You learn a lot when you work at something for 13 years, and inevitably the most impactful lessons are ones learned from things that went wrong or should have been done differently.
As I geared up for Threshingfloor’s re-launch as a church last week I spent some time thinking over the highs and lows that have come in the time that I’ve been doing young adult ministry. I couldn’t help asking myself the question of what I would do differently if I could go back and start fresh.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t regret any of the experiences that we’ve had over the years, but there are certainly things we could have done better. Hopefully they’ll help you (and me) going forward.
Here are five things I would do differently if I could go back and start over:
Five things I would do differently
1. Start every community with a crystal clear mission
With Threshingfloor’s missional model our focus is primarily on launching communities of 8-30 people who are aimed at being on mission to a specific region, cause, or people group.
Over the years we’ve seen some communities thrive and others struggle. Across the board the ones that have succeeded and grown have had crystal clear missions in place before the community officially launched. The point leaders had a clear mission they wanted to pursue and invited others to join them in that mission.
Communities that have launched simply because their parent community was getting “too big” or other non-mission reasons inevitably struggle to identify a clear mission after they’ve launched. When the mission isn’t clear at the outset, there tends to be as many great mission ideas as there are people in the community, but no specificity.
2. Look for leaders who don’t look like leaders
Some people just seem like natural Christian leaders. They’re outgoing, draw people to themselves without trying, and love Jesus. They’re great people, and often excellent disciple-makers. However, they’re often (but not always) not great leaders.
When you’re naturally gifted it’s incredibly easy to draw too much on yourself and your own strength rather than resting in God. When a ministry is led by someone who is clearly naturally gifted as a leader people can write it of as a skill thing rather than a God thing.
Jesus chose disciples who didn’t look like leaders. Paul talks in 1 Corinthians about leading in such a way that doesn’t drain the cross of its power. If I could go back and start over in ministry I would be far more intentional about looking for faithful, simple followers of Jesus who are humbly listening to God and doing what he says. When people like that – people no one would expect – become leaders it’s obvious that God is the one working.
3. Push myself more in personal evangelism
I’m naturally outgoing, but have always had a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to street evangelism thanks to the much-maligned doom and gloom street preachers. In my two years at MSUM there was a group of 3 people who would show up every Spring and walk around campus with signs about everyone going to hell, God being angry at sinners, and the like, attempting to force tracts on people and yelling Bible verses. They tried to convert me once, while I was sitting on the campus lawn reading my Bible.
Despite that bad taste, there’s power in going out on the streets, praying for people, and sharing the Gospel as appropriate. That power might just be the power of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, but God works through it nonetheless. If I could go back and restart my leadership, I would take more intentional steps to go out and evangelize and pray.
4. Pursue spiritual gifts more passionately
Paul commands the Corinthian church (and, by extension, all believers) to eagerly desire and pursue spiritual gifts. If I could go back and start fresh in ministry I’d go more passionately after all of the gifts listed in the New Testament. I’m increasingly convinced that missional living and authentic Kingdom communities are not possible without God’s people walking in the power of the Spirit and love.
5. Be more aggressive about dealing with my own sin and shortcomings
In the last year I’ve intentionally invested in counseling, weekend intensives, centering prayer practices, and other things that have opened me up to realizations about myself that I could have discovered years ago if I’d taken those steps then rather than pridefully thinking I could deal with my issues with just God and I.
God has me where he wants, and I believe he’s sovereign even in our sin and failures. However, I also believe that there’s biblical precedent for a leader’s shortcomings limiting the impact of those who follow them.
If I could step back in time 10 years or so, I would immediately dive into getting help outside myself for my personal issues, even if they didn’t seem like a big deal in the moment. As Craig Groeschel once tweeted, when a leader gets better, everyone gets better.
I look back over that list and I see five huge opportunities for my future. As I wrote a couple days ago, if we’re viewing things from God’s perspective there’s only delight when we discover we have a problem. If those are things that I would like to go back and change, then that change is going to start now so that ten years from now I can look back and write a totally different list of things I can learn from.
How about you? If you could jump back ten years and do your life or leadership over again, what five things would you do differently?
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