That's Note Worthy

Cool Conference Call with Tim Elmore

I was recently on a conference call with Tim Elmore (a leadership guru) and about a dozen or so other youth pastors. Here are my notes for you present and future youth leaders/pastors (sorry, if they are a little rough grammatically).

Three Cool Images that Help Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes (Habitudes) – You must consciously pursue personal growth!

Starving Baker – #1 Occupational Hazard in Ministry
Imagine walking into a bakery and you see a really skinny guy behind the counter doing everything. He’s so busy serving everyone else he doesn’t have time to stop and eat and he starves himself. That’s a picture of a lot of us in student ministry. We are so busy serving, serving, serving, that we don’t spiritually stop, eat and digest ourselves. Often times it happens because it looks so noble to be giving our lives away, to be investing and expending our lives for other people. As noble as it looks, after a season we burn out and end up just going through the motions. There is no power on our ministry. The starving baker reminds us that we have got to feed ourselves before we feed others.

If I stop growing today, I stop leading tomorrow.

It’s the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguish leaders from followers. – Warren Bennis

The number one problem in ministers in his generation is that they were trafficking unlived truth. – Dwight L. Moody

We’ve got to live it before we give lip service to it.

Oversized Gift –
Imagine your 5th birthday party and you open all your gifts, but your mom and dad say there are a couple of more in the garage. You’re thinking a bike or maybe a big water gun for the pool. You open the garage door and your jaw drops. It’s a bike and gun alright… it’s a Harley Davidson and a 12 gage shotgun. “Mom, dad… I’m five, not fifty.” The gift doesn’t match who you are. In the same way, you all have entered ministry most likely because you have a pretty big gift, there is a God given gift inside of you. And, what happens often is that we begin leaning on our gift rather than on our growth, or leaning on our gifts rather than our God. We wing it in our ministry. You think things like, “I don’t have to prepare for this, I can do this in my sleep”, our preparation level goes down and our discipline level is not high. We must continually stretch and grow.

Iceberg –
Imagine a huge photograph of an iceberg and you can see both the tip above the water and the massive amount below the waterline. The 10% above the waterline – the tip that you can see – represents your skill set, the 90% below the waterline represents your character. It’s always what’s below the waterline that sinks the ship. The major portion of your influence is below the waterline – it’s your identity, your character, your discipline, your emotional security, the values that you live by…that’s what people read and that’s what really influences. Again, it has to do with personal growth. It’s what you are feeding internally into your spirit man and mind that is going to make all the difference in the world.

Leaders have to keep growing. What got you where you are seldom keeps you there.


Question and Answer Time
One of two life verses for Tim (in response to a question regarding the D. L. Moody quote above):

And Ezra set his heart to study the law of the lord, then to practice it, then to teach the statutes to Israel. Ezra 7:10

Wise man, right order.

The question I asked him during the Q & A session was "What book have you read that refreshed your soul?" His answer was Your God is Too Safe by Mark Buchanan. I just ordered it so somewhere down the line I'll let you know.

Four leadership books that he likes...
Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute
Certain Trumpets by Garry Wills
Good to Great and Built to Last by Jim Collins