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Drive Conference – Day 2
Some quotes from today to get you thinking…
Session 2: Becoming a Great Staff – Andy Stanley
“The further up the organizational ladder you climb, the more you must serve.”
“Great leaders don’t set their sites on leaders they want to emulate, they set their sites on serving people.”
“If you have to require loyalty, the game is over. You earn loyalty, not require it.”
“I don’t get this right all the time, but I’m COMMITTED to it.”
Breakout Session: A Healthy Staff Culture – Jeff Henderson
“If you are not intentionally creating a healthy staff culture, then you are unintentionally creating an unhealthy staff culture.”
“When your team knows that you have confidence in them, it increases their confidence in themselves.”
“Staff burnout is unacceptable and I believe that you as the point leader will answer to God for staff under your care who burn out.”
Breakout Session: An Organization Driven by Leaders – Joel Thomas
“If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.”
“If you can’t cast compelling vision, you won’t have competent leaders.”
“If you’re not having much fun, the people around you aren’t either.”
“If you create an irresistible leadership environment, you will not have to go find leaders, they will find you.”
Which one of these quotes challenges you the most?
Drive Conference – Quick Update
I’m in Atlanta for the next couple of days for the Drive Conference at North Point Community Church. Things got off to a great start tonight. Andy Stanley spoke about trusting and being trustworthy, especially as it relates to church staff teams. Really great stuff – more about that later…
The highlight of the night was joining a somewhat impromptu gathering of bloggers who are at Drive hosted by Ragamuffin Soul. There were about 30 of us in attendance and it was great to meet people from churches all across the country. Here’s a pic of the night (courtesy of Josh Lazar) – there I am right behind Carlos!!
More details to come!
I feel like I'm in high school again!
Lately I’ve been wrestling with my motivation for blogging. Not motivation as in the initiative to do it, but motivation in why do I do it? What are my motives? Am I blogging because I want those closest to me to get a glimpse of my every day life? Am I blogging because I feel like I have something important to say or some insight to share? Am I blogging to meet new people or people that I admire?
There are some stages to this blogging thing that I am just starting to discover:
1) At the beginning you are just excited that you figured out how to do it and that you have a live blog.
2) Then you get excited that friends and family are starting to read and comment.
3) Then you discover this whole world of bloggers that are out there and you begin reading about them.
4) Then you realize that you can start making connections and having conversations with some of these other bloggers.
5) Then you realize that there are what I would call “celebrity bloggers”, the ones that everyone has on their blogroll. There are the cool bloggers, the smart bloggers, the edgy bloggers, the church ministry bloggers, the business bloggers, the leadership bloggers, etc, etc. And each one of these groups has their own celebrities.
My challenge lately is that I find myself trying so hard to connect with the “cool kids”. I feel like I’m back in high school trying to make small talk with the popular kids and hoping they’ll like me = hope that they’ll link to my blog or comment on my blog.
This supports one of my theories that we always aspire to something we are not. Now, I don’t think it’s wrong to aspire to more or reach for what is next, however when this consumes you and keeps you from engaging with the people and the networks you currently have influence with, it becomes a problem.
I read a good article in Church Solutions Magazine today called “Social Networking Is a Must” by Ken Godevenos. My take-away quote from the article was this… we should strive to “a form of networking that is pure in its motive, models the image of our Maker and is void of a hidden agenda.”
Fellow social networkers, how do you balance continuous networking while also maintaining consistent, thoughtful contact with the people you currently have influence with?
I'm going to become a hermit…
I’m borderline hermit material anyway, given my deep need for alone time, but I think I could hole up for a year and never catch up on all the reading and studying that I want to do. I’m high “Input” on the StrengthsFinder assessment (which basically means I love information), so that doesn’t help this issue at all either!
Here are four stacks of books that are on my reading list right now. The first stack has been waiting on me forever, the second stack is a group of books that I’ve started or am in the middle of, the third stack is what I got this week at Q – and these were just the books given to me, not the ones that I want to order as a result of some of the discussions, and the fourth stack is a bunch of odds and ends that I have yet to get to.
This doesn’t include the blogs I try to read daily – there’s about 50 blogs on that list.
How do you keep up with all the information? How do you decide what to read? I need some help!
Guest Blogger – Marla Saunders
This is Marla’s “learning journey” experience yesterday. Thank you, Marla, for sharing on my site. You can read more about my “learning journey” on Marla’s blog.
I know I expected to come to Q and be exposed to new ideas, maybe even conflicting ideas. I expected to feel like a fish out of water, and to learn from that feeling. I expected that the amazing lineup of speakers would be inspiring, creative, worth traveling to hear. I was right on all counts. What I did not expect, was the quality of interactions between the people attending Q. And what is so surprising about this serendipity, is that the people are what I will take home in my heart from my days at Q.
Part of Q is signing up for the “learning journeys which took place this afternoon. I signed up for the “Central Park Ecology” journey.
This journey toured through the gardens of central park, stopped at the zoo, and focused on the importance of green spaces in the city.
Our learning journey started immediately upon leaving Gotham Hall. Some of our students went one way, some of them went another. All of us,
I think, arrived at the north end of Central Park. My group traveled up the 6 line, and we exited in the southern part of Harlem. This was the moment I realized the value of our trip: I was in another world. It was easy to put up my white, middle-class defenses. I’d like to say that I saw beyond my defenses eventually, but I don’t know that I ever did. The neighborhood we walked through was obviously struggling, and I sympathized with them as I kept my eyes down and walked. It was kind of a rough area, the kind of neighborhood where our church sends mission trips. But emerging from a brief tunnel, suddenly we were in Central Park, and the world changed. Bright pink trees, yellow daffodils, lilacs, hyacinth: God’s beauty there on display for rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old. In the midst of struggle, incredible beauty. That IS the importance of green spaces in the city.
I’d like to say the rest of the tour was inspiring, that I learned things I’d never known before. I’d tell you that, but I can’t, because we didn’t stay with our learning journey. We ended up on a learning journey of our own, I guess. The group spent about 30 minutes learning the facts and figures of New York parks, the park system, and the funding needed to keep the parks. I sat on the steps on a beautiful New York Day and watched the sun shine down. The words blended into each other, my mind wandered. When the group moved off to discuss the gardening strategies of the English garden, we headed across the park and around the lake on our own. I saw moms pushing babies and young studs running around the lake. I saw adorable dogs (and one really ugly dog). I smelled the flowers and felt the breeze, and I felt complete standing in this oasis. It was good, and if it wasn’t the learning journey I had intended at the outset, it was the one I needed.
Day 2 of Q
Day 2 of the Q Conference was another saturated one. Here’s the overview:
- Louie Giglio started off the day making the point that we as followers of Christ transcend culture and we need to become transcendent leaders – breathing hope as we move forward.
- Then we heard from Jamie Tworkowski the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms
- We also heard from Jim Wallis, MIchael Luo, a journalist for the New York Times, Dave Gibbons, Eric Reynolds and Owen Leimbach, a producer at MTV.
- Then we went on an art tour in Chelsea. This was really cool, not to mention that at one point I discovered I was observing a piece of art and Ben Stiller was standing next to me! I’ll be blogging more specifically about the art tour on Marla’s blog tomorrow.
- After dinner we heard from Makoto Fujimura, an artist whose work we viewed on the art tour.
- Then we closed the night with a private concert by The Fray. I have never seen these guys in concert and they were great, even with just piano and guitar. I appreciated their authenticity with their struggles with integrating their faith and their music. I had always heard these guys were Christians but sometimes I wondered if that was just the Christian community trying to claim some connection to a popular group (sorry I’m a bit cynical sometimes), but honestly I sensed that these guys are on a journey with their Savior and it made me proud to see God using them in a big way. They played a couple of new songs for us that are going to be great!
- I also met a few more bloggers today: Check out Tim Lucas and Terry Timm.
We finish it up tomorrow and head home!
