Will Mancini

While the AHA! is new a new kind of learning format, the feeling of being drenched by an information fire hydrant is not. As I watch folks tweet and celebrate and whine about this blast of kingdom wisdom, I wanted to share a few thoughts to guide your learning experience. Consider taking a 5 minute intermission to reflect now.

What we are aiming for is not the picture of a child playing and splashing in the hydrant’s water-works. There is no learning there. We are looking for the leaders ability to sip from the hydrant (without loosing your lips!)

Three things can drive your knowledge junkie “drenching” over a learning leaders “drinking”

#1 Omission Paranoia - This problem has come with the cultural phenomenon of hyperchoice. We are constantly provided with so many options and so many evolutions of improvement with products, services, and everyday choices, that we can live overwhelmed and not even recognize it. If you are an opportunistic person like me, the problem can be worse. Eventually, an unsettled spirit creeps its way deep within our soul. The result? We live paranoid that we are going to miss out on one of the options, the “right angle” or the “winning choice.” Attending the AHA! is pure hell if you have omission paranoia. Don’t worry about what you will miss. Drink and ingest what is meaningful when you can.

#2 Hidden Jealously - One of my mentors, Howard Hendricks used to say, “You focus on the depth of your relationship with God and let God determine the scope of your ministry.” If you’re like me, there is a little commentator inside your head when you see 40 plus speakers get platformed in a cool venue like the AHA!. We wonder what we would say, how they got invited, yada, yada, yada. With these conversations in your head you really can’t drink well.

#3 Photocopied Vision - If you follow me you know that this is my continual burning platform. The longer I look under the hood of ministry teams across the country the less I am surprised by the clarity vacuum. Please know that most leaders are missing some clarity and the more you’re lacking the harder it is to sip from the hydrant. Why? True clarity provides a frame or filter through which to evaluate everything. (I call it a Vision Frame.) Robust clarity actually makes learning more aggressive and meaningful, because you continually cull out or highlight content based on the needs of your vision and strategy. You know when this “personal calling filter” is working when you can skip chapters in a book or hit pause on a AHA! presenter without a second’s thought.

What’s the answer to these challenges?

They all push me back to Jesus. Battle omission paranoia by resting in God’s goodness and sovereignty. Repent of hidden jealously. Take time and create margin to refine your ministry vision and understanding of God’s call on your life.

A potential action step: Auxano runs a process called the Vision co::Lab for this purpose and we have several starting in the next few months. It’s the polar opposite of the AHA!. Instead of spending 5 hours with 40 leaders spend 24 hours of vision coaching with a small group of 8. More info here, PDF brochure here.

In 24 hours, Leadership Network will begin their second, online conference experience. Why should you watch?

• 40 speakers, many are new voices with fresh content
• Each speaker is limited to 6 minutes each
• The speaker focus is a story or principle of a life-changing “aha moment” 
• Leadership network’s motive is to accelerate YOUR impact
• This thing is totally free, but you have to register here
• For a few bucks you can get speaker info
• Leadership Network may give Todd Rhoades a raise if more people sign up!
• Enjoy from the comfort of your own home
• You’ll feel better that you were there live, when everyone is talking about it

What more can you ask for?  I am grateful to be a part of this event. I will be speaking on “How a Funnel Changed My Life.”  See you tomorrow at noon.

Last week I enjoyed an evening with Chris Willard and Tom Wilson who work with the OneHundredX family of ministries, Leadership Network and HalfTime.

Tom is currently the President of OneHundredX, a new company that was developed in a clarity process with Auxano. Before coming to this ministry Tom served for over three decades with Young Life, concluding his time as a VP of field operations. While talking shop on vision, Tom recalled a year when he made special trips to motivate Young Life camp counselors.  Currently Young Life has 20 camps that bring in over 90,000 students a year. 

One hallmark of the Young Life camp experience (from which many Christian camps take their cue) is the exhilarating welcome that campers get the moment they arrive. As a high-school sophomore, I visited Frontier Ranch and can still remember the thrill of the cheering tunnel of counselors who screamed like they won the lotto when we showed up. It was big. 

Over the years,  Tom said  he watch energy of the welcoming experience cool off. So one year, he decided to address it by systematically vision-casting at all of the camps. What did Tom say? He told them the creation story of the first camp welcome.  He reminded them of the deepest why behind the hype that had grown hollow. 

Early in the camping ministry camp counselors committed their precious summer time to serve the younger high school kids who would come in from across the country. The problem was, in the early days, awareness of the camps had not grown, and not every week of camp had campers. And if campers didn’t come, that meant more boring project work for counselors like painting fences and repairing sheds. With a drought of campers, the counselors began to passionately pray for God to bring students. All they wanted to do was to love on kids! After a few weeks an old beat-up van pulled up the mountain with a dozen or so brand new campers. When the counselors saw it, they were so excited that they spontaneously erupted in applause to God, ushering in the first unforgettable welcome.

One simple story of how it all started brought tons of meaning to the camp counselors that year. 

I just about lost it as I heard the story,  because I still remember the incredible welcome I received at Frontier Ranch. It made me want to be a counselor all over again! 

What about you? Hearing the why behind what we do is an easy way to refresh motivation. Where do the motions of ministry under your leadership need more meaning? What story can only be told by you? What story would people love to hear?

Neue is a new quarterly journal by Relevant Media that just rereleased with a more readable magazine format and leadership savvy content. The tagline is “Ideas Shaping the Future of the Church.”  A very short article by Scot McKnight (his blog) was a particular jewel in this new issue. It doesn’t look like the content will be online anytime soon. Here are my highlights for the article Copycat Church:

In summary, Scot concisely and articulately connects the problem of copying methods and programs from other churches to a defining observation he has made in his career as a theologian and biblical scholar. He calls it his most important discovery of the last decade. In his own words:

For me the most important discovery in the last decade, of biblical and theological studies was two-fold: First, I realized that Jesus’s language was not sacrosanct for Paul and Peter and others.

 Second, I realized they were doing exactly what Jesus was doing. That is, Jesus wasn’t “imitating” anyone when he articulated the movement of God in terms of “Kingdom of God.”  He didn’t find this in Moses, or David, or Isaiah and restore it to its proper place, and the early Christian apostles didn’t “imitate” Jesus by expressing the Gospel with “Kingdom of God.”

The thrust of this article, carries the heartbeat of the ministry of Auxano and the book Church Unique: Every local congregation should think through their local context and their particular calling from God. And when they do, the articulation of their identity and direction will be stunningly  unique!  Scot’s emphasis is that even the inspired biblical authors didn’t copy each others words. Therefore, and even though we have the foundational revelation of Scripture, the Holy Spirit still creates new articulation of the Gospel through his people for different places and times. Here are some quotes from the article. 

• Imitation has its place, but one thing imitation doesn’t promise is results. Unfortunately a lot of church leaders don’t get that fact.
  
•  You can’t imitate Spirit-empowerment. You either have it or you don’t.
  
•  There is one thing that’s clear: There is no movement of God apart from God’s empowering Spirit.
  
•  The New Testament suggests that Spirit-empowered movements articulate the Gospel for a particular context for that day.
  
•  Spirit, context, Gospel, word. Those are the elements of a genuine movement of God.
  
•  The apostolic witness is the foundation of the Spirit-shaped truth of the Gospel. However, this does not mean that we simply puppet, or imitate the words of Jesus or Paul- for the New Testament does not do that itself.
  
•  What we need is less imitation and more discernment through God’s Spirit.

Thanks to all the folks at the C3 Conference (Creative Church Culture) who quickly sent this video as it brought to mind Church Unique.  Ed Young Jr’s creativity is off the charts as usual, and this time he brings a video with a message close to my heart. Enjoy! He is the pastor of FellowshipChurch.com