[2015.1.8] Staff Lab: We Do Dirty Work
Steven Furtick kicks off a staff training series on leadership, arguing that real leaders dig out problems rather than just create new ideas. He introduces the EEL method (Examine Every Layer) and walks through examples like event planning and volunteer management where diagnosing what's broken restores momentum.
Chapters
Staff lab number one. Hopefully the beginning of a long lasting tradition. Staff Rally serves a purpose each week for information, celebration and alignment would be the purpose of Staff Rally every week. The vision of these staff labs, hopefully there will be 10. The vision of these staff labs will be to set apart the importance and create an atmosphere and an expectation for your empowerment. I believe in empowering people to the level that you expect something from them. In getting ready to find my flow as a leader this year, it came to me that I should be more intentional and strategic about getting in front of you. Last year I had the opportunity to do it quite a bit, but I wanted it to really feel like we were going somewhere on a journey together. I resist sometimes teaching leadership principles because to me, leadership is often better caught than taught. I found a lot of people who were teaching people to lead who never led anything. That always kind of bothered me. The people who were writing the books on building healthy organizations had one secretary and no other employees they'd ever led. Yet at the same time, the moment you become an expert on something, in some ways you stop experimenting because the expectation once you're an expert, is that you know and that what you said is the way it is. So I've always resisted teaching leadership for those reasons because I never want to leave the laboratory. I want to stay in learning mode. That's very important to me, that we do that as a staff. Even in the future, as we look into doing perhaps conferences and things like that, we always stay in the laboratory of learning ourselves. That's why I chose the title to call it a staff lab rather than a staff seminar. I figured that sets your expectation to know that when I come before you in staff format this year, that I'm going to be bringing ideas to you that we're going to work out together and ideas to you that maybe in a beaker and maybe you've put another idea, something is going to blow up and that's okay because this is a lab. I put a lot of energy, I would say as much energy into this session that I want to share with you today as I would into going into a weekend. I want you to lean in now and listen to what I have to say to you today. How many of you have a leadership role on staff? A leadership role? I'm waiting for every hand to go up. I'm waiting for every hand to go up. Leadership is not synonymous with having direct reports. Leadership is not synonymous with any position. To be a leader is to think like a leader in all the decisions you make for us to grow and for our ministry to continue to flow at any worthwhile level, everybody is going to have to think like a leader. So we're going to have 10 sessions this year to empower you to think like a high level leader. To empower you to think like a high level leader in the sphere where you have responsibility and also to provide cultural and practical handles to help you empower other leaders. In other words, to give you fresh ways to talk about things that we may have already said as a leader. You're always repeating vision, you're always repeating vision, but hopefully you're not just repeating, you're reinforcing. The difference here is that when you reinforce something, you drive it down deeper. When you reinforce something, you bring in something stronger to support what's already there. So many times I've not wanted to preach something or teach something because I thought they've already heard that. They've already heard that. Everybody already knows that. Well, for one thing, not everybody has already heard it. Not everybody does already know it. That's just not true. That's number one. Number two, it's true that vision leaks, to quote Andy Stanley. And number three, at the same time, that really is the essence of leadership. To take something that starts at a surface level and drive it down deeper. We're going to put each of these videos for you online on a site that you'll have access to all year and then you can go back and work it out more fully. Today we won't start this today. We're going to do it a little differently today. But in the future sessions, I plan to have you go into breakout blocks for 30 minutes or so after I teach and at least talk about how one concept I spoke about is going to affect your daily routine and your priorities and work together on those things so that it is truly a laboratory. So there's a demonstration of a principle, a concept, an idea or challenge, and then there's a hands on application of it immediately so that we're not just hearing and forgetting. That's the goal. Then also in talent show in 2015, we're going to have those who stand before you in staff rally focus on what came before. We won't be reaching back to 2013 or 2014. We're going to be talking about what was just said in the previous staff lab. Today I want to talk to you on a subject level about how to keep it flowing. How to keep it flowing. It's one thing to find your flow, it's another thing to Keep it flowing. But my real title I want to use for this, that I think is a little bit more true to the spirit of what I want to say. We do dirty work. We Do Dirty work. My title on the screen there, We Do Dirty Work. After you write that down, tell the person next to you, it's a dirty job, but we have to do it. Let's look at the scripture I've shared now. I shared it at the praise party. I shared it in staff a few months before that. I shared it a little bit this weekend. Genesis 26:18. Genesis 26:18. It's coming on the screen. Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them. I love that verse. And for me, it has become sort of a metaphor for this idea of how ministry flows. Ministry has a flow. Life has a flow. Relationships have a flow. When things are flowing, you don't have to force certain things, they just flow. One of the times that Moses got in the most trouble was when he tried to force the flow because the Israelites wanted water. So he said, I'll give you water. He struck a rock that God had instructed him to speak to. When you strike things that God has instructed to flow, when you start trying to force things in your own flesh, a lot of times that's where our biggest trouble comes. A lot of times that's where we find ourselves even more frustrated and we end up breaking the people we were called to heal. When ministry has a flow, and when there's a flow to. To anything we do, frustration is reduced. But I want you to think in terms of these wells. I've talked about it. On a personal level, I tried to use that well for an analogy for our heart at the praise party. I had such an enjoyable time thinking about that well. How the scripture says your heart is the wellspring of life and how our hearts get stopped up. That's certainly true. I don't think we could spend enough time talking about that. But today I want to back out now and still use this metaphor organizationally, to talk about flow blockers within our ministry, to talk about what to do when something within our ministry is not working. I think what you'll find as I go through this, and it's going to be highly practical, but it may seem scattered to you because I'm going to jump all around from very big things to very small things, because everything has a flow. It Works, sometimes not based on whether the word of God works. The word of God always works. It works sometimes not based on Take something like a worship experience. We say, man, the people weren't really worshiping. Today there could be 17 small elements of a flow that was created. Knowing that ultimately worship is not about us, but yet we orchestrate that experience for people to connect with God. I want to show you how when you are a leader, you have to become a master of analyzing flow. To do that, you have to reopen wells. This is where I want to, at the risk of being redundant, kind of bring home something again that I've said many times, it's a lot more fun to plot wells than it is to purge wells. It is so much more fun to brainstorm the name of a conference. What could we call it? Fresh Wind. What could we call it? Flow. What could we call it? I could give you 74 names before noon today and they would all be decent. It's a whole lot more fun to name a conference than to take registration for a conference and make sure the site works and make sure the hotel details are up there and to work out the discounted rate with the hotel and to make sure the parking is going to be apropos with the apartment complex that's across the street. And to make sure once we put the registered rate and people are calling in to fuss about the fact that they didn't get the early bird rate and their credit card payment didn't go through. What you find out as you do a little bit of ministry is ideas are sexy, but success is in strategy. Ideas are cheap. I would rather execute well on an average idea than execute poorly on a brilliant one. If you see your job on staff as I'm an idea person, I'm more of an idea person. I'm more ideas. Or if you don't say that but you operate, the most important thing you do is think of ideas. You've not only missed the essence of what the Bible teaches about how ministry is supposed to happen, which I'll explain shortly, but the essence of how stuff works in life. It's like a football team having an 016 season and concluding it was their helmet color that needed to be changed to always be cosmetically adjusting things that really have a deeper level of dysfunction. Everybody say flow. Ministry has a flow. Today in staff rally, I feel like the flow was not the most energetic flow we could have had to introduce Staff lab. It started out very informationally. It went into a time of worship that was good, but it didn't set apart that today is new. So when I come up, the flow, rather than being a current that just shoots right into it. They did a great job with worship. The information was fine. There was no single element that was out. But the order of the flow can either create. When you walk up as a speaker to say, these people are ready, or I'm going to have to push a little bit. It's a flow. Meetings have a flow. Not just this meeting which has singing and announcements and teaching, but a meeting you have today at 2 o' clock with the same people you meet with every Thursday at 2:00'. Clock. It has a flow. To really have great ministry, you have to learn to analyze flow effectively by asking the question, does this still work? Isaac went to some wells that no longer worked. He made them work again. How did he make them work? He got his hands dirty and dug out what was blocking the flow. We, as ministers and as leaders and as staff members at this great church where God has placed us, we do dirty work. It's what we do. I wrote down to tell you, if you want to do something with your life that's nice and neat, get out of the ministry. If you want a career path that is nice and neat, I'm not mad at you. I'm not judging you. I don't hate you. I don't even blame you. Because there are times where if I felt like God would let me do something else, I would try. But if you want that, get out of the ministry. How many of you remember what this acronym means? Nmnm. I've shared it before. NM in him. It's not New Mexico. New Mexico. No mess, no ministry. Where does that come from? Proverbs 14:4 in the New King James, where no oxen are, the trout is clean. But much increase comes by the strength of an ox. Strength is sloppy sometimes. What I mean is to assimilate a lot of people into a task, you creates a lot of side issues. So you can have strength and growth in your ministry, or you can have neatness and order and predictability. You can't have both. You can have power or you can have predictability. You can't have both. But there is a flow to it. There is a flow to it. There is a flow. I think by understanding that this is a dirty job, by understanding that it enables us to approach it correctly. If you've been reading John 15, even up through verse seven, one thing you find out real quick about the way Jesus describes growth, process and everything is that it's not only very organic, but if God is willing to get his hands in the dirt and garden and grow our lives, how much more do we have to be willing to get our hands in the dirt to grow this church and to grow the people within this church and to grow the people and to grow ourselves? You have to get your hands dirty to grow. I say this because there are always new people on our staff who are shocked at the level of effort and labor that goes into doing what we do. Maybe they saw it from one vantage point when they were sitting in the dining room, coming on the weekend, watching the sermons online, brought to you on a white tablecloth. It's beautiful. Then you get a peek back into the kitchen. Remember people cussing each other out in the kitchen, sweating in the kitchen, moving around in the kitchen. I just want to start the year by saying for the church to flow, for the ministry to flow, for the ministry to grow, for things to go forward is going to take people who realize I signed up to do the dirty work. Like Isaac opened those wells and got down and purged them. I didn't just sign up to plot wells on a map and think about where they should go. I didn't just sign up to create ideas. I didn't just sign up to go into meetings and talk about things, but I went into meetings to solve problems. That's what I signed up for. It's a dirty job, but I believe we're called to do it. Let's look at John 15 for a moment. I am the true vine and my father is the gardener. Dirty job? You bet. Dirty job. Our God does dirty work. Somehow we think when we get in situations that are not so clean and not so neat, we're surprised by that. How would we be surprised when the God we do ministry on behalf of and the Savior we do ministry in the name of came down and did our dirty work for us, took on our sin for us. You have to understand that theologically, because in a minute, when I get practical, I want you to understand there's a theological basis. He said, my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. Now listen, I was studying something interesting. Bruce Wilkinson wrote a book called the Secrets of the vine, and he studied John 15. I want to share this part with you. That part where he says about I shared this a little bit in Heyday yesterday, where it says he cuts off every branch. That is one interpretation. He cuts it off. But the word that's used for cut off in the original language of the Bible can also mean to take up or to lift up. The word that's used there is the same word. It's the same exact word. If you read Greek, it's. It'd be the same word in this passage that it is when it says that the disciples took up the basketfuls and the loaves. Bruce Wilkinson says he was preaching somewhere one day, and a man who owned a large vineyard in northern California came to him and said, I want to share something with you about John 15. I think I figured out a key to John 15. He starts explaining to Bruce Wilkinson about the process of owning a vineyard. He says new branches have a natural tendency to trail down and grow along the ground. He explained what he just said about new branches. You can say about new Christians, you can really say about everybody that is going to walk in our church and yourself as well. He said, but they don't bear fruit down on the ground. That's their tendency. But they don't bear fruit down there. When branches grow along the ground, the leaves get coated in dust. When it rains, they get muddy and mildewed. The branch becomes sick and useless. So Bruce Wilkinson said. I asked the man, what do you do? Cut it off and throw it away? Oh, no. He exclaimed. The branch is much too valuable for that. We go through the vineyard with a bucket of water looking for those branches. We lift them up, take up and washed them off. He demonstrated for me with dark, calloused hands. You know how you can look at somebody's hands and see? You could see my hands and see I'm a preacher. Maybe a few paper cuts, no calluses, you know, I think you can look at somebody's hands, I'm speaking in metaphor now, and see how their approach to ministry is. Look at somebody's life, look at somebody's pattern and say, do they do dirty work? You can look at somebody's resume and see how many places they went to work in the last 10 years, 15 years. Do they bounce around or do they do the dirty work of getting in one place and making a difference there? Are they always flying off to the next thing, flying off to the next thing, flying off to the next thing, trying to drill a new well every time this one gets stopped up. They have 17 different wells all around the land, but none of them working. I fear for us as a staff that now, going closer and closer to year 10, that there are many wells that are no longer flowing and the only way to get them flowing again is for us to do the dirty work. Analogy of the vine and the branch, there are many vines and branches that are trailing toward the ground. So when God grows something in your ministry, its natural tendency is to trail down to the ground. Its natural tendency is atrophy. Its natural tendency, when something starts, unless it's acted on by something else, to keep it flowing, unless it's maintained, unless it's sustained, it's going to trail toward the ground. It's going to get in the dirt. So when you start something in ministry, what you learn over time is it's sexy to start, but success is sustaining. It's sexy to start it, but success is sustaining. I will say this as many different ways as I can. Let me try a couple more. Everybody gets really good and excited about a new event. A new event is what sexy. An event is only as strong as the evaluation of the event. I want to do some well checks today. I want us to look at the different areas of ministry and work that we're responsible for. I want us to wonder for a few moments about wells that aren't working. I want to teach you a leadership mentality. I believe some people are born with this, but I also believe it can be learned. I don't believe there's anybody in here who can't learn a measure of this. You might not be as good at it as this guy or that gal, but you can learn a level of this and it will make you a leader. Leaders have the ability to evaluate every layer. To evaluate every layer. Chris Allen came by while I was writing this and sat down on the couch. And I really didn't ask him to sit down. So I didn't know what he was doing. But then I was glad he did. I was glad he did. In the end, I was glad he did because I was in a flow. I don't like to be bothered in my flow. I had my headphones on, too. Some people can't pick up on social cues. He sat down, we started talking about the sermon, we started talking about the wells. He said, you know, I spent so much time before I came on staff here working with natural gas wells. In places where there were wells, there were energy sources that were 40 years old. To get down to the well, they had to do a process. And it got me thinking. He gave me some excellent material. Uninvited guest that he was on my couch. I'm not doing a commercial for fracking here because I don't deal in that and I'm not the greatest environmental hope or I'm not a proponent of anything or I'm not against anything because I don't know anything about anything. I do know I invested $10,000 in a natural gas thing one time and never saw a dime of it. That's what I know about natural gas. But that aside, I thought the illustration was awesome. Now listen, he said, when you go into Appalachia and dig these wells, he said, you have to understand there are shallow wells, but there are 40 years of life under the wells. So they go in to dig when they go in to dig. Now, this is your job. This is my job as a minister. They have to clear out the sand and debris in order to get the natural gas flowing. Here's what was interesting to me, he said often he brought me some charts and I was going to show them to you, but I thought it was too much. It would be cool to look at, though. I'll show you another time. He brought me these charts. He said, when they have to go in to find out why a well isn't flowing, they drop an instrument in the well that runs the length of the well and it measures the frequencies at every level of that well for sound and heat in the well. Then they take the printout I was going to bring you. That's awesome. It stretches out, he said, as long as the length of the well. At every layer of rock in that well, it tells you the sound and the heat. Now, the engineers are trained. The engineers are experts. They are able to take that printout that shows you the sound and the heat at the different levels of rock in the well. When they drop the instrument down, they are able to tell you from that printout why the well isn't flowing. I thought, dear God, we need a staff that knows how to go in with good thinking, with good intuition, and evaluate an area of ministry, whether it's one worship experience in Gurgit or whether it's something that's going on on our website, or whether it's something that's going on in our children's ministry and people who learn how to examine every layer. Sound and heat. That's how you measure the effectiveness of something in your life or in your ministry, especially in a church. What are people saying? Sound. What's the word on the street? Sound. What conversations am I hearing over and over again? Sound. What problems keep coming up over and over again? Sound. What's the stuff I see that's causing the issues over and over again? What's the language that needs to be updated? What are the handles we're using that are antiquated? Sound, then heat. Where are we losing passion? Where are we manufacturing energy? Where are. Are we having to get people to do stuff they ought to want to get to do? Where's the sound? Where's the heat? As a minister, it is not simply your job to go put an idea on a map of a well. That would be nice if we dug it. There were a lot of wells that were dug, possibly before you got here. Your job is to do the dirty work, to keep it flowing. So you come on staff and you have maybe a lot of ideas. That's awesome. And perhaps some of them will find an incarnation. But do you know how ideas are incarnated? Through implementation. Through implementation. It is not the idea that moves the ministry forward. I could preach a great sermon with a horrible title and it would work. It wasn't the idea, it was the substance. I didn't have to call this talk. We do dirty work. I could call the talk principles from Genesis 26:18. If I put the content. That's the title, that's the packaging. Have you ever noticed how good we are at packaging as a church? Oh, man, we're fantastic. We can package. We can put a bow on something, make you lust with envy over our bow. Our bows are beautiful. I have to get you to see, though, if anything is going to be transferable in this ministry and sustainable. We're going to have to go down into wells and keep them flowing. And keep things flowing. Keep things flowing and keep campuses growing and keep an inviting culture strong. And keep it flowing. And keep staff culture flowing and keep honor flowing and keep generosity flowing. And go down in the well and see if you're a skilled staff member. If you're a leader, you develop instruments to be able to go down into the well and say, at what level is this not working? Let me make a distinction. Anybody, Anybody can identify something that isn't working. That does not make you a leader. I had a server at a restaurant the other night who felt compelled to give me three things she didn't like about my church after one time attending. That does not make her a leader. It doesn't guarantee her a good tip, by the way. Not a great strategy. I left her a good tip anyway because I'm a man of character, but I didn't want to yet. Anybody can comment on conditions. Leaders get this. Leaders identify causes and connections and contribute to solutions. That's what I mean by think like a leader. I don't mean think like a leader. When you see how the creative department does something, you think, how Much better. You'd do it if you were in the creative department. That's not leadership. I don't mean being snobby and seeing something on ekids and thinking you're not a leader. You're not a leader because you can comment on a condition that is not leadership. Leadership is not synonymous with skepticism. But to think like a leader is the ability to enter into something that should flow that's not flowing. There was nothing wrong with Abraham's Wells, but they were stopped up with dirt. So sometimes we walk away from a well thinking it wasn't a good idea when really the implementation sucked. I told them the other day on a TV product offer we had. I said, hey, we didn't do that offer. Well, when we evaluate that offer, our tendency is going to be to say the product we offered wasn't a product people wanted. We need to offer something else. The fact of the matter is, the way we presented it didn't put the number to call on the screen up for long enough for people to call it. I went to chunks immediately. I said, nobody is going to order that product. Watch what I tell you. It's going to be the worst product offer. He came back and said, you're absolutely right. It wasn't the product. It was something as small as how long the number on the screen was up. But now think about what would have happened if we didn't examine the layers to determine why nobody called. Because the assumption would be nobody called. We need to offer a different product. That product wasn't popular. Let's find a new product offer. Let's dig another well. No, no well is fine. The presentation of the product was the problem. Are you following me? This is why it's a lab. I'm not here to inspire you. I don't pay you so you can get inspired on Thursday morning. I'm here to help us and empower us and challenge us to that we do the dirty work. Not just of seeing that we're losing momentum. Oh, we're losing momentum. Less people are going to this site. Why are less people going to that site? What's the problem? Is it the content? It might not be the content. It might be the time that the content is hitting the site. It might be the publicity behind the site. It might be that platforms are shifting by which we publicize the site. And we didn't shift with the platforms. But you'll go fixing the wrong stuff if you don't learn how. Put it up there again. Examine every layer. The EEL method of leadership. Examine Every layer. That's kind of where I want to spend my time. While ideas are fun to think of and they are important, I don't want to execute on a bad idea. I would simply say that ideas are not the mainstay of multiplying ministry. Ideas are not. The implementation of the idea is where excellence makes a difference. Ideas are exciting. Implementation is exhausting. That's why we go draw new wells up, because we don't want to get our hands dirty in the wells we already have. Constant improvement is the secret to success at this level. You know that, right? Constant improvement. Finding flow blockers, finding what's blocking a well and getting it out. That's your job. That is your job at every level. Where your hands find work to do in this organization, it is your job not to complain about places where flow is blocked. See, sometimes when we examine every litter, let's go down the well. What we'll say is we'll start with something that's outside of our control. We'll say, well, the reason this isn't working is because there's a system that's set up that I don't have control over. I told them three times to move the thing over here to over here. Put it on Tuesday, put it on Wednesday. I told them nobody would listen to me, and I think we ought to buy this. And this thing cost $55,000, but we really need it, and they wouldn't buy it. What did you just do? You started at the wrong layer. When I identify something that's wrong in the ministry, I always start with me. Always, always, always, Always to a fault, probably. Because what happens if you start with yourself and stay with yourself is you take it personally. Then I start to feel like if something failed in the ministry, then I'm a failure. You can go too far. But it is healthy. When you see a problem to start with, how you had a part in it, to go back and say, I wonder if I really told them that as clearly as I could. I bet I say this a hundred times a month. Somebody, was I clear about this? What did I say? What did you hear me say? I'm assuming to begin with that I could have probably said it more clearly. There are times where there's a tendency to want to be like, they just suck. They just gave it to me three days late. There was nothing I could do about that. I know you deal with that, and that's incredibly frustrating. Incredibly frustrating. How many of you have been frustrated with somebody else in the room at some time in the last 12 months. Yeah, that's fine. How many of you reckon that somebody in the room has been frustrated with you in the last 12 months? As long as we know that, as long as we understand that, we won't get stuck at the wrong layer. To stay at the surface is to say something like this, to say attendance is down. Let's say attendance was down. It's not down, it's flat in some places. But we wouldn't say it's down. We've grown as church attendance is down. Or let's be more accurate, attendance is flat. We're not growing at some campuses. I start by saying, is it something I need to do different in my sermons? Because that's the main thing I provide. Am I preaching too long? People don't like these new 55 minute sermons because I like them, but maybe everybody else doesn't. I have to dig that out. I come to the conclusion after digging it out that I really believe that's the most effective way for me to do what I'm doing right now. So I started at that lair. I didn't stay at that lair. I started at that lair though, and I took it very seriously. I went through, even at the beginning of last year, I asked our campus pastors, what do you need from me that you're not getting to help grow your campus? I want to know now. Some of the stuff they say makes me mad. Half of it I listen to, I think is bullcrap. You just do your job. But I want to at least open the conversation. Then I have to get past my pride and say, well, maybe they said this and maybe that's not entirely accurate, but there's an element of truth in that and I'm going to tweak what I can tweak. When we rolled out the begin again challenge, I take responsibility because I never said when I wanted it to roll out. So how can I expect them to get the site early? If I didn't say, I'd like this to roll out at the beginning of December, that's my fault. Whatever happened from there is my fault. My fault. I'm the leader. If I didn't establish it, if I didn't check on it, if it was important to me, I should have checked in. My fault. If you do that, and I think we do as a church at a staff level, for the most part, I don't think we have a ton of excuse makers on the staff. I don't think you'd last long if you make excuses. But where you are making Excuses. It's okay if your initial instinct isn't to go, that was my bad. If your initial instinct is to blame it on a thousand other factors. Just as long as at some point before you actually deal with it, you say, you know, I could have this and I could have that and I could have that. There's never a time where I did everything I could have done. The more leadership you want, the more you're going to have to say, that's my fault. That's my fault. That's my fault. Chewbacca had to send the email on the Begin Again Challenge why he was over the project. The email could have come from other people who had their part to play and how the project wasn't managed. I know the Begin Again Challenge is basically now going to be like a cultural teaching tool for something we don't ever want to repeat again. It's like, yeah, like the Begin Again Challenge, which we didn't begin on time. It's like, we're going to use that now. We're going to get past it. But before we get past it, I. Let's evaluate it. What went wrong? Well, it starts right at the top. I wasn't clear because I wasn't clear as a leader. Now everybody else is operating off different timelines. But I wonder, do we start at the right layer? Do we start with ourselves? Are we willing to own the part we play in? Then after you take your own responsibility, if you're in charge, you have to be ruthless about examining where the people in the process didn't do their job and be willing to not care less whether they like you or not, to tell them what they need to hear about it. I'm not saying to be cruel. I'm not saying to be hateful. I'm not saying to publicly embarrass them. But I think sometimes we leave people in positions they're not really suited for because we don't want to do the dirty work of replacing them. I'm going to let that sink in for a moment and see if it rings true for anybody. Sometimes when we say do dirty work, our natural tendency would be to do the menial tasks. And that's part of it. We shouldn't be above walking by a piece of trash on the campus and picking it up. No matter what our position is, we shouldn't be above that ever. But I don't really mean just the menial stuff. What I mean by dirty work is the hard stuff, the brain work. Sitting in a meeting and knowing that something is ineffective but you know that if you open that, it's going to take six hours of your time. But volunteering for it anyway because it needs to be done, that's dirty work. That's rolling up your sleeves. When an element in a worship experience isn't right and someone sits in the room that is starting over on that element to make it right, even though they know they had to scrap all the work they did to get there, that's dirty work. That's a commitment to making the well flow. That's a commitment to effective ministry. I don't want you just committed to being busy. I want you committed to being fruitful. Ministries get frenetic and get frantic and get absolutely unfocused when there's a focus on activity rather than effectiveness. So when you start examining every level of something, you go past. Okay, attendance is flat. I guess people don't like pastors preaching anymore. I guess the news stories of 2013 are still wreaking havoc upon us. Okay, that's a layer. Can we go deeper? That might have cost us some people. Okay, that's over. Let's go deeper. Now. I have different campuses. Why is University City campus not growing? Well. Well, here's one layer. Because they started Concord. Awesome. Great. Good job. Awesome. Now why is it not growing? My objective isn't excusing a lack of flow. My objective is getting a flow going. Again, I want to know. At University City, we're open in our building and people are kind of in a holding pattern because we're in the gym and we've got to get the building as a campus pastor. LB has to willing to say, well, if culturally, if we hit the brakes for a couple of months, we're not going to be ready to have an evangelistic culture when we get the building. Because the building won't solve the problem. It will only amplify whatever we already have in place. Culturally, that's a leader. The leader says, we can't keep Blakeney full until Ballantyne is open. We have to open Weddington. That's a layer. That's a level. Boy, Blakeney 11:30 was down in attendance this week. Why was that? Anybody with a leadership chip knows because it was slammed full the week before. But I have staff members sometimes that don't understand even the most basic dynamics of this stuff. I can't grow if you don't understand what causes things to flow. We can't grow if across departments. I should be able to pick anybody in this room and present you with a major area like giving like attendance, like communication, like. Like outreach, and have an intelligent conversation with you about factors that cause it either to flow or not to flow. You should be able to intelligently discuss as a staff member at this church, why something isn't flowing and take it apart, because otherwise you won't be fruitful. Are you getting anything out of this? We're in the laboratory, so let's go through a little list. I think one of the things we're weakest at as a church does come down to evaluating effectiveness. I think we're weak at evaluating effectiveness. I don't know if it's because we've always had a certain measure of momentum. And when you have momentum, you don't have to measure. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you're a trust fund baby, you've always got money. You don't have to learn to budget. Are we the trust fund baby of the church world? Like, people have just always come, so we've never had to really look at how to get them to come. If we built it, they would come. If we preached it, they would come. If we announced it, they would come. Now we're going into new communities where people don't give a crap who we are, and we're starting all over again in momentum. And so now Raleigh is having to learn, Roanoke's having to learn. What are the things that cause that flow. It can't be Pastor Steven doing a newcomer's lunch in the senior center, asking people individually to volunteer. So we have to find new flows in that area. I got to hear a little bit of Holly's meeting with LST yesterday. I thought she did an excellent job of leadership, of evaluating effectiveness, because they were talking about stuff like the Ladies first event. They were talking about some of the outreach events. They were talking about the party we had for Christmas, and they were talking about this stuff. I was amazed at Holly's ability because I'm watching her grow as a leader. It's very, very rewarding for me to see this. I'm amazed at her level to keep a big picture in front of those ladies and then how they all worked down to the lowest level of depth to find out what was really causing the issue. I'm saying they were talking about slicing the cheese at the party. For a minute, I thought, I'm going to come in there and shut this meeting down. As my wife, the first lady of Elevation Church, really talking about slicing cheese. Somebody else can figure out if cheese needs to be sliced cheese blocks and cheese slices and all this she explained it to me. She explained to me. She said, I noticed when people came in to some of our events, we have different caterers. When we have different caterers, everybody has their own style. Some of the foods we ordered were so hard to eat that people wouldn't eat them because they wanted to talk and they weren't able to eat. All the cheese they brought in would look beautiful, but it was so hard to slice. Since people couldn't slice the cheese because it was too hard, they wouldn't go to the cheese. So it created an awkward environment and nobody was talking to one another. But if the cheese is already sliced and the foods are able to be handled easily, then people will go in and get the food. Now what she could have done is say, the energy at those events sucks. Nobody wants to be there. They don't even eat the food. They don't even appreciate the food. We don't need to have food at those things anymore. We're not having food. Next time we can fast at the next event. That's what she could have done. She could have shut down the whole idea, but instead she sliced the cheese. Do you see what I'm saying? That's what you have to do as a leader. We do dirty work. We don't make statements like, well, people just don't come on time. We don't get to say that. We don't get to say that. We get to examine why they don't come on time and try to get to a depth of level to understand what is it psychologically, what part do we play in this? I came to Blakeney this weekend. No offense to any Blakeney campus staff, but I wondered, how in God's name are we letting people stand outside at 8:50 in this nasty, foggy weather when we have a lobby that could be open to them and expecting them to want to come back to church? It doesn't matter how good I preach or how hot the new song is or how cool the opening video is. If they stood in the fog to get in there, they probably don't want to come back if that's their first experience with us. But there's a system probably where production would be happy to get ahead of schedule and open the doors if it were prioritized at the right level. We know the weather is going to be nasty this morning. We need people. Doors have to be open. This is a priority. This is leadership. People not sitting in a room thinking about ideas. That's what you think leadership is. Leadership is detail. Detail is leadership. It's examining every level. We are very stage focused, right? We're very stage focused. That's awesome. As a church, what happens on the stage deserves our utmost attention. I still believe that what we do in leading people to encounter and experience God from the stage is the most important thing we do. Because I believe that worshiping God, connecting people to his Word, I believe everything rises and falls. If that experience is from the heart and if that experience is replicated, well, I believe in that. That's awesome. That's amazing. But do you know that sometimes it's not the stage, but the systems that determine whether or not people have a good experience? The stage can be amazing. But if my experience in getting to the place where I can encounter everybody has to think like a leader. Everybody, everybody in the room has to think like a leader now. We have to understand and see things. And that's why I can't have any of y' all that only go to one worship experience a weekend. I'm sorry, I don't want you on my staff. If that's your desire, you're not a leader. If you just go to one and don't serve anywhere and don't do anything, and you think what you do in the week is disconnected from what happens on the weekend, you're not a leader. How are you going to know if what you're doing during the week makes a difference? If you don't live it out on the weekend, how are you even going to know? But I want us to think harder. If I could get you to do one thing this year to help me outside of just doing your job, one thing to help me. I need more people who know how to evaluate effectiveness. I need more people who need to look at something and know why it doesn't work. Not just that it doesn't work, that makes you a critic. To know why it didn't work, that makes you a blogger. That makes you a loser. I'm just messing around. I'm really not mad about it. Well, I kind of am. I used to pick on this all the time. I used to pick on when we would get in a moment previewing a video where campus pastors would start saying, well, maybe you could light change the color of this and you could maybe, like, I don't know, could you make this part blurry and then run that in reverse? Now I would see it on Jared's face the whole time. Like, am I really taking advice from Larry Bry about how to make a video? This is the worst moment of my career. This is not the dream I had at scad. I didn't see this coming. God, please give me strength right now to get through it. But what I like about it, what I like about it is it's a whole lot better than I didn't get. Didn't work for me. If you're going to critique the well, please be willing to roll your sleeves up and pull something out of it. Please. I'm not saying if you didn't like a worship song, give Chris your melodic ideas and lyric tweaks by one o' clock today. That's not my point. My point is it's the level you look at, something that determines your leadership capability, the level you look at it. So a follower, a church member, will say, huh, Attendance is flat. We don't have momentum right now. A leader will say, I wonder if it's that people aren't inviting anymore. I wonder if that has to do with the fact that we're not giving them invites. I wonder if it's the fact that we've been at capacity. I wonder if it's the fact that people are inviting, but that they're standing outside in the rain when they're waiting to get in. I wonder if it's the fact that it's too loud in the thing. It doesn't sound good loud. It sounds bad loud. It's like herding loud. It's not like elevation loud. It's like another kind of loud. It's like get me out of here loud. I wonder if it has nothing to do with what's happening on the stage. I wonder if it's the fact that people aren't coming to church recurrently. I wonder if it's the fact that they're just coming once every four weeks. Did you notice this week in my sermon, I didn't talk a lot about bringing your friends. I just talked about coming back. I went down the well in my thought process to realize we could increase church attendance weekly by 20% if we could just get people regularly to show back up. All I ever heard was, invite, invite, invite, invite, invite, invite, invite, invite. I realized we had people who were being invited who weren't being encouraged to come back or taught the value of coming back, or the systems in place that make them want to come back, or different things that bring them back. It's just a level you think at, examining every level. Here's another example. It means maximizing resources. It means maximizing resources. If we're going to talk about getting fresh water from old wells, I Want to ask a personal question? Do you ever listen to the sermon again after it's been preached on a weekend and sit down with your notes at a time when you're not having to focus on being a staff member and you can just take it in? Do you ever go back and say, man, there was one thing that pastor mentioned in his sermon that I wanted to go study for myself. Do you ever do that, or you just move on to the next well? The next well? I'm just trying to get you to think about, are you maximizing what's in the well or are you moving on to the next? One of the things I did last year is severely reduced the number of preachers I listened to. I decided I didn't need to listen like I did when I started to 30 different preachers or 20 different preachers in a week. I used to do that all the time. Now I have two guys I listen to every week. I track with them and I learn from them. They're very different, and my relationships with both of them are different, but I'm on that flow. It's amazing to me sometimes it's amazing to me how somebody who's not on staff will listen to a sermon six times that somebody who works here barely heard once. You're not hurting my feelings if you don't listen to my sermons. I have people who listen to my sermons. I'm not looking for podcast subscribers today, okay? I get plenty of opportunities to go and preach. I don't need a speaking invitation. I'm just saying for you to find your flow this year, there may be a depth to just one thing, but you moved on to the next thing. It's a matter of maximizing what we have before we move on. The next thing we can think of. How about this dirty work? Just examples of dirty work. Honest assessment is dirty work, isn't it? I mean, to really honestly assess something, I'm not saying to be critical. I'm not saying to just be negative, but to honestly assess something and not gloss over it, to be able to do that, you got to have a secure heart, and you got to have a certain mindset. How about this? Here's the type of dirty work that's underrated. Staying ahead. It's quiet in here in the staff lab. Oh, I'm going to go off on developing leaders is dirty work. I had a conversation with Pastor Craig about this this morning on the way, and he's teaching his staff right now while I'm teaching you. I said, where are you teaching he said, I'm teaching on one mistake of the question people ask me the most. How do you find great leaders? Because it's the wrong question. How do you build great leaders? So to build leaders is dirty work, right? One thing Chris told me, I found this fascinating. Again, all of this could be completely inaccurate. I'm just going off what Chris said. He said, a lot of times when we go, I'm making it sound like he dug the wells himself. A lot of times when they go in to dig the wells, he said, they'll remove sand and dirt, get the sand and dirt out, and that's getting the gunk out. He said, but often they have to go in and remove oil, which is valuable, but it's not sustainable. So they have to remove what's valuable to get to what's sustainable. Will that not preach? This is when you put too much of yourself in a situation instead of developing somebody else and your oil or your anointing blocks the flow of somebody else being raised up and your ministry being multiplied. God knows I'm preaching to myself because there are so many times where I think, well, I'll just do it. Well, I'll just say it. Well, I'll just get it done. Well, I'll just do it. I'll just do it. I appreciate the initiative, and I know God does, too. But no matter how valuable your opinion is or your insight is, there's only one you. So the natural gas is the thing that's sustainable and the reason we want to get to the gas, even if we have to remove the oil. The reason I want to let somebody else preach sometimes, even if I think maybe I preach better, doesn't matter. I don't just need one preacher. I need guys who can get up and speak. I need the campus pastors to have more stage time. Are there things hosts say on the weekend that I think I could say better? I'm not being ugly. But yes, yes. I think there are some things I could communicate better. I think that's my gift. I think that's my flow. I think that's what I was born to do. So there are times where I'm like, I could say this and it would get it done, but it would block the flow. Because if Jeff doesn't say it on his campus, people won't know to connect with him for the implementation of it. So I can't lead this church with me blocking the flow with my oil. So some of you are blocking the flow of what's sustainable by your own strengths, your own Strengths are blocking people that need. You are so unaware of raising up other people. You just want to get it right this time. You don't have a long term strategy, so the flow is eventually going to get blocked. Because you can't do it all forever. When you don't do dirty work, here's what you do. You do it. You just make the decision and you don't tell anybody why you made it. When you do the dirty work. See, I'm working on a book right now and I'm using a writer to take some of the parts of my sermons and turn them into written form. Then I go back and make sure it's what I want and change it and move it. So it's my book, but he's helping me write it. When I delete something from the manuscript, whose book is it? Okay, I don't have to tell him why I deleted it, but every time I do. Why? Because every time I tell him why I deleted something, he knows not to put it there the next time. That means because I took the time to make that one comment that might save me 50 deletions on the next chapter. Because I took the time to clarify one decision. Do you do this? I know you're busy, I know you're busy. I know you have a lot to do, but is there anybody? You're walking through your thought pattern so they can know. Is there anybody? You're saying now, the reason I did this, this is what I'm thinking, this one thing, that is how I lead this church, right or wrong. I don't know if it's the best way, but how I lead this church is get people around me and I show them how I think and I tell them how I think. The good, the bad, the ugly. It's not always right. This is how I think. That's how I work with our songwriters. I'll say now the reason I chose this word, because I know this sounds better, but this actually makes sense. Or this makes sense, but this sounds better. I don't know. This bothers me because this is in sequence. I know they get tired of hearing it. I don't care. Because I can't just do the thing because that's going to block the flow. We don't need one good songwriter at this church. We don't need three good songwriters. We don't need 10. We need 20, 30, 40, 50. But it's not going to flow. So strength can stop you from being sustainable because you can be so strong at something. That's why the Greatest preachers don't always build the best churches. That's why the best doers aren't always the best leaders. Because I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. You know what else is interesting? He said on the wells, you have to be careful when you go into the ground to dig a new well, because what you'll do is you'll take the energy from a well that's already there and you'll dig a new well and you'll think you're getting a new resource, but you're actually just stealing the energy from another well that was close by. I wonder how many times we do that in any given month as a staff. Leaders learn how to measure that. Leaders learn how to not suck somebody else's stuff to get your thing accomplished. I thought about having you touch your neighbor and say, don't suck my stuff. But what I will say instead of that is sometimes we have overlapping objectives. Watch this. Recover, recover, recover. It's a lab. It's a lab. It's a lab. We have overlapping objectives and we steal energy from it. We've got one volunteer going to five meetings, and nobody's thought about the fact that that one volunteer is going to five meetings. Because we look at it as five meetings, but it's really one person. So a leader would measure and say, huh? Our volunteers seem exhausted. Wonder if it's because they're going to a campus meeting on Tuesday, forward on Wednesday. But if you're not a leader, if you don't think like a leader, if your hand is slow to go up when you do that, you won't even factor it in. They say, well, I'm not the one setting up the meetings. What does this apply to me? I'm sleeping on you, Pastor. I just said it for me. Give it to them so they'll stop doing all these dumb meetings. They need to hear this. Amen. Number one, you're never going to be a leader thinking like that. So just. You're never going to have any more influence. But number two, don't you think that if you were a designer, even if nobody reported to you, this would affect what you designed? If you understood the elements of flow, if you knew what a piece was for, wouldn't you know what to put at the top and what to make it bold? If you knew what we were ultimately driving toward, do you understand? Put it up there again. Do you examine every layer or do you just stay at the surface? This is what I was asked to do. I did it Like a monkey. Like a monkey. Like a trained monkey. You did it. You sure did. And now we're going to have to redo it four times because you did not ask three questions you could have asked and gotten it right, folks. Get clarity about what you're working on. Get clarity. Even if you have to ground. Say, I want to get this right. Is this what you want? Is this what you want? Those are the best employees, I'm telling you, the ones who get clarity. And then when they're off, watch out. When they're off, they have it. When they're off, you don't have to check on them again. But when they get what they get, they know where they're going because they know the layers. I'm telling you, there's some stuff that's not working in your life and ministry today, and you're working on it from the wrong layer. You're working at it from the wrong layer. There are meetings you don't like going to, but if you would flip the order of how you did what you did, you'd like it. It's not the people in the meeting, it's the agenda order. I told Chunks and Josh the other day, I said, why is this number one and this is number 10 when this is very important and this is not important at all? What were we doing? We were our flow. Our flow. It's my fault because I never told him to prioritize a meeting. I said, how about we have to give our best energy to our highest priorities? Are you giving your best energy to your highest priorities? That question alone will change the way you work. Best energy to highest priorities. We've gotten in trouble so many times as a church because we were working on something we preferred rather than something that fulfilled the greatest purpose. Discipline, maturity, leadership gives best energy to highest priorities. I'm going to shut it down in a minute. I feel like there are some wells in our ministry that may not be flowing right now, but they're completely functional. It's just going to take somebody doing the dirty work of digging out the stuff, the stopping the flow, of going through. Nobody likes to look at, well, some of y' all do statistical analysis. I hate that. But if somebody is willing to analyze patterns, then we can actually make better decisions. If somebody is willing to not just do the task, but actually analyze it. I could use so many great examples. I used Holly and the LST Ladies, I hope you know, I could celebrate so many of you that do this in ways I know about, in ways I don't. But I know we're not going to get anywhere with staff members who think surface level. We can't do it, not where we're going. We can be where we've been with surface level. I wonder what is God challenging you to do today? Is it managing priorities? Is it embracing discomfort? Is it communicating clearly? Again, you have to examine the levels for yourself. Go down in the well and see where it's broken. Otherwise you'll make sweeping statements about things and they won't be true. You're just describing the surface. Assigning accountability is dirty work. Isn't it just in a meeting to say, now who's on point for this and when is it going to be done by and when are we going to hear about it again? Just that is life changing. But sometimes we don't do it because it's at the end of the meeting we want to get on, we don't do anything. Then the thing we talked about doesn't get talked about for seven weeks. So we started digging a well. We got half dug wells all around, none of them flowing. You see how it happens? Am I right? Is this needed, do you think? We have some wells on our property that are functional but not flowing? Is it going to take people who get in with their hands and dig it out? How are you going to do it? Sometimes it's confronting dysfunction that's dirty work. Some of you have somebody working for you right now that has no business in that role. You don't want to hurt their feelings. They're so nice. If they're nice and if you love them, don't let them do something they're not good at. It's wearing them out and wearing you out and stopping the flow of ministry. Be a big boy, be a big girl and get it done. On the other hand, some of you have volunteers under you that aren't being raised up and you just want to hire a staff member. You don't want to do the work of getting the volunteers raised up. That's dirty work. You don't need to make a hire. You need to get the people flowing that you already have. You see what I'm saying? This is powerful, man. We're going to get the wells flowing this year. Following up is dirty work. To just stay on top of things, to just say, where's this at? Starting over is dirty work. You know, I've got a lot invested in this, but this is not good. This is not right. This isn't working. I'm going to start over. Do you know how many Times I do that every week with my sermon on Thursday, on Friday. But it's all about the layers. Sometimes I have to dig through what I thought was the sermon to get to what I thought was the sermon to get to what I thought was the sermon to get to what I thought was the sermon to get to what I thought was a sermon to. Then all of a sudden, whoa, now there's the sermon. I had to dig through every layer. You want something to flow. Otherwise you will always blame the idea or idealize the idea. You'll say, that didn't work. I don't want to hear that didn't work. Why didn't it work? Where did it fall short? Because if you just say it didn't work, then we have nothing to build on next time. Was there 10% that did work? Was there 30% that did work? Let's get it. Let's implement it. Let's make sure next year we don't do the same dumb thing again. Let's do the dirty work this year. I'm going to tell you something. There are people's lives that are stopped up, and it's our job to help get it flowing. God didn't put us here just to comment on conditions. God put us here to do the work of finding out what's keeping people from connecting with God, what's keeping people from having a relationship with Him. We dig and we dig and we dig and I dig in the Word, and I labor in the Word, and you labor in your area, and we labor in our areas. But I don't think we've ever been afraid or ashamed or hesitant as a staff to roll up our sleeves and get dirty. But if you just dig at the surface and don't dig down deeper, as a leader, you'll always fix symptoms, never system. You'll cure the headache, but you won't cut out the cancer. You'll pop a pill, but you won't do the procedure it takes to really make it work. Now, out of this message today, there are going to be a dozen people who are going to dig everything out, I said, and everything I didn't say. There's a lot I didn't say that I had here. Then there's going to be some of y' all who are going to take it. That was good. Put it up and get back to work. The problem with getting back to work after you've heard something powerful is if you don't get back to work with a greater level of awareness or focus, you will not produce anything More than you did before you heard the new truth. So how would this apply in outreach? If I were an outreach, I'd be asking the question every time we put something in front of the church, does this make people see the overall value of being a part of Elevation Church and giving to the church? Or did we just show them that volunteering within the church isn't as significant as volunteering outside the church, thereby depleting our volunteer systems on our campuses, which limits us from being able to multiply? Because people now equate serving with something outside the church. And we don't even show them that serving inside the church is. Is the thing that makes service outside the church happen. What did I just do? I put the instrument all the way down in the well. And now every time I see a video, I'm asking those questions because I understand it doesn't matter how much they love blessedback worldwide if we can't give blessedback Worldwide a check and we can't give blessedback Worldwide a check if people don't tithe. People can't tithe if they're not committed to the church. So you have to go down deeper than just. Was that a cool video? Oh, that was a great video. But what did the video do in the heart of the person? Boy, we had a volunteer night. It was amazing. Was it? What do you mean? People sang loud. I'm evaluating Heart and Soul meetings. I want to know from my campus pastors on Tuesday when I meet with them, what did Heart and soul do? Oh, they were great. The people loved them. Great. Did you see people serve more? Did you see people give more? Did attendance go up? Did attendance go down? Did attendance actually go down the next weekend because we had people out there on a Thursday night? If so, is that a long term win? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. These aren't easy answers. But leadership isn't an easy job. If you don't want to hurt in your head sometimes or have to think about things, don't be a leader. Don't do it. Because leadership is to wrestle with these tensions all the time. That's what weirds me out. To preach a sermon. And not just preach it, but say, what did that sermon produce? It's to make a decision and say, I made that decision. But that's going to create this decision. Do you know how much I labored over whether to keep you in here until noon today? In my head I thought, if I'm going to keep them in there until noon today, I need to have something of substance to say, if I have you in noon, I bet you they got a lunch already that they scheduled two weeks ago, and they didn't know about this until Tuesday, so they're going to have to move it. I thought about that. I decided I wanted you in here because I want to get this in you. I decided. But I didn't just decide. Get in there until noon. I didn't decide. You evaluate, examine every layer. Why isn't this working? Is it a sequence thing? Is it a priority thing? Is it a communication thing? Stop throwing away good ideas and moving on to new ones because you didn't implement the last one well and you thought it didn't work. Stop fussing about the stuff. One of my friends called me last night. He said, you guys have the best app of any church on the planet. I said, no, we don't. He said, yeah, you do. It's awesome. I said, it's not awesome, it's terrible. He said, no, I'm telling you, man, Northpointe doesn't have one like you. And Louie Giglio doesn't have one like you. Nobody has an app like you. Your app is amazing. I said, yes, the team does a great job getting it updated. Everything looks great. It's awesome. But when we launched our app, we didn't check to see if we could have access to send push notifications to the people who downloaded it. So now all the people who downloaded it, we have no way to talk back to them because we just used somebody else's template. I hate our app. We're going to redesign it and do our own so we can actually tell people when we're releasing a worship album, when we're doing a conference, when we're having a book, when we're doing something special. Now, if you don't think like a leader, here's an example. You'll just say, man, our app looks great. Lots of people listen to it. Yeah. But has it given us an ability to get deeper into their life, into pulling? You see what I'm saying? You have to think about the systems we're building. You have to think about all this. I want to take the last few minutes of this first one to pray for each of you, for the depth of your thought, understanding, and your approach to this year. I don't know where your personal level of energy is at or what you're excited about or what you're frustrated about or where the flow is blocked. Sometimes it's a personal flow issue. Sometimes it's a personal frustration. Sometimes it's frustration that we have with other people. Sometimes it's frustration we have with what we can't figure out. Sometimes it's frustration we have with our skill and ability, and we just can't seem to get past a certain barrier. I believe that the anointing of God that makes things flow can make you better than you really are. This is where what we do is way different than if I were standing up in front of a software company and saying, we need to grow this year, we need to flow this year. We need new products this year. I have the ability to now at this point, say that what we do, that, what we're involved in, that what we're engaged in, it's either a fairytale and we're all wrong and we're wasting our lives, or it has divine backing. It has divine backing. So any lack of flow or frustration that you have in your life, I believe it's going to be overcome on multiple levels. I believe it's going to be overcome by these practical things we've talked about today. He said, if you don't abide in me, you can't do anything. He said, if you did, you will bear much fruit. I think the opening step to this year as we want to flow in new ways this year and see new opportunities open up and see new levels of effectiveness open up, is to ask God for a fresh anointing. I asked at Lake Norman last year if I could have the privilege to anoint your hands for service. We were teaching from the Sticks and Stones series at the time on anointing. I want to close the time today just by asking you guys to line up in a moment. Let me take one moment and just take some oil and anoint your hands for the service God has called you to this week. Your hands are going to get dirty this year. I hope you know that. Stained with some failures. Calloused cut, tired hands are going to cramp. You're going to get some arthritis in your hands by the time you're done working here. It's all said and done. These hands. I believe that with the anointing of God that what our hands touch can be supernaturally blessed. I believe we can find a supernatural flow of ministry. I do believe there's greater leadership ability in your mind than your tapping. But I don't believe you arrive at that greater ability or capacity just by willpower alone. I believe we need God's help. I'm going to maybe make this an annual tradition. I know for certain I want to do it this year. I want to have the opportunity to anoint you with oil. What we were planning on doing for this session, we're going to save for next month because we do have a new award that we want to give. But just trying to flow with what I feel in my heart, we're going to save that for next month. Could everyone stand, please? Did you enjoy the first lab? Well, it's a dirty job to get in people's lives and get in people's messes. It's a dirty job to grow a church and try to figure out how to keep people excited. Series after series, how to keep yourself excited. It's a dirty job, but we have a power inside of us that's great enough to get in the muck and the messes of our situations. It's messy. It's not always clear to know what decision to make. But with God's help, we're going to do it this year.
