference these days. To order the resources from this conference, click HERE.

Which of these nuggets of wisdom jumps out at you the most?

Scott Harrison, founder of Charity Water, shared his heart to get clean water around the world.  There are many good organizations sharing this passion.  Surely as believers, we can address this situation.

Consider these facts Scott shared:

• 1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean water
• In the United States, the average person is responsible for using 150 gallons of clean water per day.
• The goal is to get people who have none 5 gallons per day.
• People carry dirty water for miles, just to have some.
• 80% of disease is related to unclean water.
• Children are especially vulnerable to lack of clean water.
• Half the world’s schools do not have clean water.
• 40 Billion hours are wasted trying to get clean water…more than all the work hours in the
• Typical well costs only $5,000 and can produce 5 gallons of clean water every 90 seconds.
• Water changes communities by bringing hope and dignity to a community.

Read more startling facts HERE.

Learn more about how you can help HERE.

I love people who combine passion and heart with action to address a real need.

What’s your passion?  What are you going to do about it?

Gayle Haggard told her humbling story about her husband, Ted Haggard’s moral failure. You probably read about it…( #UnderStatement) If you haven’t, you can read more HERE. Most of us can’t imagine finding out that our husband had a secret life as Ted Haggard had. As a pastor, I can only imagine the trauma that went through his family, his church, and his personal life.

Gayle threw out so much in a short time that I decided rather than do a commentary I would share some of her statement that caught my attention most:

This is my moment to confess aloud to the whole world what I really believe and who I have confidence in…

My relationship with my husband, the church, even my family was at stake, but this is my opportunity to reveal what I really believe.

I was challenged, did I have the courage to do the things Jesus teaches us to do? I really do believe He will never leave us or forsake us… I believe that we do not abandon when the going gets tough. It seems like everybody I counted on was failing me.

God was telling me to love and He was telling me to forgive. The implications would be hard, but I was determined to live out the faith I had claimed to have. What good is forgiveness if you don’t bear with one another and forgive as the Lord forgave us?

I became the “sinner” for staying with my husband by the judgment of the church.

The evidence of our faith is shown by what we do when we face our greatest trials.

A great test of faith is how do we respond when another person sins.

Even though I was shocked at the nature of my husband’s sin, I was not shocked that he sinned.

There is not one city in America where the number of people attending church is increasing.

The church appears to not know how to model what we preach.

The world watches when we have a scandal and wants to see how we respond.

We are no better or no worse than any other human…but we have been redeemed.

I would hope as a church we would be able to grasp the real meaning of the Gospel.

Sharing my story has brought many others to share stories proving to me the church is often not the safe place to share the real struggles of life. (She went on to say the world seems to forgiven easier than the church.)

Gayle offered a sobering reminder to us all of what grace and forgiveness looks like. I plan to buy her book Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.

What about you? Can you imagine offering the kind of forgiveness Gayle has had to offer her husband? Give me your thoughts.

Yesterday we announced that Grace Community Church is going multi-site. We will be one church that meets in two locations, adding our second location at Kenwood High School. (I wrote more about it HERE.)

As expected, we couldn’t answer all the questions in the time we had yesterday. This post addresses some of the most common questions I or members of the staff have received since yesterday’s announcement.

Will we still meet at Rossview?

Absolutely, this change is to allow us to continue to grow so we can fulfill the mission to “encourage growing followers of Jesus Christ”, so we will continue to offer three services at Rossview and we will be adding a fourth service at Kenwood.

Does this mean we are not building a building on our property near Rossview?

Not at all, it means that right now, because a building is not an option financially, that we are finding another way to create more room to reach people for Christ. We want to be financial responsible and not acquire debt beyond our means, while continuing the level of ministry God has called us to do. The plan remains to build on our property when the timing is right and the proper finances are in order.

When we build a building, will we close the Kenwood campus?

The plan is not to close what we feel God wants to do in that community. Anyone who has lived in Clarksville long knows that geographically we are spread out from each other. About 600 people pass Kenwood every Sunday to get to Rossview. There are approximately 75,000 people within a 5-mile radius of Kenwood. We think that’s enough to support a campus.

Will there be additional staff hires?

At this time, no staff hires are planned to be specifically assigned to either campus, but growth at Kenwood could allow for that eventually. We certainly want to minister effectively to the people in that area. We launched the church five years ago with volunteer leadership in many areas and we still empower many volunteers to lead. Kenwood will require even more volunteers to assume key positions, partnering with the existing staff we have.  Due to our co-pastor strategy from the beginning, our staff is accustomed to working in a team environment and is working a plan to share the responsibility of two campuses.

Have we considered a Saturday night service?

There probably aren’t too many options we haven’t considered, but this one would be hard to do in our setting. Every time we use the school, it requires a school custodian to be there. Sundays are a stretch on their schedules, but Saturday would be even more so and are not an option at this time. Additionally, school activities would consistently conflict with church schedules on Saturdays.

Why don’t we just build a smaller building than originally planned?

While that sounds logical, it isn’t practical. The size of a building with only the square footage we are using at Rossview is still a very large building and right now would be outside of our comfortable reach financially speaking. We can’t justify building something less in size (or even the same size) when our growth rate is what it is today and we are already maxing out the space we have at Rossview.

Will the same things be offered at each campus?

Yes, the Kenwood campus, other than some changes in color schemes due to school colors, should look almost identical to the Rossview campus. There will be excellence in Grace Acres (preschool), Cross Street (children’s) and worship.

Is each campus going to have it’s own pastor?

No, both campuses will continue to see the same faces that are seen at Rossview. Thankfully, the distances are close enough to easily commute between the two. On a typical Sunday, some of the staff (including the pastors) will be at each location.

What will a “launch team” for the new campus do?

That’s a great question. The launch team for Grace Community Church when we began the church five years ago did everything that was required to make a Sunday work. That included greeting at the doors, set up and tear down, working the parking lots, working in all areas with children, and giving up prime seats and parking spots to be as visitor friendly as possible. The Kenwood launch team will cover the needs of that campus. It will be exhausting, but rewarding, just as the original launch of the church was for that launch team.

What can I do to help?

Right now, the biggest needs are to raise the additional $150,000 needed to buy everything for the Kenwood campus and pray for the launch and all the details that still need to be completed. This Sunday (October 10), you will be able to sign up for the launch team. There will be launch team meetings and trainings in the near future.

Any more questions? Thanks for loving people enough to step outside your comfort zones and think outside the box. God is getting some tremendous glory from your hearts to serve this community.

POST UPDATE: I answered questions about this post HERE.

We announced today that Grace Community Church will become a multi-site church early in January 2011.  We will be one church meeting in two locations.  We are excited about what God is doing through us to reach people with the message of the grace of Jesus Christ.   (If you missed this message, be sure to check it out online HERE.  It should be up by Monday morning.)

Our second location will be at Kenwood High School.  Kenwood is ideally located in the center of an even larger population base than our current location.  In addition, Kenwood has an identical footprint to the school in which we currently meet.   It is closer to the military base, so has a larger presence of soldiers and families.  The principal is anxious for us to begin. We couldn’t be more excited about becoming a part of the Kenwood community.

If your church is currently doing multiple locations, we would love to learn from you.  What’s something you have learned that we need to be aware of before we begin?

Will you pray for us in this important transition?

When I was in school I had a love-hate relationship with math. I loved doing math, working to find an answer to a problem, but I hated having to solve it with the teacher’s methods. On tests I would do poorly if the teacher made us “show our work”. I could get the right answers, but using my own systems. I realize the teacher’s need to make sure I wasn’t cheating and that I knew how to think through a process but I wanted to invent my own process. The years I was on the math team and did best were when I had teachers who allowed me the freedom to do it my way.

Successful leaders understand this principle as it relates to organizational success. If you want creative team members to be energized towards progress the leader must allow team members to develop their own systems and strategies for attaining them. When you allow people to script the “how” they are more motivated to complete a task. Creative people especially need space to create.  They need to have input into the process of completing the vision of the team or organization.

Is your team stalled? Perhaps the system is too defined; too restrictive to allow changes and creativity. Try handing out some freedom passes. Hold team members accountable for progress, but allow them freedom to choose the process.

What about you…do you desire more structure or less structure to do your best work?