Leadership Letter #4

March 2007

Last week I spent a very stimulating week at the YWAM North American Council Meetings at the Leadership Learning Center in Richmond, Virginia. These meetings had an unexpected spin to them, since Jim Stier, the YWAM Americas Field Director, was present to facilitate some major dialoging regarding the values we aspire to as a sodality in North America. The bulk of this letter will focus on the process we went through and a very insightful early morning trip to the Airport.

What Does a YWAM Base Leader Need to Do?

Early Sunday morning Dmitri from the Richmond base picked us up to shuttle the “early-birds” to the airport. During the course of our ride Dmitri (originally from Belarus) asked me for the 3 most important things a YWAM base leader needs to know to survive some of the rigors of YWAM community leading. I surprised myself with three clearly articulated insights and I have since added a fourth.

The first thing I said is that a leader needs to take care of self. This is not permission to be selfish, rather it is a clear-headed exhortation to love self enough to take care of self (meaning one’s own person and family). Such a love willingly serves, but does not lose self in the process. I realize that might sound contrary to “Deny yourself, and take up your cross to follow Christ”, but I can assure you that I do not advise self-care in any sort of self-negating or self-promoting way. Years ago in the zeal of youth we would often chide one another with the motto, ”It is so much better to burn-out for Jesus, than it is to rust out”. Now having witnessed first-hand the devastation of burn-out among friends and peers, I can no longer glibly endorse burning-out for any cause particularly Jesus. There is too much preventable human devastation that masquerades as sacrificial living through ill conceived reactionary living strategies. Laying one’s life down for Jesus, does not mean to reject life, rather embrace it to the full in Christ. Jesus is the master Life-giver, not the life-extractor. There is no point in sacrificing health or family relationships in a mistaken belief that this pleases the Lord. Contemplate the theology of our choices and follow through with how our ideas have consequences both to the Lord we serve as our primary loyalty, but also to the community in which we witness to God’s innate goodness.

What I mean about taking care of self is all the daily common sense activities that rounds us out as human being. The physical areas include getting enough sleep, exercising as needed, taking in fresh air, proper nutrition, and meaningful work. Intellectually, it means life-long learning, conversations that matter, and multi-discipline studies. Spiritually, it involves practicing the disciplines of personal growth and change, as well as growing in healthy relationships with others. The major point of this is that to take care of self, one can than yield a whole self to Jesus and whole-heartedly serve. This is a primary pre-condition for others to also know they are loved and cared for sacramentally by your attention, hence self-care, soul-care, member-care, and obedience to the Great Commands and Commission are all linked and inter-connected.

The second recommendation is that leaders need to understand finances both personal and corporate. This is an area that took me a long time to understand. I suppose part of this is that our lifestyle has always been simple and we have not had much in the way of finances, especially early on in our journey. The best recommendations I can make for this is to understand the spirituality of money, practice budgeting, and understand the wisdom of tithing and savings, and practicing stewardship of God’s creation. Earl Pitt’s book co-authored with Craig Hill offers many hard-won insights that are a good foundation for both personal and corporate financial wisdom. Wealth, Riches & Money- God’s Biblical Principles of Finance.

Thirdly are the disciplines of spirituality that move a team of people together in the same direction. This recommendation for leaders is much more of an art than it is a science. Therefore, it has to be more experimental and perhaps mysterious, since it is not always clear what combination of spiritual activities will work in any given circumstance. It is always easier to do this at the founding stage of ministry development than it is at the maintenance stage. Prayer, worship, common projects, retreats, conferences, and outreaches can all contribute to serendipities of Grace leading a team of people into their destiny.

Fourthly, define ministry by outcomes, not projects or events. This is an important afterthought and a corollary to the last point. Defining by outcomes are broad statements that can be answered in many creative ways. For example the Great Commission statements by Jesus before his ascension are all outcome based commands. Jesus does not give detailed instructions, rather he says things like “make disciples”. He does not say how to do this, instead the multi-form creativity of His followers linked to an infinitely creative God suggest a multiplicity of ways to make disciples. For YWAMers defining ministry by projects like “start a base”, “staff a DTS”, or “plant a church” immediately puts us into a duplicate-our- own-experience mode, which limits our creativity to our experience. Broader outcomes are helpful in that they open up the creativity circuitry in our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit. So here is some more outcome-based suggestions for the above 3 examples: “create a way to live, work, worship to influence the community in which we are called”; “learn how to help people grow and change”; and “create a means for new disciples to continue to grow in their new found faith”. This more outside-the-box thinking allows for innovation to happen when and where it is most needed at the grassroots of our lives committed to Jesus. It also means that a “base” could look differently from place to place. Maybe discipleship is not just confined to the DTS model. Perhaps there are many more possibilities in helping new disciples grow than to start up a meeting on Sunday morning.

A “Briefing” on a Six-Day Process

I used the word “briefing” in the title to highlight the challenge of reporting adequately on a six day dialogue and interactive time interspersed with the North American Council meeting. How could such a report be called a briefing? It will only take you a few minutes to read what we did over 6 days. Definitely, the time was full and like most YWAM events phenomenological-a fancy word for saying that the full meaning and significance was in the participation of all that were involved in dialogue. Ontario had a fitness program called “particip-action” which would be a good word to describe this event. Those who participate with action found it quite meaningful. Jim Stier in his role as the Americas Field Director and Eduardo Angelo, a Brazilian YWAMer with a side business working with businesses to create mission statements, were the facilitators.

The conversation began with a candid recognition by Jim that YWAM was no longer predominately youth and the youth that are coming into the mission are entering with a postmodern mindset, values, and post-Christian experience. Eduardo picked up on this point by using a powerpoint presentation to illustrate how advertisers gear their ads to the anxieties of current culture. The message may be subtle or overt, but what advertisers say is the “we understand you, therefore buy our product, because we are contemporary and relate to you.” These advertisers spend a lot of money to find out the current anxieties (which change every 4.9 years) and then position their business with 4 core values to identify with their potential customers. So we embarked on a process to see what our core values are as YWAM Canada and USA. (We were not talking about the YWAM values in this setting-rather the values we project as an organization in Canada). At the Canada Table there was Anderson and Jay from Toronto, Scott from Alaska, and Randy and myself from BC. To find out values Eduardo gave us 2 sheets with icons and words to describe the current buzz words that resonated with people in general (not necessarily geared to a Christian audience).

Our first assignment was to find 4 words that best describes our current reality as YWAM Canada. Here is our initial sort:

Practical Cross-Cultural Innovation Team Spirit

You can imagine that there was much discussion over these words and many others that could have been chosen, but by the end of the session we felt these words describe us today across the nation as YWAM Canada.

Our next assignment was to look to the future and craft a mission statement that reflects who we are as YWAM Canada. Here it is with much wordsmithing already finished-and likely more to come in the future:

YWAM Canada-Incarnating Christ in our place of call, multiplying transformation in our communities.

The next assignment was to select 3 strategies that best captures how we are presently living out the mission as a sodality in Canada. For this exercise we departed from the general buzz in the room by asking the question of ourselves. “What stories do we find ourselves as Canadian in?” I suppose this might be construed as more of a postmodern response, but we thought that there were many stories involving

Social Justice (Multiple types)

Our Purpose and Identity as a Mission/Sodality

Coloring outside the lines (Innovation in ministry)

The above is a report on 3 days of processing interspersed with feed back, questions, short lectures, prayer, etc.

The last 2 days were focused on producing 2 lists of values that actually correspond to the first values list above. However these values were distinguished by what values we would internally use to identify ourselves (an in-house set) and what we would use to communicate our values via media to others.

First the Internal set- the words in italics are ones that are similar, but we do not necessarily think we finished these values as a final sense that we had really captured the sense of all of us across the country. (We need more voices at the table).

Truthfull Engaged Diversity Pioneering Cohesive
(Incarnational) (Holistic/Collaberative)

Truthfully Engaged Diversity Pioneering Cohesive (Incarnational) (Holistic, Collaborative)

The last set of values are the ones we would use in the media:

Innovative Creative Authentic Dynamic

I end this report with an awareness that words on the paper are not going to do justice to the interaction we had at the Richmond meetings. . What we need now is for us to continue this process of dialogue and as a nation begin to face the future with faith, hope, and love trusting the Lord will lead us. Please think, pray, and plan for more interaction with this initial step as we meet together at the NALC in Albuquerque, the WCLT in Winnipeg, and the CLT in June.

As a Lenten devotion this year I have been using Frederica Matthews-Green’s book “First Fruits of Prayer”. After battering my soul with petitions of prayer I did have a first-fruits experience with the gift of tears yesterday. The ancients thought all change was well-watered with tears. O, Lord continue to have mercy upon me.