Leading through paradoxes

One of the odd things I am discovering is that often churches get the pastor they deserve and pastors get the church they deserve – even when they don’t like each other!
It’s odd.
This is relational sociology 201.
It is true in life.
We get the relationships we magnetically pull.
This is so true.
We complain about people, about politicians, about other people’s kids, about our neighbors dog – but maybe the relationship we have with them is merely a reflection of our own self’s.
We complain about the shows on television – but we watch them.
We criticize the bad movie – that we’ve just finished going to the cinema to see.
We are a paradox of hypocrisy. We have developed skills of double lives.
We live on two tracks of life.
We stole the cookie out of the cookie jar.

So how do we live this paradoxical life and yet lead transformationally?

Or think about this.
How many times have you heard pastors use language that cannot be delivered on?
How many times have we spoken false promises?
Just a few weeks back I recorded how many times our staff guys used the word ‘awesome’ in describing something going on at our church as they tried to encourage people to participate while they gave announcements in one of our services. While the event or the ministry was a good event, unsure if ‘awesome’ was not going too far. That word is now banned from our announcements – as is ‘brilliant’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘incredible.’ We don’t want to mislead the public.
But there is a bigger reason – apart from shrinking some words, maybe we’ve begun to believe that it actually is ‘awesome’, ‘brilliant’ or ‘incredible’.
This is not so much a paradox of hypocrisy; rather it is a paradox of exaggeration.

Both our hypocrisies and our exaggerations are the enemies to leading transformationally.
Yet we cannot flee such, they are the human factor we are stuck with, we need to lead through them.
Effective, transformational leadership always leads through not around.

I’ve only got two suggestions as to how to deal effectively with our paradoxes:

1. Be fully recognizant of it – just knowing that you have this bias to hypocrisy and exaggeration helps you work through it. Be honest.
2. Listen to your spouse more often – my wife’s antenna to pick up on both hypocrisy and exaggeration is hot!

Anyone got more suggestions?

The Gospel Makes it Possible to Have Such a Radically Different Life

The gospel makes it possible to have such a radically different life.

Listen to the words of a lady who grasped how amazing the gospel is:

If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would like a taxpayer with “rights” – I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by grace – then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.
[Timothy Keller, The Reason for God p183.]

I love that quote. She’s got it.
It is these radical asks of grace that make the Christian life so radically different – because when God asks he empowers.

This asks are beyond the realms of human or natural boundaries. In his grace he asks us to forgive those who wrong us. In his grace he asks us to trust him even when the darkest cloud hovers over us. In his grace he asks us to give – even our last dollar. In his grace he asks us to turn the other cheek. In his grace he asks us to forego how the world defines success – give up for his values and his Kingdom.
In his grace he asks us to die to self and live for his kingdom and his gospel.

And when get this you begin to live a radically different life – a life that some don’t understand. But what a life.

So why are so many Christians living dull, ordinary lives.
Maybe it’s because they have assumed they are saved by their works and they refuse therefore to let God ask anything of them.

But maybe these works are different than we think. Sometimes our ‘works’ are our biblical knowledge, or our “daily devotional time” or our ‘Bible study”. We’re not doing door to door work like some cults but so often we default into a works based salvation and we miss the radical call of grace….we stop listening to it too busy doing our ‘works’.

Of course nobody would ever confess this. But the evidence is in the ordinariness of our living. Christians are boring. Christians are just like everybody else. The words ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’ are absent from all but a few. [Take Jake and Renée. Living in Guadalajara to then head to Guatemala to plant a church …..with their little daughter and no money!! …check out their blog @ jakenrenee.blogspot.com - radicals.]

Grace more than knowledge, more than theology, more than church activity, more than Christian piety makes you open to do whatever God asks. Risk, boldness, radicalness…are products of grace not of works.

So Christ followers out there ….live in grace …it’s an adventure. Read about it; learn about it; but most of all live it.
So church pastors out there ….. teach grace; saturate your campus with grace; model it …it will transform your congregation.

The gospel makes it possible to have such a radically different life.