PV John on Spiritual Leadership

This morning the KCF staff was honored to spend a few minutes with PV John of Care India. He spent some time talking about spiritual leadership principles and sharing some incredible stories about what God is doing in India.

Here's a few bullet points. Good stuff!

1. Invest yourself in developing others. Release responsibility. Leave behind a spiritual legacy.

2. Be transparent.

3. Be faithful. To the Lord and to the ministry.

4. Be a leader of integrity. This springs from #2 and #3. Don't work for man's applause but God's approval. You are pretty much done if you compromise your integrity. All the years of working on building a reputation of consistency and integrity can be gone in a few moments of weakness.

5. Serve the Lord with JOY. Never look at ministry as work and a burden. When your perspective changes from seeing ministry as a joy, then suddenly you are trying to motivate people to help out of obligation or guilt. Remember, the greater the sacrifice the greater the joy in ministry. Our debt to the Lord is worth all that we have to give.

6. A vision that is given by God will never match our resources or budget. God will never ask you to do something that never requires His intervention. If your vision matches your resources you are simply doing an exercise of business planning!

God's Plan is Different Then Ours

Right now I'm re-reading The Making of a Leader by Clinton. The book is all about the process that God uses to develop leaders. Clinton has studied thousands of Christian leaders, both living and dead, and discovered that there is a framework that it appears that God uses to mold all of them, and thus, all of us.

I think one of the most striking things about this process is that a major phase, Clinton calls it Ministry Maturing is all about God using things in a leaders life (circumstances, other people, challenges, etc.) to grow the leader's internal character. Often times the leader believes that God wants them to focus on learning things, when in actuality God is most interested in building one thing into the leaders life - Christ in them.

I think we all fall into this trap. We think that God wants us to do something — and it's not that God doesn't want us to do something — it's just that He is more interested in doing something inside of us rather then us doing something for Him. I've heard this referred to as the process rather then the goal. God is process oriented, not goal oriented. His time horizon and perspective is so much larger then ours that He is much more aware of where things are headed then what is happening right now. All we can see is the next "goal", but He has so much more in view that the "goal" is much less important to Him as an individual piece.

So in all of this, the thing to remember is that God wants to use all the things that are going on in our life, to form us on the inside. The conflict we are experiencing, the person in our life that rubs us the wrong way, the challenge at work, the struggle with the car — all are tools in God's hand to make us in the image of Christ. But we must allow Him to work inside of us, we must seek to learn the lesson, or we will repeat it over and over again until we finally figure out - it's not about the thing, it's about what He's doing through the thing.