Inspiring and Challenging Dreamers

When you talk about spiritual fathers a lot of people go straight to the Scripture where it says “call no man father”.  But like a lot of Christians people do not read the Scripture in context!

Who was speaking and said “call no man father”?  It was Jesus.

Who was he speaking to?  His 12 disciples who had spent 3 years with him.

There comes a point in your Christian life where you don’t have a spiritual father, where you don’t fit into the denominational system, where you are pioneering something new and amazing.  There are some people who are experienced apostles, leaders and church planters.

People like that Jesus speaks to and says “Call no man father!”  It was a sad day in my life when Dave Duell took a trip to heaven and decided not to come back.  He was one of my three spiritual fathers, a man who shaped me and loved me and cared for me.  He was there for me in my darkest hour.  When other ministers believed lies about me, he always believed the best for me and in me.  He was truly a spiritual father.  He came to our church whenever he could, and wanted nothing in return other than to love us.

Eventually, my other two spiritual fathers will take the same trip, and I hope you understand when I say hopefully before me.  At that time, I won’t be looking for new spiritual fathers, I will fully be one.  I will call no man father!

But until that day, I will call some people father.  The scholars estimate Timothy was the senior pastor of a church of 100000 people.  Yet, he had Paul as his spiritual father and knew Paul as his father in the faith.  If that’s good enough for Timmy, it’s good enough for me!

I have 10000 instructors, but few fathers.  But I am so glad I have those fathers, they have made me a better better person.  And I wouldn’t give up on those fathers because a few independent, rebellious, selfish, uncorrectable people make up a false doctrine based on a verse out of context to avoid becoming part of something bigger than themselves.

“For though ye have 10000 instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4.15)

One of the most precious gifts God can bring into your life is a father in the faith, a spiritual faith.  These gifts are very precious because they are so rare.  There are so many teachers in the body of Christ, you can watch them all day on Christian TV, log in over the internet and listen to teachers all day long.

Paul when addressing the Corinthians is trying to let them realize this: many, many people will make an input into your life.  But they are not your fathers.

I want to spend some time talking about spiritual fathers on this blog because many Christians come across as spiritual orphans, no confidence in who they are or what they are called to do.  It’s because they are fatherless.

• A teacher cares about giving a good lesson
• A father cares about your total well-being

Because of this simple difference you will find there are not many fathers.  Many preachers are far more concerned about what you think of their message than raising you up and loving you.

And the truth is most Christians are still carnal, ungrateful, selfish – and they need a spiritual father to lift them higher in their difficult walk in life.

I can find a thousand prophets, a thousand evangelists and a thousand pastors.  But I have found few true fathers in my life.  Truly there can be 10000 instructors, but only a few fathers.  The true truth of a father is what he brings out in other people.  The proof of a good father is his children.

It takes love, commitment and time to raise children.  And in the end the only voice that will affirm you as a good father is the voice of your children.

If you look at Elijah, he was a father.  He fathered Elisha.  Both Elijah and Elisha were prophets, only Elijah was a father.  Elisha had a spiritual son, Gehazi, and he cursed him for his issues with money.  A true father doesn’t curse their son, especially his only son.  The fathering spirit reaches into others and makes them like you.  It brings a love that brings ignorant people into wisdom, lost people into family and hurting people into wholeness.

It takes love to raise a child and patience.  I have 4 children, and children don’t understand their parents.  They have a wrong perception of you until they mature.  You have to love them anyway.  You have to endure looking bad to do what is right to mature your children.  It’s the same spiritually – you have to endure looking bad to do what is right to mature your children.

I thank God for the many teachers he has brought into my life, and the lessons they have taught me, and the points of doctrine they have helped me with.  But I thank God more for the few fathers I have had who have invested love and patience with me when I did not deserve it and did not even know I needed it.

I have noticed that efficient and idealistic people, perfectionists, do not make good fathers.  They don’t have grace.  They insist on 100%, and people can’t give it all the time.  Especially the immature.

Many people know I am a great teacher.  Only some know I am a great father.  May you find a father or two in this life.  May you love and nurture and become a spiritual father to people yourself!

 

Paul told Timothy that when he appointed elders into the church not to appoint novices (1 Tim. 3.6).  Some people are charismatic, charming, efficient, kind and helpful.  You should be keen to appoint people who can do the job and who know what to do and how to do it well.

But you must not appoint a novice.  Don’t appoint someone who is immature.  It can be difficult to see immaturity – a little child seems perfectly mature until he doesn’t get his own way.  A person may seem like a good church leader until they don’t get their own way.

Here are 5 sure signs that someone is immature:

1. They Don’t Know the Bible!
   1. Mature Christian leaders know the Bible.  They base their theology and doctrine and practice on the Bible, not their opinion or their ideas.  If you are going to appoint someone as an elder or leader in the church, don’t be afraid to ask them “where does the Bible talk about the resurrection of Jesus?”, please quote Romans 6.23, 2 Cor. 5.17 to me.  People should know the basic Scriptures about our faith and the foundation of our faith.
   2. When Jesus fought the devil in the desert, Jesus knew the devil.
2. They Have No Interest in Sermons and Christian Material
   1. Immature Christians do not listen to sermons and do not read Christian books.  Show me a Christian who listens to CDs of sermons and reads Christian books – that is someone who is going to be mature.
3. They Don’t Worship!
   1. They mumble and stumble around during the worship, they don’t know God, and they don’t want to!  The truth is they never worship on their own!
4. They are Utterly Inconsistent in their Worship
   1. They struggle to attend church, they turn up late week after week – it’s like church is a chore for them.  A man who loves a woman doesn’t make visiting her a chore.  If you love the Lord and are mature, then church is not a chore.
   2. Some people just fade away from church, they are not mature people.
5. They Are After a Title, Not a Job
   1. Immature people want the titles: they want you to call them pastor, they want to be the elder.  It’s amazing how many people who are hardly at church who want to be an elder!  It’s tragic how many people want you to call them “pastor” but don’t want to pastor anyone.
   2. In the Tree, we don’t give out titles, we give our job descriptions.  It soon separates the mature from the immature!

In Joel 2.7 one of the things we find out about the great army approaching is that “they shall not break ranks”.

A lot of people in leadership teams, a lot of people in churches especially, do not understand the principle of ranking.  It upsets them because they think that life should be equitable and everything should be shared out.

The fact is that on an ontological level we are all ranked the same.  We are all human beings with equal worth and equal rights.  But on a teleological level – how we function – we are not all the same, we have different functions which leads to different rewards and different opportunities.

This concept can be hard to grasp, so let me give you a couple of examples.   You know for example that Jesus is fully God (John 1.1-3).  He is exactly God.  He is on an ontological level the same as God. Fully God, not worth less or with less rights than God. But Jesus also said “The Father is greater than I”. So what does that mean? It means on a functional level Jesus saw that the Father was the one with the rank. Jesus would not break rank, he kept rank. Although he was fully God, he only ever did what he saw the Father do and only said what the Father said.  Ontologically the same, functionally different.

My sons and my daughter are worth as much as me, they are ontologically the same. But I tell them when to go to bed, they don’t tell me when to go to bed. Functionally we are different.

It is the same in any organization, and the church cannot be the exception.  This is principle of God hard-wired into the universe!  Politicians have tried to make everyone the same and it never works!

If you are a leader you must realize you have a place – you have a rank and you should stay in that rank.

Your rank is how you operate. If people are allowed to break rank, then your organization will turn to chaos. Ranking is positive as it shows you there is potential within an organization.

I know many men who have a far greater ministry than I do.  Some of my closest friends have done far more in ministry than I have.  I get really excited when they tell me what the Lord is doing with them – it encourages me to dream big, but I will tell you the truth: I always respect those who are ahead of me.

Now where you are right now is not your rank for life, but you have to learn to function at the rank you are at.  If you are a pastor, be a pastor and be a good and happy pastor.  If you are an elder, be a faithful and good elder. Enjoy being an elder.  If you are a Bible College student, enjoy it and learn everything you can, you will be coming out of that bubble soon. If you are the assistant pastor, be the best assistant pastor in the world – when you finally get the big chair, then you will be glad of every day you were not in it, I can promise you!

If you want more rank, you have to be faithful where you are. 

But be aware, the more promotion the more persecution.  You will never know the implications and the role of a higher rank until you enter into it. If someone is paying your salary, you do not know what they are doing to believe God for that money to come in. Maybe you should be wise enough not to criticise them.

One of the worst things you can do in terms of your destiny is to try and promote yourself before the Lord is going to promote you.  

A lot of people are guilty of self-promotion, but they are not faithful, not supportive, not encouragers.  They want more honour but do not know how to show honour.  I have been in the ministry for many years now, and been serving the Lord for over twenty years, and I have seen so many flash-in-the-pan ministries come up and fall down because they don’t understand simple truths of Scripture.  This truth will protect you a great deal.

 

My son came home from school this week disappointed.  It’s that time of year where students his age find out if they have been accepted into the university of their choice.  My son was not sad because he was rejected, but he was sad because a friend of his didn’t get any of their choices.

It’s difficult to rejoice when your friend is suffering a bit.  It’s difficult to rejoice when 5 of you are off to the university of your choice, but your friend is stuck.

If you are a leader you need to understand and embrace this principle: we all win, or nobody really wins.  If you have enough money, you want your friends to have enough.  If your marriage is working, you want your friend’s marriage to work too.

Jacob had twelve sons but when one son was lost, he had no joy.  If you are a leader, you need to be the one who goes after the lost sheep, who sweeps the house to find the lost coin and who waits hopefully for the lost son.

We serve a God who would not start a banquet until all the places were full (Luke 14.21-23).

Learn to be the person who looks out for people.  Who gathers the lost.  Who ensures we all make it together.

It’s not always possible.  Some lost sons never come to their senses, some people will never come to the banquet, some people will never take their place at the table.  But as much as it is in your power, gather the people and make sure you win together.

The start of a new series in this leadership blog on the power of a team.  Today, I want to talk about something dear to my heart and that is about raising up people as you move forward, rather than stepping on people to move forward.

If you are a leader you will move forward and rise up.  That’s part of the nature of a leader.  But if you go alone, it is a lonely place.  If you take others with you, can you share the fruits of success, and that is far, far better.

Having no-one to share your joy with is not a good place to be!  Joy shared is double joy!  When you can speak freely about how God has blessed you because the people around you are also blessed, that is better.  People who can relate to you is something so precious.

Also, being the top leader is a position of vulnerability.  If someone wants a piece of your thing (and sadly there are always unscrupulous people out there), they will attack and malign you.  “Oh he has built something great, but he has his flaws” is the attitude of Absalom that still infects many selfishly ambitious Christians today!

If you are the only pastor with a nice house, people will see.  If all the pastors have nice houses that is better.  If you are the only pastor who travels, that is the way it is, but if the others travel too, then that is better.  Sometimes you should stay at home, and let the other pastors travel.

Finally if you are the only one at the top, people will try and bring you down.  Those crazy people I mentioned earlier – they want you to fall to their level of self-frustration.  But if you are all at the top, they can only pull you to the side!

This is what Jesus was like – when He got a wedding invite, He brought the disciples.  He ate with his disciples.  He even invited a thief to join Him in paradise when He was dying.

If you are a leader, when was the last time you invited someone somewhere nice?

 

10.  Buy a hamper.  Give everyone a ticket as they come in.  Hold a raffle in the middle of the service.

9.  Play a really old well known hymn.  Even use the original tune.  Belt it out!

8.  Receive the offering to the tune of Yakkety Sax.

7.  Give the people bingo cards with very spiritual words on: righteousness, faith, holy, etc.  Play bingo during the sermon.

6.  Preach with a huge bag of wine gums in your hand.  Hand them out to everyone in the front row as you preach.

5.  Use props to make your sermon more accessible to the visual minded people in your church (over a third of people find it much easier to process and retain information associated with an image)

4.  Start a conga line during Shine, Jesus, Shine.

3.  Make all your ushers wear purple.  When asked why tell them that only people wearing purple will be raptured.

2. Have a good time yourself.  If you look forward to it and enjoy it, that is contagious.

And finally…

1.  Tell someone you are genuinely glad they came.

The grace people in the UK (indeed many people in the UK) are still too small minded, looking at maintaining house groups and sustaining groups of 20 people.  I am not against small groups – we all started small, and I still regularly preach to crowds of people under 10 as we are starting new churches and new ministries.  But you must grow.  We all must grow.  We have to grow.

“It’s not about numbers” is the cry of the person who is mediocre, doesn’t dream and doesn’t think big.  It is about numbers, because each number is a person who is being impacted and changed by the message of the complete work.

To inspire you to believe for growth this year, here are 10 reasons your church should go:

1. The Harvest Field is the WHOLE WORLD – EVERY NATION!
   1. Jesus told us to go into ALL THE WORLD.
   2. If your church isn’t in ALL THE WORLD, there is space to grow.  There are people to reach.
   3. If Jesus is dreaming of reaching the world, why would you dream for something less?
2. There are not enough labourers
   1. There are a lot of talkers, a lot of people who have been to Bible College, a lot of people who have played a guitar, a lot of people who can preach a message on grace.  There are not a lot of labourers.
   2. The harvest is plenteous, but the labourers are few!
   3. There are plenty of people to get to your church.  PLENTY!
3. Most pastors are thinking too small
   1. Your end goal is not being able to get a full time salary.  That is far too small a goal.  Your end goal is not being able to get enough money from ministry to get a Bentley!  That is far too small a goal.  Your end goal is not to fill whatever hall you are in – that is too small a goal.
4. The devil wants your church to stay small
   1. The less people in your church, the more people he can deceive and manipulate.
   2. Stop siding with the devil.  Small is not beautiful, it is letting the devil run wild in your area.
5. A bigger church creates vision and expectation
   1. It’s amazing when a lot of people get together to worship.  It creates an atmosphere of expectation.  It creates excitement.  That changes lives.
6. A bigger church can do more evangelism!
   1. You can do more – you can have more meetings, more outreach, more connections.   It’s like a snowball the more you outreach, the more you can outreach!
7. A bigger church has more money!
   1. Money is important – if a church has a godly pastor, then more money is a great thing.  Obviously, if the church has a greedy pastor, more money in the church means more for him!
   2. Money in the hand of godly pastors is used to change the world.  It’s used to feed the hungry, preach the gospel, change lives, bring godly teachers who bring life to people
8. A bigger church means more helpers
   1. Have you noticed only some people in your church actually help out?  It’s true for any church, don’t get upset with it.  But as you grow, the percentage of labourers might not change, but the number will grow!  The more labourers the more you can do.
9. A bigger church can be more specialized
   1. You can run meetings for specialized reasons that only some people go to.  You can run a single’s ministry, a ministry to the over 60s, a minister to the poor, a ministry that is for the teens.  Any ministry that only ministers to a specialized group needs a large church, that’s just maths.
10. A bigger church means more connections
    1. That means someone in your church needs a job, there is a much higher chance that someone in the church needs an employee.
    2. It means that people can meet in your church and fall in love and get married in the church.
    3. It means that you can build good friendships with people who are like you.
    4. It means there are more people coming by who have ministries and that means you can plant more churches and start more ministries.

You need to grow this year.  Let’s do this thing!

This Sunday has been awesome.  Great carol service in Dagenham, someone got saved and people got healed, and I know I haven’t heard all the testimonies yet.  It was a really awesome service, and loads of people have benefited from the message.

Then  a swift drive to Guildford to enjoy the Christmas party of our first daughter church, just wonderful to watch what is happening there.

I am going off line until Christmas.  I am going to enjoy my family and have a great time with them.  No blogging or posting until after next Sunday.  I will email the church and let them know what is happening next week, but that is all.

The truth is, and I am sharing this to help leaders, that I am currently with a major sleep deficit and I need rest.  My legs are sore from constantly working out (I will lose the rest of my weight) and my mind is sore from constantly dreaming big.  So it’s time to rest.  Rest is vitally important no matter what you are or what you are doing.  If God rested from creating the universe, then it is important you rest from activity too.  Rest from strife, from conflict.  Get outside and walk in the forest.  Spend time with the precious people who enjoy your company.

I will return next week, rested and on fire.  Get ready!

Until then, enjoy Christmas!

I’ve deliberately written this post to senior and lead pastors of churches, because one of the things that really messes up church growth is promoting the wrong people.  It’s also true in businesses as well – promoting the wrong people will destroy your business, and promoting the right people will propel it forward.  So if you are a business leader, you can convert these principles.  But I have deliberately penned it for pastors today.

One of the key things you need to do as the church grows is delegate your tasks and promote leaders – generally we call the key assistants “assistant pastors”.  You plant a church you need to eventually appoint a regional, branch or campus pastor.  Your church grows you need assistant pastors in the mother church.

Now if you delegate you empower people, and that’s awesome and that’s God’s will, but if they misuse their empowerment that will affect your church.  If you are a senior leader, use this check-list to avoid promoting the wrong people.  If you are a campus pastor or assistant pastor, use this list to check your own heart.

• Don’t promote people who constantly say “I told you so”.  You are the leader, you are taking risks – that’s part of leadership.  Some of the things you do will go wrong.  But you don’t need a reverse-cheerleader telling you things have gone wrong.  Anyone who is happy that things have gone wrong is a bad assistant.  Replace!
• Don’t promote the people who don’t respect your wisdom.  The people who are thinking “I would be a better head if I only had the chance” are not remembering that you built the building and you pay their salary with what you built.  They do not want to help you, they want to help themselves.
• Be very wary of people who are unwilling to look subordinate.  They want to look like you.  If you have a new car, they want one.  If you go and preach overseas, they want to.  They don’t understand that there is a difference.  He doesn’t like being an assistant, because he doesn’t really honour the lead pastor!
• Be careful of people who cannot wait to take your place.  They eager to preach, they want you to travel so they can take your office for the week and make decisions it’s not their business to make.
• Beware of people who see your flaws more than they see your good qualities.  Generally they will think the services are too long and you cannot preach!  He will know who you have offended and have a great catalogue of all the times you messed up.  But they have no such catalogue of your good times!
• Beware of assistants who obsess over how wonderful other ministers and churches are, but don’t have a good word to say about you!
• Beware of assistants who listen to a lot of preaching of other preachers but don’t ever listen to your preaching!  The fact they think they have nothing to learn from you is a red danger sign!
• Bad associates are the ones who always think things should be done in a different way.  They have far better ways of doing admin, of preaching, of handling people and pastoring people.
• Look out for the associates and assistants in your network who people go to with their complaints.  Complaint magnets will lead to trouble.  I would never let people come to me with complaints about my staff, so I don’t expect they let people come to them with complaints about me.
• Never promote the people who don’t clap, laugh and say “Amen!” when you are preaching.  The people who look like cabbages and never take notes.  Don’t give them leadership positions!
• Never promote the people who don’t clap, laugh and lift their hands during worship.
• Never promote to leadership people who are behind the atmosphere.  If the atmosphere in the church is cheering and dancing, and they can’t break out a smile; if everyone is raising both hands and they are barely lifting one.  They are not leaders!  They are unimpressed with the Spirit of God – that is a danger sign!
• Never promote people who are not happy for you to be promoted.  If you get given money or opportunities and they think “well I do all the donkey work around here” then that is not going to help the church!
• Never promote people who disagree with you in public.  If a leader disagrees with you in public, get rid.
• Never promote people who think honouring you is indulgent.  That is what Judas felt about Jesus, and you know how that ended up.
• Never promote people who don’t know whether they should be in your church.  They are always changing their minds, they want to know if they are in God’s will, they are asking about where the church is going next all the time.  Where as other people in the church are receiving your preaching and getting their lives transformed, they are sitting there wondering whether to quit or not.