Before I'm 40... Part 6, Learn your trade

There used to be such a thing as apprenticeships. A young man would work alongside an older man, watching, learning, copying, acquiring skill. After a period of years the apprentice would eventually be credited with the same ability as the teacher and able to trade and take apprentices in his own right.

This doesn’t really happen anymore. Nowadays things tend to be more trial and error – have a go and see how you do. I have fitted my own kitchen and bathrooms in the past, but I have made mistakes. I won’t make those same mistakes again, but if I’d been working alongside someone who actually knew what he was doing I wouldn’t have made them in the first place! There is only so much you can work out from reading books and looking at pipe work – sometimes you need a master to show you the ropes.

This really should happen in church leadership, as ‘apprenticeship’ is just another way of describing what it means to be a disciple.

I have been able to watch and learn from some spiritual masters. At times though I didn’t get the apprenticeship I needed. For example, I never had a good preacher sit down with me and work through the strengths and weaknesses of my own preaching – which is why I now try to give that kind of feedback and instruction to those I ask to preach.

So the first key to learning your trade is to find a teacher. Ask someone to help you. Don’t just rely on trial and error.

The next thing is to be prepared to take your time, just as an apprentice had to. If the trade you want to learn is preaching then its going to take time. I reckon I didn’t really begin to get a handle on preaching until I had done it about 300 times. That takes time, If you are appointed as the sole preacher in a church with two Sunday services you’ll be getting the hang of it after two or three years. If (like me) preaching opportunities don’t come along too regularly at first its going to take you ten years to get good – which is why its sensible to get going before you’re 40. (Of course, if you get a good coach, rather than just learning by trial and error, you should be able to cut this timeframe down considerably.)

A third thing is to be prepared to put the graft in. Any trade worth knowing takes hard work and discipline to master. The trouble with church leadership is that every church member thinks they are expert in it and has an opinion on it. Because they are sitting there every Sunday they think they know how it should be done! Funny thing is, I wouldn’t tell an architect, or a surgeon, or a mechanic, how to do their job, even though I live in a house, visit the doctor, and get my car serviced regularly. I know they have worked hard to acquire skills I don’t have. Don’t think that just because you are a Christian and have sat in a lot of church meetings that you can straight away be an effective leader – its going to take blood, sweat and tears.

Fourthly, keep on learning! The leaders who are most inspirational to me are those who remain curious and engaged even once they are well established and respected. One of my living heroes is Terry Virgo, leader of the Newfrontiers family of churches. Terry wouldn’t have to do another thing to command respect. He could just turn up and smile and everyone would be happy. But Terry keeps on learning. Every time I speak with him he has read another book, met someone new, increased his store of knowledge and understanding. Terry keeps getting better at his trade.

Finally, don’t get frustrated and give up. If a trade is worth learning a few set-backs along the way are worth riding out. With enough application, and with the help of a teacher, the day will come when you are skilled enough to do the job well and pass your skills on to others.

Before I'm 40... Part 5, Get physically fit

Developing a philosophy of life can help keep us spiritually and emotionally healthy, but what about physical health?

I started running regularly when I was 16 – at that time I planned to join the army and knew I needed to get in good shape. My plans for the military changed, but through college I continued to run, rock climbed, and took up taekwondo and Thai boxing. I then started playing rugby. I was in pretty good shape.

Then, shortly before turning 25, Grace and I moved location, to a church where I was going to invest the next 13 years of my life, and I got out of the habit of exercise. I did bits of exercise here and there, but nothing organized and pretty soon put on weight, went up a belt size, and generally began to lose fitness.

By the time I was 29 I knew I needed to do something about my physical condition, or I would hit 30 and find it all the more difficult to get it back again. My good friend Tom Eaton (who is now church planting in Japan) encouraged me to enter a triathlon, and three months after turning 30 I did my first race, a sprint distance tri in Brighton. I loved it, and was hooked. The next year I was back, this time for the Olympic distance (1500m swim, 40km bike, 10km run). I had been swimming breast stroke up to this point, but then taught myself to swim freestyle, joined a tri club and got pretty serious about it, often training six days a week. I was always a poor swimmer and runner, but got strong on the bike, and at my best managed to bang out a 2hr25 Olympic distance tri – hardly world class, but not too shabby.

Then two years ago I crashed off my bike while racing – coming down a hill too fast in wet conditions – and took a knock to my confidence as well as my head. This happened at the same time that the decision was made we should move on from New Community Church, and in the turmoil of working out our next steps triathlon took more of a back seat. I joined a tri club as soon as we moved to Poole but the times and location of the training sessions didn’t really fit with my other commitments. So I have had a relatively inactive couple of years, and now find myself pretty much back where I was ten years ago.

The trouble is, it is even harder to get going again touching 40 than it was touching 30!

But does it matter?

Yes, I think it does.

Once we get past age 30 the body starts to slow considerably. Past 30 the metabolism begins to slow to such an extent that you will put on a pound in weight every year simply by eating what you have previously eaten and exercising as you have previously exercised. Added to this, bone mass starts to decrease.

The only way to keep the weight off and the bones strong is to eat less and train more. My fondness for wine and cheese, sausages and beer, butter and chocolate seems, if anything, to be increasing as I grow older. As I find these pleasures hard to resist I ought to be doing even more exercise – more cardio work, more weights work.

And so should you.

Too many leaders give in to their slowing metabolisms, their aches and pains, and the busyness of their schedules, and carry on eating while stopping exercising. They get fat and this makes them unhealthy and less energetic. They get sick more often as a result, and are not able to work with the vigor they should. Their spreading girths also often betray a growing spiritual malaise, because our souls are not separate from our bodies.

This does not honor Jesus, or serve his church. It is not good enough when gluttony is the one acceptable ministry sin.

Christian ministry does not generally require a highly developed musculature, but it is highly demanding, with many pressures. Being in good physical shape helps us to handle these pressures more effectively.

I have always been impressed by the example of Nelson Mandela, described in his biography Long Walk to Freedom. Knowing the inevitability of imprisonment Mandela got himself in good shape. He knew prison would be tough, and he wanted to be physically strong enough to survive it. Christian leaders should adopt a similar mentality.

So it is a good principle for younger leaders to develop habits of healthy eating and regular exercise before they are 40 – it is so much harder to develop these habits once you are already into middle age. Start young, and keep going until you’re old. (For some helpful advice on weight loss see this post by church planting guru Ed Stetzer.)

Ok, I’m going to do some weights right now! And I’m saying “no” to that chocolate brownie thanks Grace – you’ll be glad I did.

Before I'm 40... Part 4, Develop your philosophy of life

At first thought, getting clear about your philosophy of life might not seem so different from getting clear about your priorities, but there is a difference.

Our priorities are the fixed points around which everything else must revolve, whereas our philosophy of life is more to do with how we are going to live. It is more about the how than the what.

For example, I don’t have a TV. This is a philosophical decision rather than a priority one, although the philosophy does flow from my priorities. I don’t think its wrong to have a TV, and as a family we get quite a bit of screen time (DVD’s watched on the computer; the BBC’s iplayer), but we have decided that our family life is better when there isn’t a TV in the house.

Our philosophy of life sums up our values – the things that give shape to what we do. In his book Traveling Light, Eugene Peterson expresses it like this:

What are our values? In the Christian way we acquire a healthy value system. We find that persons are more important than property. We learn that forgiveness is preferable to revenge. We realize that worshipping God is more central than impressing our neighbors.

When our values are denied or scorned by the people around us, will we abandon them? If we do, we will flounder. Without values we live “in vain.” If we lose touch with our values, we are at the mercy of every seduction, every inducement, every claim on our money, our energy, our time. Values infuse life with a steady sense of direction and purpose. They free us from the petty dictatorships of fashion and fad and free us to pour ourselves into large goals for high purposes. The gospel keeps us in touch with sane and healthy values.

That’s a good description.

We need to get our philosophy of life worked out so that our decision making is made easy. We are confronted with so many choices and decisions, we can easily develop options paralysis. With a clear philosophy of life in place decision making becomes more straightforward. How we spend our money, energy and time becomes the practical outworking of our philosophy rather than something we have to agonize over.

The thing about a philosophy of life is that it will be different for each of us. There should be core priorities that don’t shift (if you are a pastor and married with kids I would be surprised if your top four priorities were different from mine) but how we work those out will vary. You probably have a TV – nothing wrong with that, so long as it is consistent with a gospel grounded philosophy of life.

And the truth is that everyone does have a philosophy of life, its just that most haven’t consciously thought about it. Your actions reveal your values. For those of us who aspire to Christian leadership it won’t do to have an un-thought-through philosophy of life. We can’t do situation ethics. We need to be clear about our priorities, and then work out our philosophy. Our values need to honor Jesus and keep us spiritually and emotionally healthy.

All leaders should be philosophers!

Before I'm 40... Part 3, Determine your priorities

Some people never get much achieved simply because they never work out their priorities.

Many of us live under the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent is that thing that screams for your attention, and demands an immediate answer. The urgent is probably represented most powerfully in our culture by the phone – it rings or beeps and cannot be ignored. People will break off a conversation with a real live person, interrupt a meal, ignore their kids, just because someone else has sent them a text message, that probably isn’t important anyway. Technology magnifies the urgent – phones, email, social networking sites – all demand instant attention.

Truth is, most things that are urgent are not priorities.

There is a great scene in The West Wing (of which I am an avid fan) when the grizzled former Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, gathers the senior White House staff late at night and rebukes them for spending their whole day chasing the urgent. The President only has 365 days left in office – our priority has got to be achieving something in those remaining days that will leave a legacy. We can’t afford to lose days to the urgent. We’ve got to get clear about our priorities.

We might not be working in the White House, but we can easily lose days, months and in the end years to fighting fires and never get anything built. We have to find ways to prioritize the priorities, and this means we have to know what they are.

For me its simple. My priorities are these:
1. My God
2. My wife
3. My kids
4. My church

Everything I do needs to be done to the glory of God. That’s No. 1. After that my main priorities are to love my wife and pastor my kids, and then behind that my priority is to love and pastor the church where I serve.

Being clear about these four things makes it easier for me to prioritize the other stuff. For example, In my role as a pastor I have to be careful to prioritize time for the development of other leaders and keeping the church focused on mission. There are many other urgent things that would scream for my attention, but they have to be moved down the to-do list. They can’t dominate.

The thing is that the priorities don’t normally scream at us. They tend to stay quiet, and so can get neglected and ignored. That’s why so many pastors have no real devotional life, crappy marriages and disillusioned kids.

My experience is that when I ignore the screams of the urgent, chances are that the next day the thing that was screaming at me wasn’t so urgent after all. And then I don’t feel so guilty about focusing on the priorities.

Not a bad habit to be in.

Willow Summit

Just got the promo stuff for the next Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, happening live in Chicago in August and by video at locations around the UK in October.

Looks an amazing line-up of speakers - Bono & Tim Keller on the same platform...!?!

More Questions for Leaders

CJ Mahaney's excellent series of interviews with leaders continues. Here are the links:

Mark Altrogge
Bill Kittrell
Carlos Contreras
Mickey Connolly
David Powlinson
Jerry Bridges
Ligon Duncan
Thabiti Anyabwile
John Piper
Mark Dever
Wayne Grudem

Church Planting Books

Need something to read on church planting? Ed Stetzer has an annotated biography of nearly 50 of them here.

Before I'm 40... Part 2. Settle your family life

I was fortunate to have found and married the woman of my dreams by the time I was 23, and Grace and I have been blessed with four wonderful daughters. When I am with them I feel like the richest man alive.

Not everyone is so blessed.

Sometimes a settled family life just doesn’t seem to happen for people, but too often this is a consequence of poor decision making.

I have seen men who fail to get married not because they don’t want to, or because they have a call to celibacy, and not because they are unattractive to women, but simply because they cannot make a decision. Some men are looking for the one woman with the body of Angelina Jolie, the spirituality of Mother Theresa, and the cooking ability of Delia Smith. That woman doesn’t exist!

It is culturally unusual now to get married and have kids while in your 20’s, but it is a good thing for the young leader to do. Church leadership is a lot like being a dad and being a husband, which is why Paul’s instructions for elders are that they must be able to lead their families before they get to lead a church [1 Timothy 3:4-5]. Learning to love Grace and pastor my daughters has been essential training for me in church leadership.

(I would also add that every prospective parent should first have a dog – if you can train a well behaved dog chances are you’ll be able to raise good mannered kids too!)

Its tough going to carry significant leadership weight if at the same time your personal life is turbulent. So this is good advice for the young leader – find a woman who loves Jesus and loves you. Marry her. Love her. Make babies. Create a home which functions as a place of refuge and stability for you, because there’s going to be plenty of stress and demands coming from elsewhere. Lead your wife well, loving her like Christ loves his church. Then she will submit to you gladly, making your life with her a joy and delight. Pastor your kids before you pastor your church, so that they respect you and love the church rather than despising you and resenting the church.

Settle your family life, and get leading.

Before I'm 40...

Yesterday I linked to an article in which John Maxwell identifies ten things young leaders should do before reaching age 40. As I face the prospect of reaching that milestone in 14 months time, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts of my own on each of Maxwell’s headings. This will serve as a helpful checklist for myself over the next year, and if its of benefit to anyone else, then great!

1. Know yourself
I have blogged extensively elsewhere about the significance of personality – how we mustn’t be straitjacketed by our Myers-Briggs profile, but how it is helpful to have an understanding of our personality.

If we are to work and serve most effectively we need to understand how we work and serve best. This doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can be as simple as understanding when your energy peaks and troughs occur in a typical day and scheduling your workload accordingly. It means working more on your strengths (the things you are good at and get energy from) than your weaknesses (the things you are not good at and which drain you). It means being the person the grace of God has enabled you to be [1 Corinthians 15:10].

There seems to be significance about working yourself out before you hit 40. I see lots of guys get past 40 and sink into a quiet despair with themselves. The truth is, most of us want to be a Mark Driscoll, Rick Warren, John Maxwell, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, David Beckham [insert your icon of choice here] but that most of us never will. By definition these men are exceptional, and most of us are somewhere nearer average. We get to 40 and the reality of our averageness can hit us hard – where we are is probably about where we are going to be. Do we have the maturity to handle this or will we slip into middle-aged apathy and cynicism. Do I have the maturity to handle it?!

Young leaders need to get to know themselves early on, so they can accomplish the tasks God has given them to do and not try and accomplish someone else’s. Try and be someone else and we’ll only collapse in a disappointed heap in our 40’s. The Apostle Paul’s instructions about contentment are helpful here [Philippians 4:11-13]. Know yourself, and be content.

Advice for Young Leaders

John Maxwell identifies ten things young leaders should do before reaching age 40:

1. Know yourself
2. Settle your family life
3. Determine your priorities
4. Develop your philosophy of life
5. Get physically fit
6. Learn your trade
7. Pay the price
8. Develop solid relationships
9. Prepare for the future
10. Find purpose for your life

Click here to continue reading.

10 Questions for Leaders: Mike Gunn

Mike was the co-founder of Mars Hill Church, alongside Mark Driscoll and Lief Moi – you can read about him in Driscoll’s Confessions. He is still in the Seattle area but now leads Harambee Church (harambee means “together, pushing forward” in Swahili) which he planted as part of the Acts29 network. Mike is also International Director of Acts29. I got to meet Mike in Seattle last month when he dropped me off at the airport at the end of the conference. He was heading off to India to do so some stuff with Acts29 there, and we had an hour or so to chat in the car. On the way we stopped off at Mike’s house and he helped out a neighbor who’s cat had been run over – truly a man for every situation…!


Who is your leadership hero? Why?
I have different leaders that I have looked up to for different reasons. There are sports heroes who I have thought were great leaders. Men like Mike Singletary and Ray Lewis (Football) were warriors who led by strong example, Steve Jobs (Apple) is creative and innovative, Martin Luther King (American Civil Rights Movement) was courageous and inspirational, men like Desmond Tutu (S. African Bishop) and Nelson Mandela (1st Black President in S. Africa; Post Apartheid) have shown resolve, courage and grace in the face of persecution, Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Church), John Piper (Bethlehem Baptist Church), Tim Keller (Redeemer Presbyterian), not to mention men like Calvin, Spurgeon, Martin Luther, etc. who simply preached the gospel with conviction, clarity and passion; Nehemiah, David and Moses (Jewish Statesmen) for their integrity and conviction to carry out God’s will in the face of massive opposition and obstacles, lastly, for the many godly men and women that I see live out the gospel in obscurity, conviction and integrity throughout time; they are inspiring.

How long have you been in leadership?
For the better part of the last 30 years!

What was your first leadership role?
Outside of sports, it was when I was asked to lead a youth group when I was 22 years old, with no experience, and a believer for only 1 1/2 years. It was scary!

How long have you been in your current role?
As Lead pastor of Harambee it has been 6+ years, and as the International Director of A29, it has been 2 1/2 years.

How long has your church been established? Did you start it?
6+ Years and yes I planted Harambee. I also began the international wing of Acts 29.

What has been the growth curve of your church?
I’m not sure you would call it a curve. More like a squiggly line. We grew fairly quickly, then plateaued, then went backwards, then re-tooled, and have grown well for the past 2 years.

What has been your biggest leadership challenge?
Realizing that leadership can be lonely if you don’t reproduce yourself. It is also hard to move people toward vision that appears counter-intuitive.

What has been your greatest leadership success?
Definitely spending time discipling young men to lead, and diversifying the leadership in every way!!

How are you developing new leaders?
Mainly by discipleship, and seeing training as non-abstract. Training and discipling men toward mission (Church Planting), and not to run a program. We use our Missional Communities and DNA Groups (Discipling Triads) to help create more leadership.

How are you continuing to develop your own leadership gifts?
Books help me a lot, but being involved in a network as talented as Acts 29 has been invaluable to me, and my continued growth. We simply keep pushing one another. There are a lot of good men that love God and desire to do His kingdom work. I find that to be the most effective way of staying fresh and on target.