New Life Assembly

Book Review: Primal

How is it that I have time to write a book review three days before Christmas, you ask?  Well, when I took the Strengthsfinder test several years ago, my top strength assessed out in something called "responsibility".  So when I agreed to receive a free preview copy of the book, Primal:  A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity, I signed on to be part of a blog tour in which I would write a review of the book between the 15th and 22nd of December.  The responsibility combined with a knack for procrastination leads me to writing the review here, at the last hour, but absolutely compelled to keep my word.

This is the first book I've read by Mark Batterson, who pastors National Community Church in Washington, D.C.  I've heard a lot about Mark and his church, particularly since he is a pastor in my denomination (Assemblies of God) and his church is often held up as a model of a great church doing a great job connecting with a postmodern culture. 

Batterson's contention is that we as Christians have lost the soul of our faith, and that if we hope to find it again, we need to start with Jesus' great commandment:  that we should love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.  If Jesus identifies this as the greatest command, then it would make sense that we would "spend an inordinate amount of our time and energy trying to understand and obey it."  He'll get no argument from me there, nor when he says that, for the most part, Christians have become more known for what we are against than what we are for.  What we are for, in his mind, is supposed to be great devotion to this great commandment.

The Heart of Christianity - Primal Compassion

Here he describes the ability for us to feel what God feels, to have our hearts broken with the things that break the heart of God.  If we are to genuinely love God, then we must love and care for what he loves and cares for.

I was only marginally engaged with the book until I read the following words that finally grabbed my attention:

What makes you glad or sad or mad?  What puts a holy smile on your face?  What causes your spirit to sob uncontrollably?  What makes you pound your fist on the table out of righteous indignation?  Somewhere in the mixture of that gladness, sadness, and madness is your God-ordained passion.  Or maybe I should say compassion, because you are feeling what God feels.

I believe many Christians simply go through the motions without ever thinking through questions like this.  If you had the chance to read the book only to be challenged with those questions, and allow your spirit to rise to answer them, I think it would be worth it.

The Soul of Christianity - Primal Wonder

If the heart of Christianity is to feel what God feels, then the soul of it is to stand in awe, wonder and worship at the beauty and majesty of what God has done.  He writes that there is something about staring at the stars that is good for your soul, and I felt myself resonate with that.  We live about a mile from the beach, and on a clear winter night I can stand in my driveway and hear the sound of waves on the beach while I stare up into a sky clouded with stars and all I can do is wonder at the creativity of a God who could make all of this.

In the pages of Scripture, Batterson argues, we find the soulful revelation of God's character to us.  And here he encourages us not just to read Scripture, but to allow Scripture to read us.  To get lost in the wonderful story that is the gospel, and allow ourselves to be consumed by its raw power is good for the soul, inspiring truer worship than simply going through the motions.  We must think about its implications not just with our mind, but from the soul.

The Mind of Christianity - Primal Curiosity

But the soul is not the only place for thinking and expanding our understanding of who God is.  Batterson encourages us to use our brains (both hemispheres) to be continual learners in the kingdom of God.  Here he encourages us to pursue logic, humor, imagination and every other aspect of our brains for the purpose of understanding God and the world he has made to a greater degree.

I loved his thought that eventually holy curiosity will drive you past simply looking for things to make sense, or be reasonable, and will eventually push you past what your senses can hold, and past what your brain can make meaning out of.  Eventually holy curiosity will push you past the ideas that are just good ideas, and into a pursuit of a God idea, an idea that would transform you, and others, in its fulfillment.

The Strength of Christianity - Primal Energy

If we have heart and soul and mind, but do not engage our bodies and our strength in the loving of God, then ultimately we will have missed out on perhaps our greatest task.  At some point, our love for God will push out of those inner worlds of heart, soul and mind and will express themselves in actual physical ways on the earth.  Perhaps you could say this is where it begins to cross over from loving God to loving our neighbors as ourselves.

If there is anything that I think speaks loudly to our culture and world it is precisely this.  It will not do for us to contend for theology without the world seeing that our theology drives our service to the world.  If we work with all of the energy that God has given us (and will continue to give us), then what can't we accomplish?

My Thoughts

As I said in the opening paragraph on the heart - I was off to a slow start with the book.  At times I felt like too many examples and illustrations overwhelmed the message the author was conveying.  I can hear the influences of different writers (Erwin McManus and Rick Warren are the two that come to mind) in Mark's writing, and so I felt like a lot of what I read was not new information for me.  That does not, however, take away from the impact of this book on my own spiritual journey.  I see its potential to be a personal catalyst for sparking my imagination at what God could and would do with me and through me if I would devote myself to loving him this way.

I would recommend the book for you if you are seeking a personal, spiritual reformation.  Batterson does a great job opening up the heart, soul, mind and strength avenues to the great command, and provides some strong challenges for you to consider.  If you are willing to engage with the hard questions, and do some soul-searching in the process, I would consider taking your time to go through this book with an open heart and mind (and notebook) to see what God will show you about the road ahead.

Random, Disconnected Thoughts

With no particular order or flow:

• Last night's Red Sox game was depressing.  I hope they can bounce back today and get a win from Beckett.
• Had a great night writing last night with the thunder and rain while listening to the foghorn and the sound of the waves out the window.  I felt inspired.  Hopefully it translates to the writing I did.  Though, truth be told, nothing ever seems as good in the cold light of day (or the cold gray of day, in our case here).
• I've been on a bit of a reading binge lately after reading through a list of top 100 books related to New England (either by topic or author) from the Boston Globe.  Recently finished John Adams' biography by David McCullough, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and am just about done with Three Junes by Julia Glass. 
• I'm really looking forward to starting a new series this weekend called "The Table".  We're going to explore the connection between meals and spirituality in the Scriptures by focusing on three places where the two cross over:  grace, fellowship and thanksgiving. 
• I'm amazed that while our economy has been in probably the worst state of the years I can remember, that the giving of our church community has been steadily on the rise.  To date we're about 23% over our projected budget for this point in the year.  That's definitely a testimony to God's faithfulness!
• We're in the process of working two major projects that I hope will expand our influence in the community:  (1) A renovation of our garage into a better equipped food pantry which will allow us to expand hours and services that are definitely needed (2) A back to school block party that I hope will help bring our people together around a common, exciting project and will allow us to invite others in the community to see what the people who occupy that strange-looking building on the corner of Post and Tuckertown are all about!
• I'm getting very excited for my missions trip in just over a month.  Pray for me if you think about it, but also particularly pray for Rita and the kids while I'm away.  Our family structure is definitely such that both parents contribute a lot to the managing of the house, so a lot of my burden is going to fall to Rita.  I'm sure she'll handle it superbly, but I know it's going to be a challenge for her.
• Last, but not least, I'm looking forward to a vacation at the end of August like I can't remember looking forward to vacation before.  Usually I don't get that sense of longing to get away until just a couple of days before we leave - at this point I'm already feeling like I need the time away, and we need it as a family.  We're going to visit friends in Baltimore, spend time with Rita's family in West Virginia, and then spend a few nights just the four of us touring D.C. 

Two quotes that guide me...

Yesterday afternoon I cracked open a brand new Moleskine Plain Journal with the heavyweight pages that allow me to use my fine point Sharpies for writing out my sermon notes. This morning I took a few minutes to inscribe the following two quotes into the first two pages, as I have done for the last two books before this one. I genuinely enjoy the process of crafting and delivering a message every week, and these two quotes have served as a beacon for me as I endeavor weekly (and sometimes weakly) to speak a word of hope and life into the hearts of those who sit in need with me on Sunday.

They are both from a beautiful little book on preaching called "Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale" written by a remarkable author I first encountered on a recommendation from my brother: Frederick Buechner.

"Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe even when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have."

"The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old term, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn't believe them or doesn't want them or just doesn't give a damn? In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen....it is impossible for anyone to leave behind the darkness of the world he carries on his back like a snail, but for God, all things are possible. That is the fairy tale. All together they are the truth."

Good to Great: A Culture of Discipline

I have a feeling that before I finish this blog post, something is bound to self-destruct in my computer, due to its inability to process more than two posts a week.  Nevertheless, we press on in pursuit of greatness...

I think most people don't like the "D" word - discipline.  Given free rein, I'll slide towards freedom over responsibility most every time.  Given complete license to do what I want, I'll often choose that over what I have to do, procrastinating the necessities until later.  So this chapter about a creating a culture of discipline really hit me between the eyes.  Collins asserts that companies that make the transition from good to great consist of disciplined people who are incredibly disciplined in their thoughts and from those thoughts take disciplined actions.  They are tenacious about their one thing we discussed in the last post, and will go to seemingly extreme ends in order to make sure they adhere to that concept in every aspect of their organization.

Yet, he contends, these companies seem to balance freedom and responsibility.  Because they have done the difficult work of getting the right people on the bus, they have confidence in their ability to think through the issues facing the company, and to take disciplined action to resolve problems and capitalize on opportunities.  There is a clear belief in the system they have created, and yet a freedom to create within that system that continues to allow the right people to experiment within the bounds of the system.  It's that balance that is, I think, particularly difficult to strike.

When I heard Collins give his talk at Catalyst, one of the key points I took away was the need for a "stop-doing" list to coincide with the "to-do" list I already have.  He said that our tendency is to just keep adding to the to-do list, and never eliminate anything from it.  Even as I write it, it sounds ridiculous, and yet true.  But he says that the disciplined organizations (again, made up of disciplined people) knew what lay within their hedgehog concept and were passionate about eliminating anything and everything that didn't move them closer to that goal.

Churches (and pastors) tend to get stuck here, I think.  We get comfortable doing certain things on a weekly, monthly, or even annual basis, and we never question whether they are helping us achieve the goal of seeing the lives of people in our churches and then in our communities transformed by the gospel.  Reading this chapter I was encouraged to think through some of those things again, to try to take a look with fresh eyes at what we're doing, and what we may need to stop doing to become more effective.  That, of course, applies also to me personally as the leader.  I have to be willing to not do certain things so that I can focus on the few things that I can do that will help us become a great church.  Lots to think about there for me. 

I think I'll take tomorrow off.  All this writing is exhausting me.  I'll be back on Monday with the regularly scheduled weekend reflections.

Good to Great: The Hedgehog Concept

I'm working from home this morning because Rita's taking the day off and this way I can see her for a few minutes on my breaks!  One of the advantages of a flexible work schedule, I would say...

Of all the good chapters in Good to Great, I thought the chapter on the hedgehog concept was the great chapter - the one that I've found myself re-reading several times since I finished the book.  Collins talks about an ancient Greek parable that says "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."  He says that foxes are cunning creatures who are able to devise many ways of attacking a hedgehog, but the hedgehog continually returns to the one thing that will save him from the fox - rolling into a ball and pointing his spikes outward.  Collins relates this to two different kinds of companies.  On the one hand are the companies who see the complexity of the world and pursue various and scattered ideas in all different directions.  On the other hand are the good-to-great companies, who see the complexity of the world, but are able to come up with a single, unifying concept that they can work with.

To get to this "hedgehog concept" Collins encourages us to look at the intersections of three circles, which are the answers to three questions.  (1)  What can you be the best in the world at?  (2) What drives your economic engine? (3) What are you deeply passionate about?  He asserts that if you can find the place where those three overlap, you can find the unifying concept around which you can build a great organization.  The good-to-great companies had a single ideal that drove them forward in their success, and they pursued it relentlessly.

It has gotten me thinking about our church, and asking where those three intersect for us?  I still don't have an answer, but I can see how crucial the question is for our long-term success.  I've said for a long time that I want New Life to be a great church, and I think the potential is there for it to be a goal we realize.  But to do it, I think we're going to have to understand what we can be the best at, what will drive our discipleship engine (because I think that's the key factor in a church), and what we're deeply passionate about.  If we can do some digging on those (and I think we did some already in creating a mission, vision and values) then I think we can really drive towards becoming the great church God wants us to be; a great church that will have a great impact on the communities of South Kingstown and Narragansett.

Good to Great - The Stockdale Paradox

For some weird reason I woke up before 6 this morning with an awful lot of energy, so I've been returning emails, and feeling highly productive and thought this might be as good a time as any to blog some more thoughts on Good to Great.  It's highly likely this post will be interrupted by my oldest child stampeding down the stairs looking for breakfast, but it's a chance I have to take.

The third principle Collins brings out regarding the good to great companies is their willingness to confront the brutal facts about their current situation.  He keys in on just how imperative it is that companies were willing to take an honest assessment of their position in their markets.  He specifically contrasted two grocery store chains - A&P and Kroger.  A&P was the leading grocery store chain in the US, at one point with gross sales that ranked second only to GM among all American companies.  When they began to falter, however, they were unwilling to deal with current reality, instead they actually chose to ignore things that were right under their nose - particularly the reality that the grocery store industry was changing.  When they started a sort of pilot project store to gauge what people wanted it showed them exactly where the industry was headed, but because they didn't like the conclusions, they shut down the store.

Kroger, on the other hand, was faced with the same challenges:  multitudes of stores and capital invested in the old school grocery store.  Instead of hiding their heads in the sand, however, they chose to confront the reality that the world was changing under their feet, and took action to be prepared for the change.  Collins writes that, "Kroger decided to eliminate, change, or replace every single store and depart every region that did not fit the new realities.  The whole system would be turned inside out, store by store, block by block, city by city, state by state."

Collins tells us, however, that equally important as confronting brutal facts is maintaining an unwavering sense of optimism and hope that the company will succeed in the end.  It's a paradox, of course, because you must first see just how bad things are before you can believe they need to change.  And once you see how bad things are, it's quite possible to lose hope that they could ever change.  So some see the reality and don't ignore it, but instead accept it, and just throw up their hands about it.  But the good to great companies saw it and didn't accept it, they worked to change in the midst of it buoyed by great faith that they would overcome the obstacles in the end.

I think they applications for the church are stunning in this chapter.  I can't tell you how often I've thought that much of the church world is burying their heads in the sand about the brutal reality that what we're doing, by and large, is not working.  I know of some highly effective churches, but for each one of those I could name another 2 or 3 that have completely lost touch with reality. 

And yet, I am eternally hopeful about the church because I believe that it is God's purpose to use the church to advance his Kingdom in the world.  I don't think he's ever backed off of that redemptive proposal that we would go into all the world making disciples of all nations.  That calling has never been rescinded, and so I have great hope in the church as a whole.  My question is whether the individual churches that make up the larger church will have the courage required to confront reality, and will have the faith required to make the needed changes to be what God is calling them to be in a world that has most definitely changed underneath our feet.  It's my hope that New Life will be one of those courageous churches who meets the challenges with our head up, our eyes open, and our hearts filled with hope.

First Who, Then What

I had great intentions last week of a series of posts based on Jim Collins' book Good to Great, and then my kids got sick and my whole routine was thrown off.  Though I'm used to it by now, it's still a little frustrating when it happens.  So today's the first day I feel a semi-normal day is in order again, and so it's the first chance to get back to those posts.

In the good to great companies, Collins asserts that their way of hiring staff followed the principle "first who, then what" - meaning that it was more important to get the right people involved in the organization than it was to fill roles that seemed to be priorities.  Not only was it key to get the right people involved, it was equally important to make sure that the people who were in a wrong fit were either moved to a different position, or moved out of the company altogether.

Those companies that practiced the principle found that they were able to more effectively meet the challenges of uncertain times because their focus was not on hiring for positions, but on hiring people with the right character, and the right competencies to navigate difficult situations.  When you have the right people involved from the beginning, they don't need to be micro-managed, because you trust that they can accomplish the necessary tasks to succeed.  They took time to make the right decisions and hire the best possible people up front, which is difficult to do, but pays off in the long run.

At the end of the chapter Collins distills it this way:  "The old adage 'People are your most important asset' is wrong.  People are not your most important asset.  The right people are."  I can't tell you how much this resonates with me and my understanding of my own life, and my own desires for leading the church.  I want to do ministry with people I can trust, with people who are committed in relationship to each other, and who are then committed to doing something great together.  A friend of mine says that it's important to process relationships before tasks, and I couldn't agree more.

I've made mistakes in this respect, sometimes looking at the gifts and talents of people as more important than their fit into the relationships of the church.  It's a mistake I don't want to make again, because it's such a difficult one to reverse.  But I am committed to being rigorous about making "who" decisions before "what" decisions.  Right now I'm privileged to be doing ministry with people I know are invested in their relationships to one another.  To take another step in our growth as a church will involve now getting all of those good, talented and committed people into positions where they can use their gifts and talents in the most productive ways.

If all goes well, tomorrow will be a chance to talk about confronting brutal facts while never losing faith.  It's always fun to look at brutal facts, right?

Level 5 Leadership

Good Morning!

I stayed up way too late reading last night, so I'm dragging just a little bit this morning.  I'm feeling like a second cup of coffee may be in order for me to get through to lunch...

Yesterday I mentioned that I wanted to take some time to blog through the concepts advanced by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.  So this morning's topic is centered on the leadership provided to these companies that made a leap from good to great.  Collins says, that he "gave the research team explicit instructions to downplay the role of top executives so that we could avoid the simplistic 'credit the leader' or 'blame the leader' thinking common today."  Despite that instruction, they found that leadership of a particular kind was critical to the success of these companies.

They developed a 5 tier hierarchy for categorizing leaders, from Level 1, a highly capable individual, to Level 5 - a leader who blends personal humility and professional will.  He contends that these leaders walked in the paradox of not thinking too highly of themselves, and yet having a perfect understanding of their mission to build something great.  The Level 5 leaders were not interested in being so great that the place would fall apart when they left, rather they were concerned with building a company that would have enduring greatness even after they were gone.

Because of that drive, the Level 5 leaders displayed a remarkable penchant for doing the "right thing" even if it was the hard thing to do, even if it meant shouldering their share of blame for the failures.  Collins describes this as the difference between a window and a mirror.  The comparison company executives often looked out the window to find someone else to blame for the issues.  The good to great leaders were willing to look in the mirror at themselves.  At the same time, they were quick to look out the window to give credit for successes to those with whom they worked.

So, since this quality is all about leadership, it was a "mirror moment" for me as I read it and then thought about its implications.  My own tendency is to be strong on the personal humility aspect of leadership and weak on the professional will aspect.  I have rarely struggled with taking my share of blame for our issues as a church, in fact, I sometimes wonder if I've taken too much blame, but that may be another conversation. 

But I haven't been as driven to see us become great as I would like myself to be, and as it seems that Collins thinks is necessary for us to be.  I heard a podcast a week or so ago (an ESPN production of all things) in which the football analyst being interviewed said, "Remember, never confuse hope with a plan."  That quote stuck with me.  I've been strong on the hope, and much weaker on the discipline to create a plan and stick to it.  In that sense I think I've managed to chase different concepts around, hoping to hit on one that would make me (and us) great.  I feel like I'm coming out of that mode now, which is good news for me personally and for us as a church.

Collins says there are no 10 steps to Level 5 leadership, but that there is an interrelationship between this kind of leadership and the other disciplines described in the book.  He encourages his readers to pursue those disciplines and then see where they take you in your leadership.  So, with that said, I'll close out this post on leadership by inviting you to come back tomorrow for a glance at the "first who, then what" principle.

Good to Great (Part 1)

In October I went to the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta with about 30 other pastors from our district.  It was a great journey, filled with inspiring and challenging speakers who charged me up for quite a while to do the work that I've been called to do as a pastor.  On the flight home I spent some time writing down my top takeaways from the conference, and was a little surprised to find that maybe 6 or 7 of them came from Jim Collins, author of the book Good to Great. 

Several months later I purchased the book.  It took me a while to get through it, not because I found it boring, but because there was so much information to digest that I typically found myself only reading a chapter at a time in an effort to absorb as much as possible.  I just finished yesterday, and thought I'd lay out some of my own thoughts related to the concepts Collins presents in the book.  As always, please feel free to engage my thoughts (or Collins') in the comments section of the blog - I'd love to hear from you!

"Good is the enemy of great.
And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.
We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools.  We don't have great government, principally because we have good government.  Few people attain great lives, in large part  because it is just so easy to settle for a good life."

This is the opening to the book, and it's a great one, principally because it's so true.  The book itself is an examination of 11 companies (and 17 comparison companies) who make the leap from being just a good company, to being a great company.  Collins and his research team spent several years (5 I think) collecting data on these companies who had a history of average performance related to the market, punctuated by some sort of transitional period after which their companies outperformed the general market by at least 3 times in the next 15 years.

The companies range from a bank, to a steel producer, to a grocery store chain to a pharmacy chain.  The goal of the research team was to look inside the transition period to see what happened that made such a remarkable difference.  Their objective was to see what, if anything, were the contributing factors to the giant step forward?

Having heard the talk Collins gave at Catalyst, I was a little familiar with the lingo already, and had already thought through some elements of how these would apply to me personally and to my leadership of the church.  Yesterday as I finished the book I couldn't escape the question, "What can I do to apply some of this to New Life?"

I'll give you the bullet points of Collins' conclusions, and then probably spend a post a day on each concept.  I'm hoping this will help me with the processing that I'm still trying to do of how I can apply these to me and us.

1. Level 5 Leadership:  "....these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will."
2. First who...then what:  "People are not your most important asset.  The right people are."
3. Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith):  "....unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end...at the same time the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality...."
4. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the three circles):  "To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence."
5. A culture of discipline:  "When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy."
6. Technology accelerators:  "...pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies."
7. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop:  "...the good-to-great transitions never happened in one fell swoop."

So tomorrow, Level 5 Leadership, and the ways that I can strive towards that goal.