Nuggets #15

An Unstoppable Force by Erwin McManus
A Future of Optimism
People are looking for something worth believing in, somewhere to belong, and something to become.

Effective ministry is not the elimination of failure but the ability to thrive in the midst of failure. They mystery is that there are some churches that just can't be stopped. It doesn't matter how many times they fail. There's no problem too great for them to overcome.

Hope Never Gives Up
. . . there are three crucial dimensions to our ability to engage failure in a positive way. They are all related to how we understand failure and explain it to ourselves.

One style views failure as pervasive, another sees failure as personal, and the third understands failure as permanent.

Faith, hope, and love are the fuel that ignited the first-century church. They are the very essence of the apostolic ethos. They are the promise that the church of Jesus Christ is unstoppable and that even the gates of hell will not prevail against her.

I know this blog has statements that skip around a little. Let's talk about purpose, ministry, and failure.

It's no coincidence that as I was starting to type this blog, that my husband came up to me and read what he was reading in the book, In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day by Mark Batterson. In it, Mark cites Gordon Mackenzie's book "Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace". It struck his heart and supports the first statement above that people are looking for something worth believing in, somewhere to belong, and something to become. It says,
"My guess is that there was a time - perhaps when you were very young - when you had at least a fleeting notion of your own genius and were just waiting for some authority figure to come along and validate it for you. But none ever came."
How extremely sad is that? Everyone wants to have a purpose to thier life, to leave a legacy, to make a difference in at least one person's life, if not on society as a whole. I pray every church has a clearly communicated method of training up these future leaders.

Let's talk about failure for a minute. I think everyone has a different view of failure. I know those who wouldn't want to be caught dead doing anything wrong, less the sky would fall on them. I know those who have a slightly less dramatic view, but still avoid it at all costs, and in addition make sure others around them avoid it by manuevering situations within their control, less others' failures reflect on them. I think both these views are unhealthy. Having worked for a large corporation for 17 years (picture Dilbert), I discovered that failure was not something to be feared. The first few years I spent a lot of energy, calories, and sweat fearing failure. Then I came to a point when I realized that failure was bound to happen. I would always try and do my best, but noticed that worrying about it had absolutely no bearing on whether it happened or not. The odds were that sometimes it would happen. Sometimes it was my fault, sometimes it was a co-worker's fault, sometimes a boss's fault, or a subordinate's fault. And you know what? It was always okay. The healthy thing about that corporate environment was that everyone else knew things would crash from time to time, and when they did, no one pointed fingers (except one person, but that's another blog) but instead just pitched in to fix the problem. No big deal! It happens, move on! It's not the end of the world. Trust others will have the grace to not make you feel horrible about yourself, and if they don't, that's between them and God. We're all human, we blow it sometimes! Every experience is worth it, as long as you learn from it.

Once again I have to repeat one of my favorite mottos:
Don't use people to do ministry. Use ministry to do people.