The Cove and personal spiritual retreats

I always have to give one person in my life credit for the cherished discipline I’ve implemented over the years of taking a personal spiritual retreat. Here’s what I said in another entry:

 I’m grateful to David James, the Arkansas Baptist Collegiate Ministry Team Leader, who effectively urged me to take a regular personal retreat each year that I served under him as a campus minister. It was a strange practice to me at first, but it’s become a cherished pilgrimage that I now seek to prioritize twice a year.

I’ve been overdue for a retreat/conference getaway, and after much looking, I settled on attending the Pastor’s Institute at the Billy Graham Training Center’s The Cove. The PI features Pastor Chip Ingram leading a one-day seminar titled Helping Move Your People from “In” to “All-In.” In addition, I signed up a personal retreat after that.

The sense of God’s presence here is palpable, even from entering the campus and meeting the security guard. The views, facilities and personnel have been refreshing. After a memorable supper and conversation with pastors from Texas, Alabama, Australia and New York at my table, I took a walk on one of the many trails scattered over this corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I have high expectations – not for answers to anything in particular. Simply for His nearness.

A la carte: Are you doing team leadership wrong?, Interns, and 3 Issues Churches Must Answer

Are you doing team leadership wrong?

Phil Cooke offers some strong advice about meetings, teams and decisions on this blog entry:

Teams are for brainstorming and execution.

Leaders make decisions.

Simple as that. What’s happening today is that too many leaders are afraid to embrace decisions. Fear of not being liked. Fear of failure. Fear of making mistakes. Insecurity. There’s a number of reasons. As a result, they defer the decisions to the group. But all that happens in this scenario is that the decision devolves into endless discussions, debates, and arguments. I’ve been in leadership meetings that lasted for 12 hours because they couldn’t arrive at a decision. (No surprise there.)

Turn to your team for ideas, brainstorming, research, opinions, and more. Develop a killer team of brilliant people. But when it comes to making a real decision, nothing takes the place of genuine leadership. Once that decision is made, a great team is brilliant at execution.

In military terms, a great team can figure out how to take the hill. But someone has to decide which hill to take.

Don’t give up your role as being a strong decision maker.

Agree/disagree? I tend to agree, but I also love the joy of bringing a group of people to consensus on issues. Where there’s consensus (even if it takes longer than I desire), there’s ownership and investment.

Interns

Jodi Glickman in the Harvard Business Review asked, “Does anyone has time for interns?” The answer is that if you don’t, you should. We have an intern program in our church that is consistently stretching and helpful. One thing I’d affirm from the article is the importance for the intern of making things happen. Get busy. Take initiative. Get things done.

One of the best ways to get ahead at work is to make your boss’ life easier or better… Show your new employer how you’re going to solve a specific problem, fill in a missing need, or simply be someone who can hit the ground running on a specific and manageable task.

Matt Morrison also wrote on The Importance of Interning and identified the following three areas:

• It’s a chance to learn.
• It’s a chance to fail.
• It’s a chance to humble yourself.

He also offered the following wisdom:

Internships are a vital part of growing as a professional and as a person. In medicine or law, they require it. Many businesses and corporations prefer to see them on a new hire’s work history. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t even hire anyone who didn’t have an internship under his or her belt. [emphasis mine]

While not all interns are created equal, having a consistent intern program – especially in the church – provides you as a leader with the opportunity to discern the suitability of a person’s role in ministry. From mundane tasks to significant assignments, the intern is observed and assessed for greater roles of responsibility and leadership. Internships provide a way for churches to identify future leaders (and to cull out that who shouldn’t be leaders at the present time).

Our church has a one-year intern program. They work for the first three months on mostly mundane, “grunt-work” and errand-type tasks. This provides us with the opportunity to observe attitude and motive in service. The second three months, they are assigned a particular area of ministry. The remaining six months (after evaluation of the first six), they are paid – a very little – and continue in their assigned area of ministry as a growing part of our staff team. You can review our intern documents here.

Three Questions Ministers Must Answer

Steve Murrell wrote in February 2012 what looks like now a prophetic post. Since then, there has been a full-court press on his third question. Here are the three issues he said ministers (and churches) must be able to respond to:

1. The Exclusivity of Christ. Is faith in Jesus the only way to heaven?
2. The Authority of Scripture. Is the Bible trustworthy and authoritative for all mankind, in all times?
3. The Sanctity of Marriage. Who should define the institution of marriage?

I would add another issue that churches and leaders must be able to address with grace and from scripture:

• The Beauty of Gender and Sexuality. Are men and women fundamentally different in their roles, and as a result, are there boundaries for sexual expression?

Would you add anything to these issues as important topics for churches to be able to address with grace and truth for our culture?

Goodbye (again)

The view from Northstar Church’s Lancaster House as Virginia Tech students and their families pack up along Washington Street

I have a love/hate time with this season of the year in Blacksburg. Even as the weather changes from winter to spring (finally!), it’s also a time of transition for students and families.

In May, both undergrads and grad students graduating and/or leaving for the summer from different schools in the area: Virginia Tech, Radford University, and the medical school. Blacksburg’s hustle and bustle will ebb to a more quiet mountain town pace over the summer. The energy level (and noise) drops dramatically, and those of us left emerge from our dens and declare “eight weeks of summer!” We’re like Punxsutawney Phil, only we’re right.

Summer in Blacksburg is several things, but let me take a stab at describing it:

• No waiting in line at Chipotle
• Free, nice furniture in every apartment dumpster in town, first-come, first-served
• Windows-down weather
• Neighbors emerge from their cocoons, and backyard cookouts scent the landscape daily.
• You can take Main Street through downtown without resorting to back roads and side streets to avoid traffic. (The stoplights are still mistimed, causing a linger wait than necessary on side streets, but just turn right.)
• Camping, hiking
• If you don’t own a bicycle or scooter, go home.
• The pace of life slows perceptibly as if the New River Valley takes a deep breath.
• You can attend newly-released movies the night of.
• Speaking of movies, the Starlite Drive-In opens in Christiansburg!
• Parking spaces? No problem.
• The New River – floating, fishing, etc.
• In some churches across the community, families meet each other for the first time in the summer as their student population exits and congregations use the summer as a time of unity-building and fellowship. (If you’re a family in the NRV looking for a church, summer is an excellent time to visit!)
• City maintenance and garbage collection workers breathe a sigh of relief. Cleanup after Thursday nights is reduced significantly.
• Daily fro-yo, no lines

For those of you familiar with summers in the NRV, what would you add?