I thought it was a great speech and worth reading.

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

There’s a whole lot of research and books on systems thinking. Systems thinking says the sum of the parts is actually greater than simple math would indicated. If you and I are in the equation, systems thinking says there are now three components, not two. There’s you, me, and the relationship between you and me.

In systems thinking, one plus one is three.

The third component listed (the relationship) is the most complex. It’s unpredictable and is also full of the most possibility. Every time even an element in the system changes, the whole system changes. Dynamic complexity says every relationship touched by that element is now altered.

Leaders today must understand systemic issues in the church.

Staff, volunteers, members, visitors, guests, family: the numerous relationships of a church compound the complexity of the systems.

That’s why you rarely come across something that is black and white.

That’s why you have to take all the relationships into consideration every time you make a decision.

That’s why the effects of decisions are far reaching.

That’s why leadership in a church is so challenging.

Ergonomics is the study of how customizing our environment can increase our overall wholeness, performance, and effectiveness. Having a keyboard on top of a desk isn’t very comfortable, and in the long term, it hurts your hands and wrists. A more ergonomic arrangement is to have the keyboard in a sliding keyboard tray directly under the desktop. Y’all know what I’m talking about.

At the very core of ergonomics is customization. The reason Herman-Miller desk chairs have as many buttons, levers, and switches as a stealth fighter is so all different shapes and sizes of bodies can customize the chair for the greatest comfort and ease of work.

So the question today is:

“How do we put ourselves in a position to be impacted by God?”

Spiritual ergonomics is positioning ourselves for the greatest imprint of God’s life and power.

The very core of all leadership and personal development is spiritual sculpting by God. He is the potter and we are the clay. But how do we keep ourselves from jumping off the potter’s wheel? How do we keep the canvas on the easel? How do we keep the pages of our book open for Him to write the story?

Paul calls us God’s workmanship created in Christ to do good works which he has prepared for us in advance (Ep 2.10). We must unpack this and discover what it means for our spiritual formation. We’re a piece in progress; the canvas is still being painted on, the marble chiseled with finesse, the clay imprinted. This is what it means to be His workmanship. We are all unique pieces. Each one of us customized for His plan.

How do you put yourself in a position to be imprinted by God?

Phillips has a great special advertising section in this month’s Wired Magazine.

I am a minimalist by nature, so I really enjoyed the ad.

“Simplicity is knowing when less is too little and more is too much. Simplicity = Sanity.”

Great quote, especially when you are communicating. I’ve seen people over and over again use 1238 words to say something that could have been communicated in 59.

“Simplicity involves two major processes: eliminating redundant elements and integrating things to make them flow.”

I think of this in terms of leading teams. Try to eliminate all the redundancy and duplicate communications. Then integrate and connect the members to allow the team to flow.

“Simplicity means products of the best quality displaying essential elements, but without additional ornamentation or clutter.”

This quote struck me this morning at church when I realized how “un-simple” our stage is. We easily clutter and complicate the essential elements.

Solomon, in Proverbs 4.23, makes a comment rarely applied to leadership:

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

We don’t tend to think of leadership as a heart issue. For most, leadership seems more head, more analysis, more systems thinking, more programmatic solution-finding. Leadership is certainly all of that and more. But that isn’t where deep leadership issues start. They start inside us at subterranean levels and slowly surface.

Regardless of how much sense something makes, I always ask myself, “How do I feel? What’s going on in my heart? How would it make this person feel? What are some of the things I sense? What is my intuition telling me?”

A guiding thought for me along these lines is this: God thinks the world of this person. In light of that, how do I need to treat them? How do I need to lead them?

Sometimes, all the books and conferences in the world won’t get you here. Great leaders lead from the heart.

A major responsibility of the leader is to know and read the cultural currents and then figure out, innovate, and create a way for the church to stay at a position of intersection with culture.

Is that Biblical you say? I Chronicles 12.32 says, “Men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” Here was a group of cultural interpreters.

A leader unwilling or unable to do good cultural interpretation will put the church on a path toward irrelevance.

There are several important cultural currents influencing the church today. Yesterday I posted on the current of Hyper-Options. Another current is spirituality.

Spirituality is on the rise and yet the church isn’t the dominant location for exploring this interest. Doesn’t this tell us something as leaders? Leonard Sweet says this is the fourth spiritual Great Awakening in American history, but it’s the first led outside the church.

Some recent examples have been the new “spiritually-based” tv shows. NBC has two: Revelations and Medium.

Another example is the salt stain Mary image on an underpass in Chicago.

People are exploring spirituality. They are no longer boxing it up as something you unpack only on Sunday mornings at church. Spirituality is part of life. It’s part of every human being. Spirituality is Monday morning at work, Tuesday night in front of the tv, Friday night at the bar and Saturday morning sleeping in until noon. Every part of us is spiritual because we are all created in the image of God.

This is another current the church must take notice of and chose whether or not to jump in.

I had the opportunity to hear Roy Moore today at World Harvest Church. Roy Moore was the Supreme Court Justice in the state of Alabama who was removed for not taking down a sculpture of the Ten Commandments.

It is part of Rod Parsley’s Center of Moral Clarity.

Also check out the Foundation for Moral Law.

Yesterday, I bought a huge whiteboard for my office. LIke 4′ x 6′. The guy at OfficeMax was like, “You want this big one?”

I spent the afternoon laying out my thoughts and trying to get organized. It’s real easy to just deal with and react to whatever is in front of you and never stop to do some planning.

One of our staff came in my office towards the end of the day and saw my whiteboard and said, “No, no, no! You’re doing it all wrong. You’re not supposed to be this organized. You’re supposed to just throw all your thoughts on the board and not care how to organize them. It makes you more creative. The way you do it interferes with free thinking.” I told him to go smoke some more crack.

Anyway, I mapped out the 4 departments that I will be involved in and overseeing the most:

1. Service Production - worship team, a/v/l, staging, sets/props

2. Host Ministries - ushers, greeters, guest services, cafe

3. Communication - marketing, design, publishing, web site, network

4. Life Groups - our small groups, the leadership, the administration

I am such visual person, that I need to get it all laid out in front of me. I listed all the key players under each team and a huge list of actions steps I need to do for each. It will probably keep me busy until the fall.

Once a month I have the privilege of sitting down with John Maxwell. He has become a trusted source of wisdom and leadership training for me.

I am a subscriber to his Maximum Impact Monthly Leadership Program. So one Saturday a month I sit down with John over coffee and talk leadership.

This past week I listened as he spoke about “Important Phrases At An Important Phase In My Life.”

He laid out some thoughts about his life as a 60-year-old into phrases that communicated important lessons he had learned.

For example:

1. Less is good.
2. Time is limited.
3. Focus is essential.
4. Change is inevitable.
5. God is good.

At the end, he encouraged me to do the same.

So here are a few phrases from a 28-year-old reflecting on life so far and communicating important lessons that I have learned.

1. Surround yourself with people you love - build great relationships.
2. Help make others’ dreams come true - add value to them; their life should be better off because they know you.
3. Personal growth is essential - “success = preparation + opportunity” ( you will always have more opportunities in life than you can take advantage of, the question is whether you will be prepared when they come.)
4. Focus - narrow everything down to the things that make you come alive.
5. Have fun - stop and celebrate every now and then; money spent on dinners out with others is never wasted.
6. Build great teams - changing the world happens through small groups of committed, passionate people.
7. Think, write and speak - take time daily to think, write it down and talk to others about it.

From where you sit, what are some important phrases in your life?

In 1983 Steve Jobs of Apple Computer went to Manhattan to recruit John Sculley from Pepsi Cola for a position as president at Apple. Jobs enticed Sculley with a challenge: “If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you’ll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water to kids. If you come to Apple you can change the world.”

Today begins a new season in my life… I start working at the church full-time. This possible Apple legend just sums it up well: I want to be in a position to change the world.

I am actually starting a 4-week series this Wednesday night in our youth group (Evolution) titled Soundtrack. I am opening it with a message on being part of the Story of God. I am going to use this story to encourage them to dream big and change the world.

I think the problem is too many times someone comes along with something real practical to say and pops our idealistic balloon of changing the world.

I was offered a position once that was above my skill set or level at the time. It definitely was a stretch, but something I had always wanted to do. I was so pumped about it and I remember telling my dad how cool it was and how I had always “dreamed” of doing something like this. I failed to recognize the skeptical look on his face. He said, “What makes you think you can do this?”

I skidded to a stop. The practical. Gotta love it.

“I don’t know… I… uh… I work well with people.” Trying to think of some reason why I was qualified.

In fact, the next day I threw that same thing out to my soon-to-be boss. “So what makes you think I can do this?” The romance was gone. I was trying to find some reason why I fit the part.

He said, “God told me.”

Perfect. So what if this doesn’t work out? Is it God’s fault? Is it my fault for not letting God do what He wants to do?

I think life is not always about the practical. It’s about the romance. The idealism. The thing that’s so big that you don’t fit the part. There are plenty of people who will makes sure we have our eye on the practical. We have to make sure we keep our eye on God.

Great quote from a book I just finished, “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi. I first heard of Keith in an article last year by Fast Company on how to be a networker. I was fascinated with the article then, so I naturally bought the book as soon as I heard it had come out.

“Never Eat Alone” is really about the art of connecting. And what’s different about Keith is that he is not one of those lame, never-have-a-job-more-than-six-months and then off to something better, pass out your business card to everyone you meet, schmoozer, “networkers.” His slant is that to be a good connector you have to be able to add value to people.

“The currency of real networking is not greed, but generosity.” pg 21