Bill Hybels -- Session 1 -- “5 Critical Questions for Leaders”

• When a leader gets better, everyone wins.
• QUESTION 1: What is your current leadership challenge level? Are you under-challenged? appropriately challenged? dangerously over-challenged?
• Where do you do your absolutely best work as a leader on this spectrum?
• Leadership is like a muscle. You have to stress it to grow it.
• First Application
• If you’re under-challenged, step it up. If you don’t challenge yourself enough, you’re in danger of atrophy.
• If you’re dangerously over-challenged, you’re in danger of a melt down. You need to find a way to delegate and scale back. You set a bad example for those you lead if you live in this area.
• When you are stressed, you get a lift. When you stay stressed, you’ll flatten out. If you stay in this level, you’ll crash and bottom out in the cellar.
• Second Application
• How do we get a handle on who is being overworked in an organization?
• What do under-challenged people in a department do? They leave.
• Third Application
• Do you think it possible for organizations to be under-challenged, appropriately challenged, or dangerously over-challenged?
• QUESTION 2: What is your plan on dealing with challenging people in your organization?
• If there was a 50% revenue drop, who would you get rid of?
• Line Exercise: Put all your people in order from the ones you would most hate to lose.
• Are the people at the end of the line, off-mission? under-performing? Am I just avoiding tough conversations because we are fully funded?
• Willow’s mission is totally dependent on the people we can attract and develop.
• Our future is also tied to dealing with people who are no longer fantastic.
• How much time are you going to give Fantastic Fred to spread his radioactive poison? I get answers from minutes to years. At Willow, this is 30 days.
• Your staff needs to know how long people can have a bad attitude.
• How do you handle under-performers? Or as the Bible says, no worthy their hire?
• Under-performers need our attention just as soon as it is identified. At Willow, this is 3 months.
• The single toughest challenging people issue I’ve had to deal with is when the growth of an organization requires somebody with a greater capacity to fill that role.
• Takeaway #1: If you don’t deal with challenging people in your organization, you discourage and de-motivate your best people. Fantastic people do not want to be dragged down by whiners and complainers.
• Takeaway #2: Challenging people are not happy people.
• QUESTION 3: Are you naming, facing and resolving the problems in your organization?
• Example: The problem of the feeding of the widows in Acts 6
• Nothing rocks forever. Everything has a season.
• Life-cycle of an idea: Accelerating, Booming, Decelerating, Tanking
• By identifying, we can solve these problems.
• QUESTION 4: When was the last time, you re-examined the core of what your organization is all about?
• Can you put the vision and mission of your organization on the front of a t-shirt?
• We all get fuzzy on what we do over time.
• Exercise: In five words, explain the central message of your product or service. In five words, what best describes the good news of Jesus Christ?
• Hybels answer for himself: Love, Evil, Rescue, Choice, Restoration
• God loved you the moment you started sucking air.
• When you’re clear about the core, there is no end to what God can do.
• QUESTION 5: Have you had your leadership bell rung lately? Has any leadership book or talk or crisis rocked your world lately?
• Most of us are hard-headed leadership types; we need our bells rung occasionally.
• If you’re sick enough of being stuck, you’d get on the solution-side of this problem and you’d take action.
• Quit making excuses and start making bold, new solutions.
• There is too much at stake in this world for leaders to walk around with a defeated mindset.
• Why couldn’t the next five years be your best five years?
• How you finish is how you will be remembered.

Upcoming One Life West Training Dates

June 26 -- One Life West will join the One Life East group

July 6 -- Training at Lighthouse @ 6 PM. Food served at 5:30.

July 17 -- Training at Lighthouse @ 4:30 PM. Food served following.

August 3 -- Training at Lighthouse @ 6 PM. Food served at 5:30.

Sunday Set List

This past Sunday's set list:

Friend of God by Phillips, Craig & Dean

Glorious Day by Casting Crowns

God with Us by Mercy Me

Give Me Jesus by Jeremy Camp

A Living Prayer by Alison Krauss

Sunday Set List

The set list from this past Sunday's worship service at Discovery:

Prelude: I Will Survive by Cake
Break Free by Hillsong United
My Soul Longs for You by Misty Edwards
Desert Song by Hillsong United
How He Loves by John Mark McMillan

Why I Didn't Preach Last Weekend

I didn't preach at DIscovery Church last weekend. I was at the theater (and no, I wasn't just skipping to watch a movie) but others led in worship and teaching. I've been asked a few times why and here's the reason:

Reason #1: We have talented teachers who need to be given the opportunity to grow and use their gifts.
At Discovery, we've been blessed with some incredibly talented teachers. Yesterday, one of those talented individuals, Janet Oberholtzer, got the opportunity to share about the purpose of and her passion for ministry to college-students. Each time she has preached, she has done a good job...and she's grown in that gifting. Later this summer, you'll have the opportunity to learn from Matt Breivogel, another young, gifted teacher in our midst. I look forward to teaching more at Discovery (and One Life) in the days ahead. However, some times it is good for me and for the body of Christ for others to have the opportunity to share what God is teaching them.

Reason #2: I was serving in KIDS ministry.
Our KIDS ministry rocks! The team does a great job each week in preparing quality lessons that teach and grow our kids. And our KIDS ministry is growing. Sunday, I got the opportunity to pour myself into the life of the kids for one morning. They got to know that their pastor loves them, cares about them, can be goofy, and wants them to love Jesus. All very important lessons in my book. Another exciting part of leading in our KIDS ministry was the chance to teach my incredible 7 year old. Dads, it is so cool to get to lead and love your kids and set great examples for other kids at church.

How to Think Missionally

The following post has been ripped almost word-for-word from the One Life playbook in preparation for the launch of One Life West. Thankful for the hard work and great teaching of Bret Nicholson.

What would you do if God spoke to you this weekend and told you to move to Yemen by this time next year? What steps would you take? What would you do once you arrived? When this question was asked in a recent training session, the lists were formed quickly.

Prior to leaving, many of us would study the culture. Yemen is really different than Evansville. We would study the language. We would learn how to connect with the Yemenis. We would pray. We would begin to arrange our financial situation to prepare for this new reality. The next 12 months would be filled with excitement and anticipation.

Once we arrived, we would begin to identify the

needs in the area. We would look for quick wins that would give some credibility to the more important messages and work that we would be sharing. We would look for individuals to partner with. We would begin to engage the Yemeni population in their cultural water

ing holes.

No matter where a missionary would go, they would go through a similar process. This process defines what it means to think missionally. Missional thinking approaches the environment with a mindset that God has placed you there to make a difference.

Here's the catch: God might not be calling to Yemen. He might not call you to Afghanistan, China, or Egypt. However, if he has not called you to someplace else, it means He has called you to where you are today. How can you begin to think missionally about how you reach your neighbors, your co-workers, and others that God has put within your sphere of influence.

Side note: David Platt noted this morning that North Yemen has 8 million people and only 20-30 are Christians. Maybe God is calling you to Yemen.