Activating Leaders

This past weekend, a crazy generous family in our church and youth ministries opened their lake house for us to use as a retreat center. We had the idea to do a leader retreat months ago, but couldn't figure out how to get it in the budget, so we actually gave up on the idea. Two days later, this couple came forward and asked if we'd be able to use their new place. #TheLordProvides.

We brought up as many as could make it for a day and a half of team-building and training as we prep for the fall. It was an awesome time of getting to know each other's personalities, stories, and what makes them tick. The weekend looked something like this:

Friday Night, carpool up to the lake house in as few cars as possible. Get to the lake, head to the beach, build a fire and make s'mores, worship, pray, share, encourage. This is the Facebook post from 1:10am...

Saturday morning, we had a time of solitude and reading. Leaders spread all over the house, woods, and beach to spend time alone with God. This was probably the best part of the morning for most people... sitting on the shore, taking in the beauty of Lake Michigan, and being refreshed. The Summer has really been a roller coaster of wins and losses, and taking time like this recalibrates my heart.

Mid-morning consisted of vision, training, and program specifics. I'll be posting more on that in the next few days. But the biggest win for me was having my friend Jason Robinson up with us to talk about his life's work of mentoring. It was a super clear picture of the way God gives people gifts to be used in the church, and he gives those men as gifts to the church so it can be built up. All of our leaders are gifts to us, and Jason helped highlight that clearly.

Saturday Afternoon we hit the beach, rented some wave runners, and just played. It was an excellent opportunity to relax, play, and laugh.

And then we headed home, really ready to take on the fall together and help student meet Jesus.

This was the first time I'd really taken time and invested the effort into a leader retreat, and I'm confident this will be a consistent part of our ministry planning over the next years. The only word I can use to describe what happened is ACTIVATE. Our leaders have been on our team for a few years, and I get this feeling after the training we did and the time we spent that they feel activated to do ministry. They've come forward and asked if they can be used, but we've gone beyond "using" people for ministry, and this weekend we saw God activate people for ministry.

What do you do to get your leaders activated in your group?

DJ

5 Ways to Preach Using Your Imagination

My grandfather wrote the book. It's called Preaching and Teaching with Imagination. While you may not have had a chance to read it, the title helps you know what it says already... "Stop boring people with the Bible!" Homiletics courses all over the country and for decades now have used this mantra for helping engage people with God's Word. But here's 5 ways I try to preach and teach with imagination...

1. Manage the tension, reveal the problem, or don't even bother telling the story. All good stories have tension or dilemmas the character balances or solves. The biggest way to kill narrative preaching and kill your imagination is to refuse to build the crisis point.
2. Read Between the Lines. The Bible is drama. It's often heart-breaking, hilarious, tense, and a matter of life-or-death. Just because the language is neat doesn't mean the drama isn't thick. Read between the lines by pulling out what's hinted at in the text.
3. Imagine Modern Day Characters in the Story. I'm a big fan of watching a lot of Netflix. So are millions of people who you preach to. Tap into the common language of today by inserting a favorite character. For a few weeks there, characters from Frozen couldn't go wrong.
4. Create Triggers for all 5 senses. In Narrative especially, there's huge opportunity for using language to move the listener's mind into the story, and sensory details make it happen.
5. Use Your Life as the Starting Point. I doubt this is a good hermeneutic, but it makes for a great homiletic. Often I find myself transposing real life situations that I experience into the original situation. Often it helps "humanize" the Bible and shows that we all have experienced something similar to the narrative at hand.

Take a look at how I do these five things in this short clip from a recent message out of Luke 10:38-42.

Taking time to Celebrate

For the past five years we've run a summer internship program at Harvest Naperville. We've been so blessed to find a handful of the brightest and most quality college students looking to explore church ministry. The really cool thing is, almost all of our interns have gone on from their summer with us to serve Jesus in the local church, some even our church.

So this year, to cap off a summer of sweat, tedious labor, early mornings and late nights, we took a little bit of time as a team celebrating these interns by a day of wake boarding at West Rock Wake Park. It was a ton of fun as we just kicked back today, but was a great time to hear what impacted them the most this summer. We'll miss these guys when the fall hits!

How I begin with the end

I recently found myself staring at a blank piece of paper and Psalm 101. This part of the sermon-writing process both excites and terrifies me. I honestly sit and stare and pray until I have a quick moment of epiphany where the text makes sense in my mind and I know how I'm going to end the thing. There have been times where I'm stuck in this phase one or two days, and there are times (thankfully) where I'm in this phase one or two minutes. Psalm 101 was one or two hours for me. This clip, which is the conclusion of my message on living with integrity, shows where I started in my preparation and how I wanted to set up the congregation to get at the real heart of the message.

Check it out: