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I have been reading John Maxwell's book entitled 'The 4 Pillars of Leadership'. In it he talks about the four major things good leaders need to do well in order to be successful: Relationships; Equipping; Leadership and Attitude. As I have been reading, it occurred to me that as a church band (of which I am the leader) not much equipping (teaching, growing, sharing) goes on. We are very good at rehearsing and making music together, but we don't really take time to discuss things that are of importance to our lives and role within the ministry. So I have created an 'Equip' evening where we get together to talk and learn instead of a practise about once avary two months or so. This is what happened on our first such evening . . .
Last night was our first 'Equip' evening. I thought it went great - to create space where we can talk about our understanding of God, and to grow in our understanding by listening to others. In all the years of playing music together, we've never talked about spiritual or scriptual things or indeed about ourselves to the depth that we did last night. It was a very good and interesting exercise to hear people's ideas.
One of the things that came out of our discussion about 'Performance and Pleasure' is that: although it is right for us to want to do our best for God, to give our utmost for His highest, we should not feel too bad if things do go wrong - God can (and does) still use it. We should be careful not to sacrifice presence for the sake of form / structure.
Then I came home and read an article in the 'Worshp Leader' magazine that fits nicely into this discussion. Darlene Zchech writes: 'When I look back over that moment, I realized that somehow we had lost Jesus in the middle of our quest to make things sound and look good'.
Often I have found that when the Holy Spirit is in it, messy church is good church. We should not let our desire for excellence superceed our desire for God himself - active, alive and at work in us. It is good to want to do things with excellence as we are doing them for God, but I pray we have the courage not to despaire when things don't always work out the way we planned. It might be God, using the opportunity to teach you or someome else something. If God is in it - it's alright!
So relax, trust God and allow Him to work even when we make mistakes or when things turn out not as perfect as we would like. |
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