Courage...

Politicians often declare themselves to be courageous leaders.  Saying you are courageous and being courageous are two different things.

I define courage as willingness to move toward the mess.  The courageous soldier runs toward the mess of battle; the courageous parent has the conversation with their drunk, underage son or daughter; the courageous business leader rejects profit for principle; and the courageous pastor leads a church to face the messiness of reality.

Courage is not picking an insignificant issue and making it a hill on which to die; courage keeps the main thing the main thing.  Courage is not overcoming fear; courage is moving toward your fear, recognizing a mess that must be confronted.  Courage is not following the cheers of the crowd; courage in action is often greeted with silence.

Courage means speaking the last ten percent.  How often do we stop just short of the plain truth that needs to be heard for fear of hurting people’s feelings?  Yet it is in the last ten percent that truth necessary for change emerges.

Why aren’t more people courageous?  We want people to like us, to approve of us.  To be courageous is to know disapproval will come.  If you lead, you cannot make everyone happy.  Courage means you must be dedicated to the mission.  You will incur losses, or as one leader called them, casualties. In church world, casualties are people who leave your church because they cannot accommodate the change required to fix the messiness.  If you are a leader who cares about people, it hurts to lose people you invest in and have done life with. 

Many leaders fear setting up a group who will fight and oppose them.  They believe if they appease instead of lead, these people will eventually drop their opposition.  This never happens.  Never.  When Churchill was in the darkest days of World War II, he faced opposition from members of his own party.  Churchill courageously stuck to his mission: defeat Nazi Germany in the face of internal opposition. 

Leaders face five common issues that require courage.  The first is the courage to address leaders or volunteers under them who are not performing, who are no longer effective, or who were bad hires.  Many leaders hope poor performers will improve over time.  They do not.  In my years of supervising and developing dozens of leaders, poor performers never get better on their own.  Often an employee is with an organization for years and has a constituency of his or her own.  You may need to build alliances and devise a strategy to help that person find a better setting to serve, but have the courage to move toward the messiness, not away from it.

The second common issue leaders face is to have the courage to define reality.  Many businesses and churches are in denial about their reality.  As Lyle Schaller famously said, many churches are perfectly positioned in the event time reverses and it becomes 1950 again.  I knew of one church that was frustrated by their inability to grow.  When I consulted with the pastor, I pointed out the obvious: They had a worship space for 400 and parking for 250.  Their average attendance was - you guessed it – 250.  Have the courage to define reality.

A third common issue leaders face is the courage to call for change.  Healthy organizations grow and change.  I do not run the family ranch the way my stepfather did.  In the twenty years since he ran things, the world changed.  We can’t just throw fertilizer and oil on the trees.  Now, we have to be much wiser about how to apply nutrients and sprays.  Leaders must have the courage to make the compelling case of why the organization can no longer stay where it is and must relocate to where it should be.

A fourth common issue that calls for courage is admitting your mistakes.  As Craig Groeschel says, “People would rather follow a leader who is always real, than a leader that is always right.”  Nobody gets it right all the time.  Be courageous enough to quickly own your mistakes.  Admit to your leadership you made a wrong hire.  Admit an initiative failed.  Admitting failure increases trust instead of diminishing it.

A final common issue that calls for courage is to hold to your mission, values, and vision when you are pressured to modify or abandon them.  People both inside and outside your organization will want to add to or take away from your mission.  It takes courage to face the opposition and say, “No.  We have agreed this is what we are committed to; this is what we value; this is our preferred vision of the future.”  Rick Warren said, “Never surrender your church to the whiners.”  I would modify that to say, “Never surrender your mission, values, and vision to someone else’s agenda.”

Without the courage of the leader, organizations do not thrive.  Maybe that is why God repeatedly says, “Do not be afraid and do not let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in me.”  Faith feeds courage.

Pacing

We were working cows at the ranch last week.  The cows are penned, sorted, doctored, and then turned out.  I have seen this ballet of work a hundred times in my life, but it never grows old.

When we turn the cows out, one man cracks open the gate just wide enough for a cow to go through.  Another man, either or horseback or on foot, stands in the pen, and gently walks the cows toward the gate.  The cows feel the pressure of someone behind them, and they see the narrow escape route.  They run past the man, and out into the pasture.

Why not let them all out at once?  If all the cows saw the gate wide open, they would rush the gate.  What happens when 150 cows try to go through a twelve-foot gate all at once?  Damage.  I’ve seen too many cows crowd the gate and the gate man lose control.  Suddenly, all the cows are running through and there is the sickening “crack” of wood snapping.  One hundred thousand pounds of beef on the move can crack an eight-inch post in two, and demolish a three-hundred pound gate.  The pace at which you let the cows out matters.

The pace of change in an organization matters too.  Some organizations never change because the gate isn’t even open.  Sometimes, the gate is not open enough for people to see a better future on the other side of the gate.  Sometimes, there is not enough pressure to move people toward change.  If there is not a compelling reason “why,” people respond by saying, “Why change?”

If a leader is conflict adverse, they may not wish to build the case for change.  It requires extra work, extra research, and extra risk.  It may be easier to keep all the cows in the pen, but eventually, the cows will die from lack of food and water.

Some leaders want fast change.  This usually is not because of a crisis, but because of the leader’s inward sense of urgency and ambition.  They push hard, and the change happens, but a lot of damage is done in the process.  I heard one pastor described like this: “He gets things done, but he leaves behind a lot a bodies.” 

The environment of your organization is factor in pacing change.  In general, city dwellers are more receptive to change than rural dwellers.  Before attempting change in a small-town organization, you have to earn trust.  People trust people they have known for decades before they trust people they have known months.

Your church or organization itself has internal dynamics that impact change.  Older, established organizations change slower than newer, leaner organizations.  Both businesses and churches have power blocks that must be considered.

I never had a class that taught me about the pace of change.  Knowing the pace of change is more caught than taught.  The only way to pick it up is to be the man on the gate and get run over a few times.  Or be the man in the back and have the cows turn back on you.  One of my favorite quotes from Teddy Roosevelt is from his “Man in the Arena” speech at the Sorbonne:  “…the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause…”

Get in the pen, learn to pace change.  Your organization needs it.  Your church needs it. 

2020 Snuck Up On Me…

The headline jarred me: “The NBA All-Decade Team.”  I’m not a big NBA fan; it was the “All-Decade” part that threw me.  Somehow my brain had not absorbed we were marking the end of a decade.  I knew we were changing from 2019 to 2020, but it doesn’t seem like ten years have passed.

I think my confusion is justified.  When I was little, I watched a cartoon called The Jetsons.  According to that cartoon, by 2020 we’d all be living in the clouds, have flying cars, and robot maids.  Roombas do not count as maids.  In 1965 James Bond had his own jetpack.  I’m still waiting for mine.  I pretty sure 1965 was the same year Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty.  That war has lasted a long time. 

Growing up in the sixties, science had all the answers.  After all, science and engineering put a man on the moon.  We were told by 2020 disease would be wiped out and people would be living on Mars.  Only in the movies. 

We’ve made some progress.  When I tell my children about writing a computer program for a college class and having to use punch cards, they ask, “What’s a punch card?”  Computers were the size of cars and had reels of tape.  My first computer was portable; it weighed thirty-four pounds.  The last computer I bought weighs three pounds.  It is easier to carry.

I got my first cell phone in 1994.  The church had a business meeting to decide if I needed one.  My cell phone was the size of a shaving kit, stuffed.  I marveled that I could drive and talk on the phone at the same time.  Who knew in 2020 we’d be saying, “Hold on just a minute, I want to take a picture” and then whip out our phones?

Not all progress is good.  When I grew up, supper was home cooked every night because fast food only applied to something running faster than you could shoot.  Mama used to make cat-head biscuits (if you don’t know what a cat-head biscuit is, ask your grandpa).  All the biscuits in our house now come in tubes labeled “Pillsbury.”  My Aunt Neta used to make the best chicken and dumplings you ever tasted.  She had no recipe.  When a granddaughter asked her how she made them, her directions started with, “Go out to the chicken coop and grab a hen…”  “Fresh” had a different meaning back then.

Church has changed too.  We didn’t need microphones for the preacher in those days.  Preachers of the Baptist flavor preached at the decibel level of a jet engine.  Even Methodist preachers of that era thundered like a Peterbilt diesel cranking on a cold morning.  Now we have a “Sound Man” and even the smallest churches must have a screen and a video projector.  Imagine how effective Jesus would have been if he’d had PowerPoint. 

When I started as a pastor, if someone was having surgery, we’d have special prayer.  I’d be there to pray before the surgery, stay through the surgery, and hear the Doctor’s report of the surgery.  Surgery was touch and go in those days.  Recently a member of my church had a heart attack; he was airlifted to Columbia, had three stents put in, and came home the next day with a scar on his wrist (I’m still trying to figure why working on your heart means you have a scar on your wrist).  I asked him why he didn’t call me.  He said, “I didn’t want to bother you, it was minor.”

Revivals were two-week meetings when the lost were saved, the saved were stirred, and the preacher got a break.  Vacation Bible School lasted two weeks as well.  When I was a young pastor and suggested we cut VBS to one-week, you’d have thought I suggested devil worship.  We not only had church Sunday morning, we went Sunday night too.  Now revivals have just about died out, VBS is down to four nights, and Sunday services are fading fast.

Music changed too.  I still remember the first time I heard a guitar in church; I thought it was a sign of the Apocalypse.  When we decided to use drums in worship at the church I serve, we sat them on stage for a month before we ever played them.  Today, thought, there are young people who think you can’t worship the Lord if the fog machine is broken.

A new decade is coming, unless, of course, Jesus comes first.  Whatever your expectations are about the future, they are probably wrong.  Instead of trying to predict what will change, maybe you should focus on the One who does not change.  There is an old gospel song that says it well, “I know not what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.”

Welcome, 2020.  The God who led me through The Jetsons, the moon shoot, Richard Nixon, disco, Jimmy Carter, Reganomics, “No new taxes,” the saga of Bill and Hillary, 9-11, Obamacare, and Trump tweets leads me still.  He not only holds the future, he holds me too.