[2015.5.7] Staff Lab: ABC - Always Be Connecting (#4)

Today I want to talk to you about something that has driven my communication and really my leadership. But I'm just getting the words for it and the language for it in StaffLab. I call it StaffLab. I chose not to call it some masterclass or seminar because I want it to have the vibe of here's something I'm thinking about and inviting you that lead the church to think about it with me. I get nervous coming in here because I bring you stuff for the most part that isn't completely organized yet or FDA approved, as I like to say. It's just we're in here, we're trying to talk about big ideas that are going to lead us forward. The way this one has come to me, I not only think it has significance practically immediately where you can apply it to multiple areas of your life, but just the concept. If I can unpack it correctly, I think it will show you what success in the next decade of our ministry will require. I know that's a big statement and I don't want to put your expectations too high because I don't know that I know all that it means. Just as I've been collecting some different impressions from things I've seen, things I've been exposed to, what I'm going to tell you about the skill we have to develop, it's what seems to set ministries apart that just make a local impact or a local splash and those who are able to bring something together that goes much further than where they are. That's the point we're at. That's the point we're at. You'll hear a lot of language from me. Seizing the opportunity as we go into the second decade of our ministry. In February, you're going to hear a lot about the first 10, the next 10, 10 again, you're going to hear a lot of language from me, like Elevation 2.0, relaunching the church, because I'm always looking for an opportunity to hit refresh on the mindsets and on the reasons that we do what we do and just really to help people get in at a more fundamental level. You'll hear a lot of that, but to really get us thinking out ahead of just the general church, I want to talk to you on the subject today of abc. Campus pastors aren't allowed to answer this, but anybody but a campus pastor can answer. What might that stand for? It's a skill that sets the best communicators apart from the mediocre communicators. It's a skill that sets the most creative people apart from those who just have ideas. It's the skill that sets leaders apart from those who just follow A, B, C. Any ideas always bring clarity. Would be a good one. I could totally teach on that. I'm not going to today, although there is a little bit of a. You'll see in a minute. That is a part of it. Always be curious. Would certainly apply to you, man, but I'm going to go a different route today. I'm going to go a different route today. You've got the first two words right. Always be communicating for sure. Because we always are, whether we realize it or not. So even non verbally, we're communicating. By the way, even your silence speaks. One thing I wish I could get everybody to understand is that your facial expressions, your countenance, it all speaks. We've talked about that in church before, but it happens in here. It happens in here and it happens in all the meetings you're a part of. So that's good. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about always be connecting. Always be connecting. Who do you think has had more job titles than any other staff member who is still currently a staff member? Say it louder. Say it again. Say it louder. Say it real loud. Everybody say, LB Skinner has had more job titles than any other staff member. I won't take the time to list them all. I only have two hours. But man, he's been it all. But of all the job titles that he's had, your assimilation pastors and your campus pastors and your associate campus pastors, my favorite title LB has ever had, and I think we ought to bring it back, is Connections Pastor. I love that title. It's kind of a buzzword in the church, so we don't use it as much anymore. This man used to leave me voicemails in Shelby. He would say not what he wanted to talk to me about, but he would just say this and Ray can affirm. Just want to connect. Hey, it's Larry. Just want to connect. That would always bug me because I'm like, man, that's so broad. I don't know if you want me to do something for you. I don't know if you just want to ask me how are me and Holly getting along in our marriage. I don't know if you have bad news, good news, just want to connect. Yet I think that LB and I could mention others of you as well. He does have a gift for connection. It's a certain gift I sent out A text message yesterday and I told a few staff members I was going to preach on connection. One said, do you mean connecting with other people? I said, no, no, not in that way. In a much, much bigger way than that. I'm coming to a conclusion after 10 years of leading a church that really everything we do about connection. I'm coming to a conclusion that any one of your job titles, if we were going to change, it could be changed to connections. Pastor. That is really the job of every church member. Not just church staff member, but every church member. Everything we do is about connection. I'm convinced, furthermore, that intelligence is the ability to make the right connections. Nothing more, nothing less. There are different types of intelligence, but any form of intelligence, any category of intelligence, comes down to the ability to make the right connections. I'm convinced that all progress in humanity is based on the growing ability of people to make the right connections. Can I unpack this a little bit? I told Chunks the other day, I don't want stafflab to be boring, but neither do I want it to just be a reprise of the weekend. I motivate you on the weekend. I try to help you practically in your life on the weekend. But in here I'm trying to speak to that top 20%. I'm trying to speak to people who need to understand the substance of what's going to make this grow and make it multiply, because that's what you're in the room for. I want to give you a little theological foundation for this and then maybe just a sociology kind of case study type thing, and then bring it home as much as I can. In Ephesians 4, 15, 16, the apostle Paul makes a connection, an unexpected connection. He says, instead, speaking the truth in love. So there's a connection. I'm going to make the case throughout this that what gets people's attention is when you give them an unexpected connection. Speaking the truth in love is often an unexpected connection. We tend to operate in either or. You either tell the truth or you're loving. Paul is bringing two things together. It's a connection. Everybody say connection. He's making this connection between two things. We often separate, but we shouldn't. He's saying in order to mature. And you can read the context of Ephesians 4, it's awesome. That's the one where he talks about, he gave some to be prophets, apostles, pastors, evangelists, graphic designers, all those different things. In Ephesians 4. He says all of this is being brought together so that God's people will be built up for works of service. He says when this happens, when we get the right connection, when we're connected like we should be connected, we will grow to become in every respect, everything in our lives being connected. Not just that we're in this area of our life maturing. Not just that we're spiritually maturing, not just that we're emotionally maturing, not just that our bodies look better because we're embracing fitness, but in every respect it's a connection, it's an integration. It's a holistic approach. He said in every respect we'll become the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ. Let me make one important point before I go to verse 16. It's kind of hard for us to be connected as a body. If we lose our connection to our head as staff members, it's going to be kind of hard for us to connect others to a Christ we're not abiding in. It's going to be kind of hard for us to connect others to a power that isn't flowing in our lives. That's why the first thing, always when you feel ineffective in ministry, is to check your own personal connection with God. It's amazing how complicated we try to make things and sometimes it's as simple as a connection. I showed this to the cps. Give me my little ring there. I showed this to the CPS where a few months ago, me and Holly came home from church on a Sunday and I had been preaching about inconvenience. God is funny because he'll connect what you preach about to your life and see if you believe wasn't a big deal. But all of a sudden we heard this rushing water sound back in our bedroom somewhere. We were eating at the table. The only reason we heard it is because kids weren't there. If they'd been there, we'd never heard it. We heard this rushing water and we don't have any waterfall in our bedroom. Just for the record, we heard this rushing water coming through the ceiling and ran back to find this steady pour of water coming through the vent. The air conditioning heating vent in the ceiling. This is the difference between a man and a woman. Just general intelligence level and the ability to make connections. I went and got a trash can to catch the water. Holly went upstairs to check it at the source. She turned off the source of the problem. I was just collecting the drops. Sometimes you're too much like me where you're just bringing out buckets to try to deal with stuff that's happening. But don't go upstairs. When she went up, she turned off the water. It ended up being massive damage. I think tens of thousands of dollars of damage just from those few minutes it had been dripping. But it was all traced back. Not to a bad washing machine, not to a bad vent. There was nothing wrong with the floor that the water leaked through. That leaked through to the other floor. It went everywhere. It was unbelievable. Our house was ripped up for a couple weeks, if not months after this. But it was all because this little 129 guy that was supposed to hold the hose to the wall was too loose. I used it to the CPS to say that sometimes it's a real simple connection that can cost you a lot in your life. Sometimes it's a real simple disconnect. That's why you can never underestimate. I'm going to prove this if I have time at the end where the hand can't say to the foot, I don't need you. And the parts of the body we think are weaker because they're hidden are the most indispensable. Never think that what you do doesn't have a big impact because the washing machine was fine, the floors were fine. There was nothing wrong with any of the major equipment. It was something that cost $1.29 that wasn't clamped on tight enough. That created a lot of damage in our house. In churches, a lot of times a lot of damage is created because the connections aren't tight. Now the whole house is flooded and the whole house has to be ripped apart. All because of a connection. The next time you think about cheating something, leaving something undone, compromising something. You have to know the value of connections, especially in your walk with Christ, but in your connections with others, which we'll talk about. Verse 16 from him. That's the source. Nothing wrong with him. The whole body joined and held together. What's that? A picture of connection. The whole body held together. Joined together by every supporting ligament grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its. I love it all through the scripture you see the power of connection. A few examples, and you can take these and teach them if you'd like. David made powerful connections that made him successful in battle. Case in point, the same God that delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from this uncircumcised Philistine. It's a connection. He's connecting his past victories to his current battle. He's connecting his past experience to his current challenge in Making that connection, he was strengthened for the fight. This is what will enable you to keep growing in your area. If you can say, I've never done this before, but I can take what I learned doing that and apply it to this. I can make the connection. If I can make the connection, I can rise above the challenge. Joseph had this ability to make connections. He said to his brothers, you meant it for evil. God meant it for good. What's that? It's an unexpected connection. It's the ability to make a different kind of connection between pain and purpose. Most people assume that pain and purpose are the opposite. Joseph saw a different connection. He said, no, the pain I was experiencing was creating the opportunity for the purpose. The opportunity and the opposition were connected. You'll have a greater perspective in your life if you can learn to make the connection between what you've been through that you wouldn't choose and where God is taking you. Do you remember what I told you about the media attack? I wouldn't choose it, but I wouldn't change it. I have to learn from the connections. I can't resent things that happened to me. I have to connect what happened to what God is doing. Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost. He said, you've heard it spoken by the prophet Joel. And he starts to quote different things the prophet Joel had predicted. Then he says a phrase we really love around here. And you remember this. Aaron used to say it a lot at the senior center. He said, this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel. What is he doing? He's connecting the promise of God, the prophecy, to their experience of it. He's saying this is that. He's connecting what God spoke back then to what they're seeing right now. I think that's one of the most important connections you can learn to make in your own life and as a leader. What God spoke and what you're now seeing. Sometimes you can be staring at what God spoke and not even know it happened because it's growing up before your own eyes. But we have the ability to make that connection. There are some poor connections too. In the scripture Gideon Judges chapter six, the angel comes and speaks to him and says, you're mighty warrior, even though Gideon was in a winepress. That's an interesting connection that a guy in hiding would be called a hero. God makes interesting connections about our lives. He tends to see us becoming something we don't yet believe about ourselves. The angel makes this connection. He says, I see your potential and I see your problem. It's no issue for me. He calls him a mighty warrior. But Gideon says, well, if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? It's an incorrect connection. Their own disobedience had created their dysfunction, but he wanted to blame it on factors outside of his control. Job's friends came to ostensibly comfort him in his time of trouble, but they were no help to him because they made incorrect connections. Man, you must have done something horrible. Job. That boils all over your nose to have lost your family, to have lost your children. You better get right with God, because obviously it's something you did that's producing where you are. And God at the end of the book of Job goes into this whole thing where he's like, where were you when I created the heavens and the earth? And God brings it together in the way only he can. He says, be careful that you don't make the wrong connections. When you make bad connections, you make wrong corrections. Let me move into that for a moment. When you make bad connections, when you connect one thing with another thing that really isn't connected, if you don't learn how to make godly connections and true connections and wise connections and insightful connections, if you don't learn how to do this, you'll connect the wrong things, then you'll correct the wrong things. You'll go through five different jobs before you understand that the people you were working with were never the thing that was keeping you from your success. You can do that with marriages. You can do that on every level. The best example I could think of, I was just thinking for God to show me an example. He told me to talk about gluten. Anybody? Gluten free in the house. That's great, John. Gluten free ld. That's great. Gluten free. Gluten free makes some noise. Somebody told me, I don't know, I didn't have time to research it, but they said it was a $4 to $5 billion industry now, the gluten free industry. Gluten free. Gluten free. Here's the interesting thing about it. It wasn't even really known about until just a relatively short time ago. I picked up this book in the airport coming back from Australia, I believe, where this girl. I'm not recommending the book to you or anything, but I just wanted to see what she did with this title. The Opposite of Loneliness was her title. It was this girl's essays. She had died, but they had published some of her essays. Marina Keegan, in one of the Chapters, she talked about her mom's obsession with gluten free. She said, early in my life, she discovered that I had celiac disease. That's the autoimmune disease, which makes you have an internal inflammatory reaction to gluten, which is the protein found in certain grains. But this was in the 80s. Gluten free wasn't a thing. It wasn't a Hollywood thing. It wasn't a Dr. Oz thing. Nobody was talking about gluten free. So the girl's mom, when she started losing all this weight at 18 months old, had to have a surgery because she says it. It's kind of gross, but she says her stomach pushed into her chest, which led to malnutrition. The girl is starving to death, but no doctors can figure out why. The girl, 18 months old. Now she's going into doctor after doctor after doctor after doctor after doctor, trying to find out what's wrong. Her mom, not satisfied with the answers the doctors give. We don't know what's wrong with your daughter. Goes into the best libraries in Boston. And the old school way, this is the 80s, the old school way. Starts flipping through every medical book until she gets to the C's and finds celiac disease, finds out about celiac disease, walks back into the hospital, tells the doctors, test her. They said, we don't even know much about this. Test her, Tested her. That's exactly what it was. And her health turned around. I share that. To say this, when you care enough about something, you'll find the connection. If that's your child, you're not going to just let your child starve to death because some doctors told you, well, we can't figure out what's wrong. I found out that when people really care about something, they don't just gather information about it. They dig until they find the right connection. The girl said in her book, her mom actually were watching a video of her first birthday party, a home video, when she was a teenager. One of the videos had the girl eating her first birthday cake. She looked over at her mom and her mom was crying on the couch. She said, mom, what's wrong? The mom said, I was poisoning you. I was poisoning you right there with your Mickey Mouse candles. I was poisoning you. But I hadn't made the connection. You can't administer the cure if you don't make the connection. We're in the business of helping spiritually sick people get healthy. In order to bring the right cure, we have to make the right connections. The level of your leadership is determined by the Depth of your connections? Do I need to slow down? I feel like I'm so full of what I'm studying, I just want to spit it all out at once. What did I say, Ray? Something about the depth and the level. I can prove it to you. I can prove it to you in so many ways. I read a book a couple of years ago called Imagine. It's about how creativity is born. It's a cool book. It went under some controversy, but one story I never forgot, and I want to get my details right. They talked about a guy who worked in an adhesive division. Let me find his name. Arthur Fry. He worked for a company called 3M. One day in 1974, he attended a tech forum on adhesives. And he was watching this guy who was presenting this weak glue he had developed. It could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Well, Arthur Frye happened to sing in a Presbyterian church in North St. Paul, Minnesota that Sunday. The preacher was preaching unusually boring sermon, something none of you can relate to. It said that while he was kind of dozing off in his mind, he had this idea because he was looking in his hymnal for the closing hymn, because he sang in the choir. He would put these little bookmarks in his hymnal to mark his pages, but they would always fall out when they got moved around the next week, while he's sitting through the boring sermon looking for the invitation hymn. And he remembered the boring seminar he sat in earlier that week where the guy was showing about the weak glue that really had no purpose. It came to him, wait a minute, I could use that glue, put it on a paper and make a bookmark that would stick. So he went to his friends and he made up a little batch and he started handing them out. He had the opportunity because he worked in a company that supported this kind of thing and he had the resource to it. So he made some bookmarks and handed them out. But he noticed that nobody ever reordered any of them because they only needed them one time. And you can't sell a product if nobody needs to reorder it. But then he had an idea to write something down on it. When he wrote something down on it and passed it on the front of a paper to a friend, the friend had to get a new one and write something down back. I just told you the story of how the post it note was born from an unexpected connection. All creativity is a matter of connections. Creativity isn't just for the people who are the smartest or who have the newest ideas, who have the most intelligence or the most information. I'm telling you, creativity is for the people who look for the best connections. You want to be more creative, make better connections. You want to be more effective, make better connections. You want your leadership to improve. You want to have more impact, make better connections. Here's a diagram. Do you have that first one I sent that I said would be 2? A guy drew this. He said, here's the difference between information and knowledge. This is information. Next slide. This is knowledge. Go back to the first one again. This is the difference between a follower and a leader. This is a follower. I have all this information. This is a leader. I bring it together. Go back to the first one. This is the difference between somebody who has a lot of good ideas and I'm going to write a book one day. That's great. God bless you. Why do you think you want to write a book? Because I have all these ideas for stories. This doesn't make a book. This makes a book. It's when you can connect the idea to the characters, to the plot, to the subplot, to the antagonist, to the protagonist. That's what it's going to take to make a book. Go back to the first one. I love writing music. I write stuff in my notebook all the time. Great. That's not a song. A song isn't a line here, a line there, an idea here, an idea there. This is a song. When you bring everything together in a way. Okay, go back. This is somebody who knows a lot of theology. Jesus taught as one who had authority. He brought it together. He took what had been taught about God. He took what had been partially understood about God and brought it together and connected it and brought it all together so we could see what God was truly like. He made the connection. That's what the cross was about. It was about a connection. That's why Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5, 20, we have a ministry of reconciliation. That's what we do. We. We help connect people. Go back. I don't necessarily need the scripture. This is how people are coming into our church. Their life is a series of random events. I know this is kind of like what I taught about patterns, but this is patterns 2.0. This is the next level. This is going to help you really put it into practice. People come in and they have this thing over here and that thing over there and this ambition and that adversity and this thing with their kids and that thing with their boss and this thing. And that happened to them when they were five. And they want to do that. And this is their dream, but this is their bank account, and this is this and this and this and this and this. Every week we get the privilege, as those who have the ministry of reconciliation, to help people see how it's all connecting. That's why Paul said, your life changes when you can say all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose. It's a connection you make. That's what we get the privilege to do, is to help people make connections. We don't always get to determine, go back, what all happens in someone's life that we minister to, or even what happens in our own life, but we get to help show the connection to see that God is in this. When I teach preaching, what I really try to teach to people who say, okay, what have you learned about sermons over the last 10 years that you've been preaching every week? I don't know that I'm ready to teach about preaching yet. I feel like I'm just finding my own voice in a lot of ways. But one thing I would say is that a great message has to have a great connection. We might express that in different ways. One of the CPS was asking me the other day, how do you get the twist? I said, what are you talking about? He said, the Patterson twist. He said, you always have a twist in your message. I said, well, I don't look at it like a twist. That's not what my goal is. Sometimes it might be like a look what I spelled or oh, look how the title. But all I'm really trying to do is create a new neural pathway, not only in somebody's mind, but a new connection in their heart. When I'm going to preach now, you apply this to the area where you work. But this is where I work when I'm going to preach. What I'm looking for is two things that I know are both true, but I can't figure out how they work together yet. When that moment of insight happens, we call it a light bulb or an aha. The only problem with that is it makes it sound like magic. It's not. It's the hard work of making an unexpected connection. An unexpected connection. The old businessman who said, everybody wants to ask me about luck, but the truth is, the harder I work, the luckier I get. What's that? That's a connection. You want to think hard work and luck are two different things. I'm telling you that hard work creates opportunity. It's a connection. While I'm teaching right now, you should be making connections about things. I'm not even saying you should be connecting what I just said about my sermons to what you do in data management. You should be connecting what I just said about sermons to what you do in children's curriculum. You should be connecting this to fashion. That's really what has changed the most about my approach to sermon preparation. Brandon. I don't do sermon preparation anymore. I live in a state of preparation that way. Every commercial that comes on the tv, that's a potential connection to a truth in scripture. They did a Mother's Day thing, you'll see this week. I don't know how many of you have seen it. It's awesome. It wasn't original. It was an interpretation of something that was seen when they made the connection between the way we could execute it and the original idea. There's nothing new under the sun. We're not going to arrive at new levels by discovering new ideas, but by making new connections between ideas that are already there. You can see it in so many different ways. This idea of connection, the power of connection. That's what I'm always looking for. How does this go with that? We can get corrective in a moment, but I just want to give you four major headings to think about for yourself personally. This is kind of what makes to me someone who is successfully creative or successful contributor or somebody who is growing. Remember, my theory I'm working off of is that all progress is a result of a correct connection. Gluten free. There were people who were sick for decades, didn't know why until we discovered the connection between what they ate and how they felt. It took me years of being married, Holly to realize the connections that drive marriage. The things I could say to her that would build her up, the things I said that tore her down, the way I was making her feel by little things I said. I didn't know I was doing it. It's just that I needed to see the connection. When you care enough about a relationship, if you care enough about the church, you won't just be doing a job putting dots on the screen. You'll be helping make connections. It took me years to realize the connection between my physical fitness and the way I felt emotionally. I didn't realize it until one day somebody said about somebody they felt comfortable in their own body. When they got in shape. I thought, that's it. When I'm not in shape, I don't feel comfortable in my own body. When I Don't feel comfortable in my own body. I react in ways that are irritated when I eat a lot that I shouldn't eat. It doesn't make me feel better because I celebrate it. It makes me feel worse. I feel good for three minutes and bad for three days. I made a connection that when I'm not doing these things right, when I don't have these disciplines, these disciplines slip. You can really learn a lot about yourself from your connections. That's what growth is. That's what intelligence is. That's what leadership is. That's what life is. Making the right connections. Let's look at 4. Are you able to connect decisions to destiny? I bring it up because very few people ever connect the two. A lot of people do see their life as a series of random specks on a screen. They make assumptions about destiny, that I'm supposed to be this way. Like the man who told me one time in a hospital, I was just never meant to have money. That was my destiny. He's saying. I talked to him a little bit more about his decisions. How he would always empty out the savings account to go to Disney World every summer. Decisions interpret it as destiny, never making the connection. It works the other way too. Because a lot of people will believe that God has a great destiny for them, but not figure out what are the decisions that are going to get me to that destiny. I had to figure that out in being the pastor of a church. Just because God told me in my heart at age 16 that I could do this didn't mean I would. There had to be decisions put in place about my friendships. Had to be decisions put in place about my inputs. Had to be decisions put in place about what I was going to focus on and specialize in and what I was going to learn. I was memorizing Tony Evans sermons on cassette tapes while you were at a keg party. So don't laugh at me now because I'm 35. I was making decisions to support a destiny. I didn't always make the right decisions either. But having this idea of your destiny without connecting it to your decisions is kind of blaming God for things he put within your reach, within your control. That's true of us as a church too. We can have a great destiny to touch a lot of people. But without reverse engineering the decisions that lead to that destiny, you can have a real disparity. That's what I'm trying to say. I think the people who get stuck on one side or the other, maybe they just make a lot of decisions, but they never really tap into God about their destiny. They just kind of find themselves going through life winning a bunch of series of different battles, but losing the war. But if they just have a sense of destiny but don't figure out what are the decisions and get around people that can help them see what are the decisions that will lead to this type of destiny. Either way, if you don't make the connection, you won't be able to make the contribution. Next one, please. Can you connect opportunities to objectives? This is where focus is so important. This is where we say we can do more by doing less. I know I've said this a lot so I won't belabor it, but just because it's a good opportunity doesn't mean it's the right time. Just because it looks good doesn't mean it is right for me. I preached to the pastors last week. We had the best time in Orlando preaching to the Pastors and Leadership Conference. One of the things I really tried to get them to see is what are you winning at? I preached to the generation group last night and I just did a whole thing about scorecards, kind of building off of goals. What I thought this weekend I said, some of us need to switch scorecards. We're winning in columns that won't really bring satisfaction. You can be trying to win off of somebody else's scorecard. You can be winning in a sport you didn't even sign up to play. Like who made this scorecard? Who says that's successful? So aligning opportunities with objectives is so important at this stage. What do we have a lot of right now as a church? Oh, opportunities for days. There's an extension site group in Antarctica and they'd like to know if we'd come over there. Stephen Webb has already been over three times and we talk about this. I want you to know what we're talking about. Back behind closed doors where Josh comes in and he's like, here's some extension site groups. I have to ask the question, is this opportunity a step toward the objective we have? Or else I'll just compile points on the wrong scoreboard. Next one. Can you make a connection between talent and team? I meet a lot of people who are gifted, but their ability to work with others is always the limitation on the expression of their gift. I help myself preach this seminar. I love it. Everybody say connect until you can take what your good at doing and join it together with what's important for us to do. I don't need somebody who can dance Good. If I'm trying to score a touchdown, your touchdown dance didn't gain me any yards. So can you align your talent, you bring with the objectives of the team, with the personalities of the team? Can you bring people together? Like, if you're a leader, if you're responsible for. For leading something, your ability to connect people's talents, other people's talents and put them in a team that can work together, that's what determines whether or not you have success and progress. You can have a group of talented people that make a terrible team, or you can be the San Antonio spurs and you can be like, okay, it's not our individual talent, it's our team approach. What we know how to do, what we have to learn how to do is get everybody. We might be 2 talent, 2 talent, 2 talent, 2 Talent, 2 talent, 2 talent,2 talent, 2 talent, 2 talent. If we get enough twos, we can do more than a few fives. The last one is success and significance. I thought Brad Starr was going to jump up last night when I said this, or maybe it was Jonathan, but one of them, because what I said was, you could build a series. You could write a book on this. I talked about the man who built the house on the rock, Matthew 7, and the man who built the house on the sand. This is just a thought God gave me for those high school students. It says, one built the house on the rock. Rain came downstream, throws, winds blew, beat against that house, fell with a great crash. The other one stood. One took the words of Jesus, didn't do anything with them. One took the words, put them into practice. That's what made the difference. Here's why I said, success is determined by what you build. Significance is determined by what you build on. We don't want to be a church or I don't want to be a person. We don't want to be a family that just piles up individual successes without saying, what is the significance of all this? Without asking the question, without, let's see it again. Without. Can I see them all in one place? Connecting the. I had to do it one time, man. It wouldn't be a staff lab if I didn't spell something. Tell somebody, Connect the dots. Did you catch me, Heather? You got it before I said it. How many didn't see me spelling it? Be honest, okay? But that's one thing I'm doing for you, what I'm teaching you. There's a point in preparing where I go. How much do I want to connect this? That's Hard to come up with. I know I make it look easy. I mean, hello, I do it every week, but to go through, my God, how many D words did I look at? Because I didn't just want it to sound good or spell something. I wanted it to be good. I didn't want to just say connect deafness with disablement. I wanted it to have some content. You can make a connection that sounds good but isn't true. Just sounded good. Wow. I don't know what it means, but, God, it starts with the same letter. That's not a connection that won't change anybody's life. That's a surface level connection. The connections we make for people are only as powerful as what we're connecting them to. What we're connecting them to always be connecting. Let's go to the staff level for a moment. Go to staff level. Just a few questions for you, then we'll go into lab groups. These are the things I'm trying to connect in my approach. And I'd like you to make a priority for yourself, your department, your team as well. Let's always be asking this question, how does what's now connect to what's next? How does what's now connect to not what's next? It was important for me that I knew the theme of Staff advance before I came to teach you stafflap today because this is my best opportunity to create an on ramp in front of you to make the the smallest connection. I could say, Staff advance is coming up to make a little better connection. I could say it's going to be 7-15-17. To make the best connection. I say touch your neighbor and say, increase the reach. I'm getting that in the bloodstream. So when I say it in July, I don't have to wait for you to warm up to it. Everybody who is going to help create for Staff advance has a little Runway, but that doesn't happen if you don't back up and say, what's next? That's hard to do, to be honest with you. I've been creating so much content the last few weeks. I'm really standing outside of myself the last few weeks going, thank you, Jesus. Because all of the content that has been going through it started in Australia. Holly has been with me for all of it. A few of the team have seen it. It's the grace of God. But there was a part of me who felt like I was doing good to just come do stafflab today. Chunks even asked me at the beginning, do you want to do StaffLab. I said, yeah, I want to do stafflab, but to take it to the next level. Not that he doesn't like stafflab. He's just looking out for me. He cares about me more than he cares about you. Get over it. That's the way the church is built. He said, are you sure you want to do it? I said, yeah. Then to do it was one thing, but to use it to get to what's next, that's a connection. I don't always do this. Well, my cardinal sin is I'll say screenshout at 9:31 week and never mention it again. I'm bad at connecting something. I like to start something new and do something new and do something fresh and do something new and do something new. Sometimes I like to paint dots more than I like to connect them. We put this in the context of new wells and old wells for the first staff lab. Remember? More fun to dig a new well one time than to unclog an old one. Whatever. However we said it. But the idea we're getting to, and I'm telling this to Wade, I told him on a flight the other day, I said, man, don't ever be up doing something that you're not pointing people to what's next because we're always taking people on steps. One of the best things I heard Andy Stanley say early in the church and I think it's good for us to hear again going into the next 10 years he would say think steps, not programs. Think steps, not programs. Think steps, not programs. Think steps, not events. Where is this leading? Where is this going to what's next? What's next? It's not that we don't enjoy now. That's another extreme. Because if you don't enjoy now, you won't have strength for what's next. If you don't enjoy now, what's the point in what's next? If it's just always God is about to and God is going to, then even when you get there, you won't realize you made it. But if you think steps, it's like I'm here, going there, using this to get people to that, this to that, to that to that to that. That's a connection. That's a connection. You have to be asking, so apply it. This is where we get past all the scriptural and post it notes and the gluten free. All of that was just to get you to ask some questions in a larger context. I'm thinking through connections. When I went to the conference, I preached at last week, I'm going to tell you one thing that blew me away. We were at an event called the International Pastors and Leadership Event. I saw very little branding that said International Pastors and Leadership Conference. The whole time I was there, everything I saw said Megafest. Megafest is the next event Bishop Jakes would host in August. We're at this, but we're going to that. And it's not that we only use this as a stepping stone to get to that, but it's that we have that in mind while we're doing this. It's May. I have 8,000 pastors together in August. I need 100,000 people together. The pastors are my connection to the people. So everything I walked by said megafest. Megafest. Do you know what else said Megafest? My hotel key. Holly showed it to me. She said, babe, the hotel key says megafest. That's a connection. We're great at connections in certain areas. I'm going to say something, and I'm not saying this so you can say, oh, no, Pastor, you're the best. Shut up. Don't say anything back. The church is not built because I'm the greatest preacher. That's not it. That's not it. I think I am an effective preacher and God has gifted me. But if you ask a large selection of people why they come to the church, a lot of them might even say the preaching. That's their experience of why they come to the church. But there are a thousand connections that make the preaching powerful. So they might see, oh, it's the preaching, it's the worship, whatever they would say about it. But it's really the integration of all those other things that make that powerful. I quit asking people, why do you come to the church? Because they don't even really know. They don't even really know. It's the fact that what they saw at the road and the people they saw in the parking lot, and it's the systems and their kids were safe. And then because their kids were safe, they were able to come in. And then because of this and because of that and because of the thing and because of the thing, they don't know how to describe it and they don't need to, but it's all. It's our job to make sure all the connections are made, the big ones and the little ones, and realize that our part is significant, your part is significant in that process. We're always taking people somewhere as leaders, right? Wouldn't that be the definition of leadership? You're Taking people somewhere. Otherwise it's sittership, stayership. Unless you're making a connection. Follow me. Make disciples. Make the connection. Make the connection. How about this one? What is the connection between my effort and my effectiveness? I mean, by that, are you putting your best effort into what's most important? There is a connection. Why would I put 20 hours of my week into dealing with things that produce less than 20% of my outcome? There's so much I could do in a week. You do know that really, when it comes down to it, 80% of what I give to this church happens in three 55 minute blocks on Saturday night and Sunday. Now I do other stuff, but I will never let the other stuff keep me from putting the best effort where it matters the most. Have you made that connection yet? Do you even know what matters the most about what you do? Do you even know? For me it's pretty obvious. It's kind of the thing, but in other areas it's more abstract. I bet if you could talk to some people, they could help you see it. I bet if you could evaluate some patterns and some connections, say, okay, when I did that, I noticed that don't make the connection to what people applauded to the most and think that's the thing that matters the most. That's a bad connection. So if you make that wrong connection, then you're going to come to a wrong conclusion. Then. Now you're going to be putting the effort into the stuff people are the loudest about. We don't do that. We don't put the effort into the stuff people are the loudest about. We put the effort into the stuff that moves us forward in what we're called to do the most that determines figuring out what that is. That means thinking about it. That means working on it, not just working in it. What am I doing in isolation that could be strengthened through integration. Connection, Connection. What am I doing alone? All one, alone, Just me. That if I were doing it in integration or what are we doing as a campus, that if we hooked up to something larger, that the whole church is doing. Where are we creating? I wrote down three connection killers. I'll give them to you real quick. Things that kill us from making the right connections. Number one, silence. Connection killer. It's a connection killer if you don't ever ask, if you don't ever speak, if you don't ever evaluate. Silence is a connection killer. Silos. Silos are connection killers. If you don't understand how what your ministry does contributes to what the whole ministry is doing. How can you ever do it with any effectiveness? How can you make the connection? If the brain isn't talking to the heart and the heart isn't pump into the organs, what good are we without a connection? We're the body of Christ more than any other organization. What we do ought to be connective. I think it is. I think this staff has a great willingness to connect. But do you have the knowledge to know what's important right now? What's going on right now? I'm going to go to video team for a minute. If. If you make a video, not only what was the point of that video, but did you care enough to check to see if people texted to give after we told them text to give. I'm going to stop there. It's very small, but it's a very good connection to point out. We're doing this new segment called verb. It's an idea to let the worship experience breathe so we can give people the opportunity as people give more and more electronically and all that. Just a way to share more stories. It's going to be awesome. But if the video team judges it on an aesthetic alone and doesn't connect the aesthetic to the action we want people to take, my God, I'm going to put this online. I'm going to put it for every leader. If you don't connect the aesthetic to the action, you might not have moved anything. You just moved stuff around. It looks sexy. It didn't pay bills, it looked sexy. It didn't feed little kids, it looked sexy. It didn't build a campus. It looked sexy. It didn't inspire generosity. Now, all that said, I think VERB looks sexy and it is good. So it's good. But I'm using an example of something that could be disconnected to show you how you can't just assume that video has nothing to talk to about contributions. You can't just assume there's a disconnected organization, is an impotent organization. You can't do it in isolation. We can't move, we can't grow. We can't progress if we don't connect. I will tell you that I think in the first 10 years we specialized in creation. We make stuff looks good. Creation, creation to get from here to there. I believe it's going to take us understanding connection. That's why I think this is the key to the next 10 years in big ways and small ways. 2K2. It's our pipeline for how we're going to raise up leaders. Do you think in any Space in your brain about how you could help us recruit for that program. If not, are you really connected? Are you connecting to the fact that you're part of the recruiting department for the church? Are you connecting to the fact that what you put on your social media has an impact on the people you're called to serve? Are you making connections? Sometimes we just post stuff and do stuff. I've done it and you've done it. We've all done it and not even thought about how it was coming across. You have to make connections. Here's an example. When I'm deciding, will I take an extension site somewhere, I have to make a connection between friends. I already have that pastor, churches in that area. I can't just think, oh, well, there are 80 people meeting in a living room. We should start an extension site. I have to think about the message it sends. I don't want to just start extension sites as fast as I can to send a message to the rest of the church in America that we're coming to every town and we're a threat. That doesn't help. So I have to think of the connections. You have to think about not only your intention, but the perception of your intention. Do you make that connection? You can mean one thing and send another message because you didn't make the connection. Touch everybody you can reach. Say, make the connection. Make the connection. Make the connection. Make the connection between what you do and what we do. Make the connection between what you meant and what people heard. Make the connection between what you're working on and how it's coming across. Make the connection between your effort and your effort. Just make connections. That's creativity. That's intelligence. They've actually proven. They have proven that general intelligence is the result of one part of your brain connecting with another. If that's true of your brain, is true of the body of Christ, the more people we connect, it's not just about connecting within ourselves, our decisions to our destiny, but it's about seeing yourself as a connector. We used to use the phrase a lot that I'm a connector to the current of the power of Christ. I'm a connector to the current of the power of Christ. I'm a connector to the current. He's the head to the current of the power of Christ. I'm not going to be a very good connector if I'm not connected. You have to make those connections. What I'd like you to do now is break down the different elements of what I've discussed. I'll give A few examples. You could take the four categories I discussed that I spelled, dots. I mean, so brilliantly, I might add. You could take a few of those questions that I just asked, tweak them, make them applicable. You could share, even personally, and say, here's some dots I didn't connect, and here's how I saw it affect us, and here's what I learned from it. One of the greatest things you'll ever learn to do is how to connect an area where you lost to a lesson you learned so you'll win next time. Even in that. A connection. John Maxwell said about a book he wrote, it was called sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. That's a new connection. Because we think win and loss. God thinks win and learn. So if you learned you didn't lose, it's only when you didn't learn that you lost. Isn't that good? It's a new connection that will free you up from the fear of failure. Because even if I lose and I learn I didn't lose, I won because I made the connection. I would say you could look at. Oh, I didn't give you the third S. It's speculation. Speculation. Are you going to be all right, Jessica? I know Jessica was dying for that. I know your personality. You were dying for the third s. The third S is speculation. Because when we make the wrong connections, we make the wrong corrections. Our connections can be no stronger than our clarity. Our connections can be no stronger than our clarity. When I don't understand something and I don't speculate, speculation to me means you want to do the guesswork of inference without the hard work of investigation. That's where I want to draw my own conclusions. They probably meant that. Well, ask them if that's what they meant. Walk across the office, fool. Ask them. Ask them. Was that helpful? Ask them. Did that work for you? Speculation. It's a killer. I believe God has given us all the pieces. Put my little dots thing back up one more time. I believe God has given us all the pieces of doing some great stuff in the next decade. I think what's lying in the room is what's going to make the difference and what's going to make the connection between just having all the elements of something that can touch the world because we have some of that, and being able to actually say, you know what? We're joined together. We're connected. We think like leaders. When I hear a decision, I try to understand the value behind the decision. I make the connection. When a problem arises, I don't just fix the problem. I look for the process that created the problem and I address the process. I make the connection. The deeper the connection, the greater the effectiveness. I want you to break up now. I want you to discuss this. We'll go for about 20 minutes. I want you to have a generous amount of time to talk about it. I think that will get it done. Go for it. Go with God. I love you. Connect the dots. Make the connection. You're the best. I'm happy to be your pastor. God bless you. Happy Mother's Day. Thank you.