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Feedback can be helpful. If you run a company you can’t afford to not stay in tune to what people think about your brand and your customer service. People have more options than ever and if you treat them like they aren’t there, soon they won’t be. They will just go to another store, restaurant, website or church.

Having an ear to the ground can alert you to “wow” moments that are happening that you aren’t aware of but you should be encouraging. Things that employees are doing that blow customers away that you can make a more wide spread behavior. Or maybe you will find out that some small thing you have in place is actually doing the exact opposite of what you want it to. Feedback could allow for a small tweak that could make a huge difference.

An openness to feedback will allow you to see your team or organization or church through a new set of eyes. This even applies to individuals. One of the ways to grow is to have people in your life that can speak into your life when they see things that are keeping you from growing. We all have a way of being blind to our own weaknesses. Honest evaluation can be a majorly valuable tool.

The key is to know what feedback to take seriously and what input to ignore altogether. If you listen to the wrong feedback you could find yourself compromising where you shouldn’t. For example, if you have recently given your life to Christ and the negative feedback is pouring in from people you used to party with, you are going to want to ignore their contribution. The same applies to business. Perhaps some people very vocally complain about your sky-high prices and you are tempted to add cheaper items to the menu. But if you are going for a boutique vibe, diluting your higher-end price point could be a mistake and weaken what sets you apart. Pleasing the wrong people could keep you from reaching the right people.

Start by accepting the fact that no one can please everyone. You have got to identify who you are trying to impact, isolate their input and reject all others.

In my world, I am open to hearing feedback from all sorts of different people, but I filter it through the grid of who I am trying to reach. If I hear complaints from someone who comes to freshlife for the first time and thinks that the music was too loud and they didn’t like stuff we did because that’s not how it was in their last church, I’m not phased. The feedback that I key into is the person who writes and tells me they haven’t been to a religious service in 20 years but their life was rocked by their experience and they didn’t even know church could be like this. I want to encourage and foster stories like that. So I care very much about the fact that they were invited by a friend, heard our radio station and were intrigued by the name of the series.

To be blunt, I don’t care if a person who is already saved doesn’t like it. If they are already going to heaven, they are good. They can just go to another church and I am more than fine with that. The person who isn’t going to any church is the one whose head I want to get in to. In order to reach the right people I am willing to not please the wrong people.

If you know who or what you are targeting you can practice selective hearing when you listen to what people say about your organization and not find yourself deviating from your primary objective. Define success and then pursue it wholeheartedly.

I bought a coffee from Starbucks the other day and was impacted by what was written on the cup. I am not generally one to spend deep moments pondering fortune cookie’s or coffee cup insights. It was a fluke that I even saw it. When I picked it up the sleeve fell off and I noticed that the writing on the wall wasn’t one of those motivational poems or schmaltzy quotes that I have become accustomed to tuning out. This was different. They were talking about me. That cut through the clutter and got my attention.

Here is what it said:
YOU.
HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL FOR 10 YEARS.

Now, as I read that I immediately thought, “No, I haven’t… I must have been given the wrong cup. There is probably a seasoned conservation activist somewhere who is gonna be so mad when he finds out I have his drink.” But then I noticed what was written immediately below…

Everything we do, you do. Buy our coffee and good things happen. Take Starbucks 10-year partnership with CI in making things better for farmers and the planet…It makes a difference. Just like you do. Congratulations, you.

Brilliant. I have been buying coffee from them for over ten years and what this cup was saying is that I am not just a customer, I’m a partner in the mission that they are on. I have never personally met a single coffee bean farmer but I am making a difference, because me and the mermaid are on the same team. I gotta admit, it felt pretty darn good.

As I sat there sipping my coffee and congratulating myself on all the great things I was accomplishing around the world by doing so, I thought of a conversation that I had the night before. I had bumped into someone around town who goes to freshlife. After we met, he shook my hand and told me, “you guys are doing a great job,” and then he went on for a bit about all the great things that me and my team were doing for the Lord, and how he prays for us and how pumped he is to be here. I listened until he was done and then congratulated him right back. He looked a bit surprised by that. But he had just told me that he prays and that he serves, I reminded him of this. I asked if he gives to the church as well and he said that he does. I shook his hand once more and then rephrased the compliment he had given me just moments ago, telling him, “We’re doing a great job!”

I want those who are a part of freshlife to understand what Starbucks knows to convey. Everything we do, they do. As we stand as one behind the God-given vision we are pursuing; we are partners together in all that we accomplish. No matter what your role is on the team, you are a part of the uprising. Congratulations, you.

One of a leader’s most important responsibilities is to continually foster this sense of unity and ownership in their organizational culture.

I am fascinated by the subject of leadership. I am almost always somewhere in the middle of one or two books on the subject that I either downloaded from Amazon to check out for the first time, or pulled from my shelf to go through again. Whether spiritual or corporate; new and outside the box or time honored and classic in it’s approach, I find it interesting. I especially love books about entrepreneurs who start companies that lead to revolutions in their industry and beyond. People who are gutsy enough to challenge the status quo and take steps to change the world.

The themes of: culture, vision casting, implementing systems, brand and identity, communication and maintaining momentum get my blood pumping and fill my moleskines up time and time again. God has revealed flaws in my leadership skills through books written by bank presidents and heads of software companies just as He has through books written by pastors and Christian leaders.

I just finished reading Transforming Church in Rural America by Shannon O’Dell and am currently reading Church Planter by Darrin Patrick and What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and I have gone through another half-dozen or more on the subject this year.

But, hands down, the best leadership book I have ever read is the book of Nehemiah. Yesterday I wrapped up an 18 week long study through this Old Testament book and from beginning to end I was blown away by the leadership lessons it contains. Long before Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Fred Smith or Henry Ford, Nehemiah was someone who took on a project big enough to change the world and though many thought he was crazy, that was exactly what happened–he changed the world. He took radical steps to live out the dream that God put in his heart, regardless of the cost or consequences, and never gave up.

He looked at the world and didn’t see what was, he saw what could be. And when he spoke of the future he saw others followed him there. Not because he had a great plan (though he did) but because he had a great vision. He inspired people. And he drew out the best in them, pushed them to be all that God had called them to be and empowered them to do all that God had called them to do. In fact, I think his building up of the people around him was potentially a greater accomplishment than the walls that he is remembered for building.

It wasn’t all roses and rewards for Nehemiah, it never is for those who will change the world. He knew full well the truth of the statement, if you want to lead you must be willing to bleed. He faced criticism, opposition, danger, and betrayal. And perhaps nothing caused him more pain than the prospect of his greatest accomplishment, the spiritual health of the people he loved, unraveling at the seams as they headed into an uncertain future. But no matter what he faced, he kept the vision God had given him front and center and refused to budge.

I found myself applying principles gleaned from Nehemiah to every area of my life. From the way I lead in my home to the way I lead at fresh life, even the way I write on this blog! The book of Nehemiah was basically just Nehemiah’s blog that God chose to include in the Bible. I am thankful that he took time to write down the things he was learning and living and hope to encourage others by doing the same.

I can’t wait until I get to meet Nehemiah in heaven and thank him for his example. Until then I plan to follow his lead and serve the Lord with a sword in one hand and a shovel in the other!

Last week was one for the books at fresh life. By that I mean the record book of how many technical things can possibly go wrong in a week. I think it was written by a dude named Murphy. I hate that guy. It would be hard to try and come up with more things that could have gone wrong.

Here is a snapshot:
While preaching at skull church my mic went out briefly and came back on with some terrible feedback that continued for what seemed like forever. What I didn’t know was that whatever had happened also took out the live radio broadcast. The webcast also crashed at some point in the night as well. And our system that sends txt msg questions, that come to my skulpit, to the screen went down. This weekend, I was supposed to preach the 11 o’clock at the Strand but, due to a series of events, they moved me to the Liberty at the last minute. I was supposed to be piped live into the Strand but they had to resort to a video backup because, for the second time ever, our fiber optic feed freaked out. When the video backup was fired it first came up with only audio before (fortunately) coming on correctly and playing all the way through. Man, just reading that list stresses me out.

Stuff like this makes the hair on the back of my team’s neck stand up. Excellence is something that we value highly. I can’t see how we really have a choice about that. Our mission is to see those who are stranded in sin find life and liberty in Christ. Eternity literally hangs in the balance. Like it or not, that injects importance into everything. We simply don’t have the luxury of dismissing even the smallest detail as being trivial. The stakes are too high. Hell plays for keeps and forever is a long time. Even small things deserve our very best effort.

Coming out of a week like we have had there is definitely the temptation to be upset, to be bummed, to beat ourselves up and only focus on every single thing that went wrong. But we won’t. You can’t live that way. If you do, eventually you will end up in the fetal position under your desk mumbling, “Laces out, Laces out, the Laces were supposed to be facing out...” And that’s not good for anyone. You have to accept that if you are are committed to thinking outside the box and pushing the envelope; there are going to be bad days. Things happen. Computers crash. People make mistakes. That’s life. Deal with it; don’t dwell on it.

Instead you have to learn to focus on all the good that happened in spite of the problems. The people who gave their lives to Christ listening to a message with feedback coming out of the speakers. The fact that people were blessed who were ministered to by the Bible study and felt God as they took communion even though according to our runsheets everything took way too long to come out of the meet and greet. The hundreds and hundreds of people who signed up for small groups even though at two of the services the amazing small group promo video never even played. And above all, the fact that the Word of God cannot be chained! (2 Timothy 2:9)

I think it’s also important to be thankful for the hundreds of services a year that have gone by without major meltdown. All the webcasts that didn’t go whack, all the times the fibre hasn’t failed and the projectors didn’t show the blue screen of death. Thank God for the other thousand times that your mouse didn’t turn into a beach-ball.

I’m not saying that you are supposed to just be ok with things that go wrong. You shouldn’t be. We aren’t. I can assure you there will be meetings where the glitches will be analyzed and assessed. We will ask: Why did this happen? Has it ever happened before? What could have prevented it? Was it human error or just a freak–the devil is in the details– kind of a thing? Do we need to upgrade a system? buy new equipment? Retrain someone? Conduct an exorcism? And we will do our best in the future to learn from our mistakes and move forward. We will pursue perfection and seek after seamlessness. As I said, I believe that the urgency of the gospel requires nothing less than our very best efforts.

But at the end of the day if anything eternal is going to be accomplished it’s not because of us, it’s because of Him. It’s all about Jesus and what He did for us at the place of the skull. In our weaknesses His strength is made perfect. If you keep that in mind, you can keep your eyes set on heaven even in the midst of a technological week from hell.

For quite some time I had this nagging suspicion that there was something wrong with our approach to student ministries at fresh life. I tried to shrug it off. After all, our youth pastors were doing a great job. They were doing the same things I had done during my years in youth ministry, the same things that just about every other thriving church around the country was doing (I know that because we checked).

As time went on I couldn’t shake the thought that something was missing, that our approach was based on an institution, not on what God wanted us to do. After several months of meeting, praying and brainstorming with the pastoral staff we came to the conclusion that the real problem with our youth groups were the youth groups themselves. I mean having them–at all. So we decided to pull the plug. Here’s the story…

I wanted to make sure and chronicle the thinking behind this decision for other pastors and church planters out there. Perhaps some will be inspired by what we are doing and rethink preconceived notions about how youth ministry has to be done; and I’m sure that others will disagree. Regardless, I hope that, at the very least, this can serve to provoke discussion and fresh thinking about how we can most effectively reach the next generation and empower them to make Jesus famous.