Author: Craig

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on Leadership Sacrifice

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In the season during which Charles Taylor was convicted of war crimes I found myself reading Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s autobiographical book, This Child Will Be Great with great interest.  In January 2006, Johnson was sworn in as president of the Republic of Liberia.

Some of her reflections on leadership and the sacrifice required are below:

I guess the debate is still on over whether leaders are born or made.  I’m frankly not sure how one develops the skills necessary to lead and lead well.  Leadership requires stamina.  It requires a whole lot of acceptance, the ability to remain committed to your cause and to have the courage of your convictions.  It requires understanding that sacrifices will have to be made–and the willingness to make them again and again and again.

The greatest sacrifice of all is putting everything important–the challenge, the needs, your own ideals and sense of responsibility–ahead of yourself.  In effect, to be a great leader is to sacrifice oneself, because if you ever stop to think about your own preservation, your own safety, and your own survival, you will immediately become constrained.  You will cease to act, or to act in the best interests of those you are leading.  To be a great leader means to get to a place where personal considerations and needs become secondary to the achievement of your goal.  That is the greatest sacrifice you can make, but that is precisely what leadership demands.”

This Child Will be Great, p. 309

You, Success, & Exams

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“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

~ John Wooden, English teacher and basketball coach.  Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success  

John Wooden moved success from the realm of comparison with others to a kind of self-awareness or knowledge regarding the effort you have exerted.  Through the application of his view, Wooden became one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history.  He coached teams to ten national basketball championships.

Grades are a product of comparison.  While they are important for some moments and opportunities in life, they have a short shelf life.  Your character will last much longer and will go with you far beyond your university years.  Pursuing your studies for the grade is short-sighted.  Jesus Christ called for a longer view of life when He said, “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?  Is anything worth more than your soul?”  (Matthew 16:26 NLT)

You have to be secure.

John Wooden’s definition of success and Jesus’ long-view of life requires an incredible sense of security.  Security is a product of assurance in relationships.  As Wooden grew as a coach, he sought to give a sense of security to his teams by assuring them that he wasn’t looking for wins; he really was looking for them to give their best effort on and off the court.

Assurance of God’s love for you can become a constant in your life.  At Origin, Born for More, we believe Jesus came to show God’s love for us as a reality that we can daily experience.  His love, demonstrated through the Gospel of Jesus, creates lasting security.  In His love, we don’t need to compare ourselves to another.

Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”  Jesus lived the life of “the beloved” and now invites us to live the same by receiving His love poured out for us through His death on the Cross.  God’s love becomes a constant that makes comparison less powerful and ruling.  Responding to His grace and love doesn’t destroy ambition as some might accuse.  Rather, by trusting in God’s love for you through Jesus, you will possess a security that empowers you to keep growing, keep learning, and actually risk becoming the person God created you to be, no matter “the grade.”

You were made to be loved.

We do hope you succeed on your exams.  But more than that, we hope you will experience God’s love in Christ Jesus as the constant that gives security and shapes your life.

(I wrote this article for our exam care packages that we are delivering this week at UBC.)

Metabolizing Rejection & Getting Back on Mission

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Dear Craig,  …you really find the wrong person. I am so sorry. I think you should spend more time on the other people, and I am not the right person…  I am very very sorry for this, and I hope you enjoy your life.

Rejection has many faces.  It comes to visit us if our passion runs counter to prevailing attitudes and actions.  Rejection can sit like a bitter pill in the soul for church planters.  We will become sick if it not metabolized or digested.  After an enjoyable conversation with a bright UBC scholar, I was served the most gentle rejection.  It was even accompanied by a blessing, “I hope you enjoy your life.”  Yet, I felt the weight of it in my gut.

Jesus was familiar with rejection.  His rejection ultimately became the pathway for our inclusion in the Kingdom of God by grace.  However, the great purpose attached to his experience did not shield him from the pain.  Researchers confirm that social rejection lights up the brain as if we have been punched in the gut.  It hurts!

When Jesus went “home” he experienced rejection as he lived out his Heavenly Father’s purposes (Mark 6:1-13).  After he taught in the local synagogue, Nazareth could not deny the greatness of his teaching or his works.  However, Nazareth would not accept him.  They rejected Jesus.  In the the anatomy of their rejection they got really personal.  They raised suspicions about his birth.  They limited him because of his training as a carpenter.  They compared him to the rest of the family.  And in the end they took offense at Jesus.

Planting the Gospel dominates our disciple-making journey at UBC.  Sharing what God has done through the birth, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus sometimes provokes rejection of not only the message but also the messenger.  Because rejection strikes at the heart and generates fear, I have found it helpful to look closely at how Jesus metabolized rejection.

1.  He recognized it.  He said, “A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”  vs 4

2.  He refrained from provoking them further.  Jesus began to withdraw.  “And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.”  vs 5

3.  He marveled at their unbelief.  vs 6  Jesus reflected on their rejection and found their unbelief surprising for it was contrary to what had been revealed to them.

4.  He got back on mission.  Jesus set out and “he went about among the villages teaching.  And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two…”  vs 6-7

5.  He equipped the disciples for rejection.  “And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”

Jesus knows the spiritual warfare connected with rejection makes disciples vulnerable.  When rejection sticks to us we are in danger of anger, discouragement, vengeful thinking, and perhaps even abandoning the mission and the message of Jesus.  The prophetic act of shaking the dust off was meant to “shake off” the slime of rejection for the benefit of the disciples.  And the act also served as a note of caution and an invitation to those who rejected them to reconsider.  At Origin we are seeking to be a Gospel-shaped church.  Thank you for your support and prayer for us.  As you pray, ask the Lord to give us grace to metabolize rejection when it comes and then to get back on mission.

(This article was first published in the April 2012 edition of the WestCoast Challenge, a publication of the WestCoast Baptist Association.)

A Moral Reckoning

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Much of our learning is 20/20.  We do something and then look back a week later, a month, or even years later with the sickening realization that we have fallen into our own pit.  In the pursuit of learning truth, facts are our friends and the stories of our histories are our friends too.  The tragedy of an unexamined life is that we fail to learn or to even take an interest from learning from the data available and the history available.  The tragedy of our human experience may be that we continue to dig pits and then fall into them without learning anything.

I was reminded of this aspect of our human experience as I read this morning from Exodus 20:33-34.  “When a man opens a pit, or when a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restoration.  He shall give money to its owner, and the dead beast shall be his.”  On the surface a reading of the Old Testament social code may sound archaic and outdated to our ears.  However, I believe these pages contain an ethic we need to hear.  If I dig a pit and another is damaged by my neglect or lack of due diligence then I bear some responsibility for their restoration.

As I read the Torah I find a compelling argument for a moral reckoning when it comes to the matters of water, soil, and air.  Our treatment of water, soil, and air matters to God.  Some of our activity may be called immoral.  The  Creation mandate in Genesis is not for the destruction of the Creation but for the just stewardship of Creation as humanity continues to increase in number.  The Genesis account lets us know that enjoying the good blessings contained in Creation will require both rest and work.  The Creation possess a wildness that will require work.  The Creation also possess a blessing from God that requires our rest from work to actually enjoy it with Him and people.

The stuff of earth was never meant to be divorced from our conversation of relationships.  The manner in which we steward the earth has great implications for our relationships with God and people.  Jesus summarized all the Law and The Prophets in these two commands, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Matthew 22:34-39  Loving God and loving people requires that we become thoughtful about life and our relationships.  These two commands require repentance and a deepening understanding of God’s provision of grace and power to us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But for this article I’m left with this:  the way I handle land, water, and air must be informed by the mandate to love well.

With every word I’m aware that the mandate to love well seems to over simplify the complexity of the land, water and air conversations filling our newspapers and blogs.  However, this simplification is not  necessarily a bad thing.  If we use economic models as our guide we have fewer reasons to move ourselves, our family, our nation, out of the centre and therefore we lack the capacity to choose certain limits for the benefit of others.  If we use the mandate to love well as we steward the Creation then I must be thoughtful and perhaps restrained about the pits I dig.  When I dig a pit I must take due diligence to prevent harm of others.  And if others are harmed by the pit I dig then I must compensate them.

While the Gospel of Jesus does position the followers of Jesus to anticipate His return, we are never excused from the thoughtful application of love to our decisions regarding the stuff of earth and other people.  The myriad of social concerns that arise is dizzying.  As our growing fellowship (Born for More & Origin) at UBC develops I have been delighted to meet followers of Jesus in the University setting who are tackling social concerns with the best knowledge and research available to them while simultaneously seeking to apply love and the Gospel to their decision making processes.  Their passions of study are not divorced from the call to love God and love people.

In Canada we are digging our share of pits.  The ones on the forefront of our news are called out as tarsands, pipelines, mining, Agriculture Land development, logging in watersheds, fishing, energy development, and treaty negotiations.  Its no wonder that British Columbia and Vancouver is the birthplace of Greenpeace.  Yet, I fear that our affection for nature increasingly lacks a developed ethic of love.  And therefore we lack the capacity to help other people come to the discipline required for a moral reckoning and the internal motivation to accept limits as good.

leadership folly: making all the decisions

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While its true that leaders are known for the decisions they make, its folly to think that making all the decisions is a mark of great leadership.  Its actually a dis-service to the organization and the leaders who serve with and under you to believe that you must be in on   every decision.

Steven Sample, President of the University of Southern California, writes in his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership of his two general rules for decision making:

1.  Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant.

2.  Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow.

His first rule is my interest today.

Leaders can find good reason to send decisions back down to others, not as a matter of shirking responsibility but as a way of developing the organization and the people who serve with them.  The leaders that empower others to make decisions are generally characterized by a strong sense of internal security, clarity regarding the values informing the organizational life, the ability to describe/story these values, communicate trust as the expectation that others will make good decisions, and a delight in seeing others excel and grow.  Why would leaders delight in others making decisions?  Sample gives three reasons:

“Even in small organizations there are compelling reasons why a leader should consistently delegate most decision to selected ones of his lieutenants.  The first has to do with time constraints.  Making a good decision is hard, time-consuming work, and no leader can make many good decisions in a month’s time, much less in a day or a week.  So he needs to carefully reserve for himself only the most important decisions and cheerfully delegate the rest.

A second major factor in favour of delegation is that it helps develop and nurture strong lieutenants.  As we’ll see in a later chapter, a leader can’t expect his lieutenants to grow and grow up unless he gives them the opportunity to make real decisions that will have real consequences for the organization, without their being constantly second-guessed by the leader…

Finally the contrarian leader who is willing to delegate almost all decisions to lieutenants has an opportunity to build a much stronger and more coherent organization than does the leader who tries to make all the decisions himself.  This assertion is very counterintuitive; one would think at first blush that strength and coherence would be on the side of the absolute dictator.  But here’s the key:  the leader who delegates is forced to build coherence by putting together a team of lieutenants who have shared values and common goals.  If he’s successful in this regard, his organization can survive the loss of the leader himself (which will always happen eventually).

By contrast, when a dictatorial leader leaves the scene there is usually no strong and well-knit set of lieutenants to carry the organization forward in a coherent way.  An abrupt ending of years of dictatorial repression usually leads to an eruption of bitter factions and infighting (think of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death).” p. 73-74