When God makes you a promise, there is a process before the payoff, a painful process
How do you keep your vision in sight when there’s nothing to see?
You’ve heard the voice of God speak into your life, but what you’re seeing isn’t matching up with what you’ve heard. When there’s nothing to see and only a cloud the size of a man’s hand, God is working.
God is not a man that he should lie. He is capable to complete everything that he has initiated in your life.
Don’t forget your promise and forfeit the payoff because you fainted in the process.
God will grow the church not so we can have big churches, but because people need Jesus.
When we come together God can use us to great things.
Believe when there’s nothing to see.
Hold on to what you’ve heard from God.
When David stood before Goliath in front of all Israel, he said: God will deliver me from this uncircumcised fellow as he delivered me from the lion and the bear.
God is a covenant keeping God, and nothing is too difficult for him.

Grew up in a radical time – had belief that they could actually make a difference. Vietna war, Martin Luther King Jr.
Didn’t realize that what it would really take to make a change/difference, it would take more than they could do themselves.
Thought about the book of Acts, about where change really comes from.
Nobody wants to change the world more than God.
If we look at God, there is no way we can stay the way we are.
How God shakes it up.
Acts 1:8 & Acts 2
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Acts 2: Spoke in/heard in native languages
The disciples are about to get shaken up at the core. Jesus tells them that they will be witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The witness of the Gospel starts where are but doesn’t end there. This will, by default, move us into challenges, beyond our comfort zones, and into situations with people and cultures with which we are unfamiliar.
We like to hang out in Jerusalem.
Judea: The place that we are familiar with but with some subcultures with which we must grapple. There are some things you wrestle with, but you get it for the most part.
Samaria: A place that is hostile to us. A place we are reluctant to go because we don’t identify with “those” people. We don’t eat their food, speak their language, understand what they are saying, etc. That place where if we didn’t have to go there, we’d take the freeway and by pass it.
We get real weird in Samaria, because we don’t know what to do. We can’t figure out right from wrong.
Samaria is the place where the Gospel gets tested, where we start to manage our complexities.
We pray on “goin’ to Samaria” because it’s uncomfortable.
Here is always a place of transition. One can’t stay here forever. It’s the difference between where you are and where you could or should be. It’s positional and emotional.
God comes and asks, “Why are you still here?”
How does God move us from here to there, from where we are to where we should be, from stuck to the Kingdom of God.
We come to Catalyst because we want a catalyst to take place in our lives.
Without a catalyst, it would take a long time for a reaction to occur.
Without catalysts, we stay stuck in our ways.
Most times, catalysts can be reused.
Samaria is going to cost more. It’s going to take more from us.
The Spirit of God shows up on the day of Pentecost. God shows up in a big way. People start having experiences beyond their own control. On this day, God decided to cause a commotion. They were hoping for power: military power, political power, etc. But Jesus said that the power they/we would get would not be their power but a power beyond their/our control.
People wanted to know what was taking place.

“From the inception of the Church, God always intended it to be a multi-ethnic movement.” It was always intended to be global. If we are to be credible/believable when we say that Jesus Christ breaks down walls, we must live it out.
We are to be global people that can contextualize the Gospel.
You cannot pull this off by yourself. We’re going to have to do it together. Jesus said that you (plural) will be my witnesses, not you (singular).
We’ve got to collaborate across all kinds of lines to advance the Kingdom of God.
We have entered the 21st century, and it is demanding something different of us.
Become credible, radical witnesses for the Kingdom of God, not for your city, state, ministry, political party, country, etc., for the Kingdom of God.
When our world is being shaken, it is not out of God’s control. It may be the catalytic event that God is using to get us from here to there.
Be willing to be shaken up. That is how the Kingdom of God advances!

Author: Good to Great

I’m very passionate to be here with you. I’m one of those people in life who have been enormously fortunate and blessed, which means I get to spend my life on things I’m very passionate about.

Not all time in life is equal. The opportunity to contribute something to your development now is a great privilege because you have such a great runway in front of you.

I’m very passionate to be here to talk to you about the results of our research.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if we only have great business corporations, we will merely be a prosperous nation. We will not be a great one, and to be a truly great nation, we must also have great K-12 education, and not just for some of our children, but for all of them. We must have great health care and arts organization and military and government, and we must have great and inspired places of spirit.

Of course, there is a problem: Good is the enemy of great. It’s one of the reasons that so few things ever become truly great, it’s because their good.

What separates the exceptional from the others?

Our approach is deeply empirical. I have a love of data.

We must study not only the companies that became great but the similar ones that did not. What separates the good from the exceptional?

If I could only have you take one thing from this session: Greatness is not a function of our circumstances. It is not the cards we are dealt. It is a function of choice and of discipline.

What I’m not going to do is to tell you that the path to greatness for social enterprise is that it should become more like a business. Most businesses, like everything else in life, are average.

It’s not the difference between business and social, it is the difference between great and good.

Discipline is not a business idea, it is a greatness idea.

You will find a culture of discipline in the military, in the Cleveland Symphony orchestra. You
will find a culture of discipline in Lance Armstrong’s cycling team. You will find a culture of discipline in great public schools in bad circumstances, and you will not find it in the average.

The discipline of the flywheel.

Nothing great ever happens in one fell swoop. The way it really happens is that you start pushing on the flywheel. After a lot of effort you get one tired, slow, creaky turn, but you keep pushing.

It is the discipline to stay on that flywheel. It took 7 years for Sam Walton to get his second store.

How do those who were once great fall.

Sometimes you build something successful, become complacent and lazy, and then the world passes you buy, but that isn’t the way that most fall. Most fall because they reach too far too fast. You try to go from 100 to 1000 to 10,000 turns of the flywheel because of hubris.

How do you know if you’re overreaching.

Great enterprise is more likely to die for indigestion of too much opportunity

The number 1 sign of overreaching is when you grow beyond your ability to fill all of your seats with the right people, when you start compromising the quality of your people.

Who then what: make sure you have the right people and then grow. If you get out ahead of your ability to have the right people, you will fall.

Overreaching, hubris, undisciplined pursuit of more.

When someone is sick, the question is not what’s the treatment, what’s the schedule? It’s who’s the oncologist, who’s the surgeon, who’s the radiologist? When you have the right who’s they will help you find what to do.

Life is people.

What separates those who do well in highly turbulent environments from others? They are not any better at predicting what will happen next then anyone else. Therefore, you must prepare for that which you cannot predict. What’s the ultimate preparation for what you cannot predict? Who is on your bus; who is your climbing partner; who is with you?

It is very rare in history that stability and prosperity co-exist. Therefore we must gather the right people around us to handle the things we cannot predict.

There are important whos on the bus.

I’ve always been a leadership skeptic. It always seemed odd to me to say that if something is successful it was because of great leadership and if something is not successful it is because of poor leadership. I told my team that we would not have a leadership principle in “Good to Great.” However, in one meeting, my team of young people confronted me and said. Leadership is important in circumstances of greatness. I tried to tell them that there is leadership both in the great and those who did not become great, but my team told me that the leadership in the companies who became great was the difference between great (level 5) leaders and merely good (level 4) leaders.

How were these great leaders different? It certainly wasn’t their personality; most of them had a charisma bypass. What was the signature characteristic of these great leaders? Humility.

Humility not as an “Aw, shucks” weakness, it is passion for the cause, not for themselves, combined with the will to do absolutely whatever it takes to it great.

It cannot be about you, it has to be about the work, cause, values, it’s not about you. That’s the level 5.
Level 5 is not about personality. We tend to confuse the two all of the time. It’s okay to have charisma.
You can even be weird and be a level 5. One guy solved a dispute with an arm wrestling contest.
If you make your church dependent on a powerful personality, then you are being irresponsible, because then it’s about you. The true test of a leader, the ultimate report card comes in when you are done. You have to begin building that early.

Think about the flywheel of your faith and the flywheel of your church as different flywheels.

Those who build a great organization leave something behind that will continue long after they are gone.
Know your one big thing, and push consistently on that one big thing. Push the flywheel in three distinct areas. What are you passionate about? What can you do better than anyone else? Where are your resources?
Resources in the social sector: people, money, & brand reputation

Confidence that you steward your resources well. It may take 30 years to build a reputation, but it only takes 30 seconds to destroy it.

The presence of a to do list without an equally robust stop-doing list lack discipline.

If you have 10,000 hours of potential work, what does it matter if you work 12 or 16 hours? The critical thing isn’t working more hours. It isn’t what to do but what to not do? What doesn’t produce results? What gets in the way?

I will leave you with the existential dilemma of whether or not to put “Create a stop-doing list” on your to-do list.

Behind any great organization is a tension of “AND.” You must preserve the core and stimulate progress. What must never change are the core values. We lose our values, we lose our soul, we lose our soul, we lose it all.

The problem is that we confuse our practices with our values.

Every generation must create a set of practices that represent the values at the core.

• Go to http://jimcollins.com (where everything is free). Download the good to great diagnostic tool
• How many key seats are on your bus? How many are filled with the right people? And what are the steps to get that to 100%?
• Personal board of directors – the people you would love to look up to.
  Also in the category of disciplined people: get young people in your face.
  The chief of staff of the armed forces said that this generation of cadets is the most inspiring and inspired since 1945, but remember there is a bell curve in every generation. You want the right young people in your life.
  Asking what job, career, organization is the wrong question. The question is who, who will you allow to be your mentors?
• What is you’re questions to statements ratio. It’s not about giving answers; it’s about asking questions.
• Spend more time being interested than trying to be interesting.
• How do you know when it’s time to change? About the time you start asking the question. Do not spend 5 years getting 2 years experience. You may not know it yet, but life is short, very short.
• Take time to think
  Turn off the Blackberry. Take days that you actually cross out months in advance. Take the time to do this wonderful thing called thinking.
  Work is infinite; time is finite.
• How do you become level 5?
  I don’t know, but I do know this. The level 5s always begin with the question: “How do I commit myself to something for which I have such passion that I am willing to endure the pain of level 5 decisions.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. It is a function of conscious choice and discipline. We are not imprisoned by our environment, setbacks, mistakes, cards we’re dealt, or even by staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices, and I believe it is the choices that no one can see.

I believe that greatness is not a function of whether you succeed. It is a function of the choices no one can see.

Peter Drucker: First you pay your mentors back by mentoring others. We are put here for a reason: to be useful. Go out and make yourself useful.

Examples of level 5 decisions:

If a company loses money, it’s bad, but even worse: if a school fails to educate its children, if a military leader makes a bad decision and people get blown up, if a homeless shelter does its job poorly. Your responsibility is to the children, the soldiers, and the homeless first.

The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you might have made a hiring mistake. The right people need to be led, guided, and taught, but the right people don’t need to be tightly managed.

People need to understand they don’t have a job, that they have responsibilities.

Always remember this, is it a seat or a bus issue? Sometimes you have the right person on the bus, but they need a different seat. Their work is too important to allow failure.

What are the keys/starting points to developing a culture of discipline?

• The right people.
• Have everybody on the bus, but never use a title. Describe them as the person ultimate responsible for X.
• Everyone on your bus needs to be able to articulate their responsibility, not their titles.

If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.

For every priority you have, you must have a stop doing.

Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence.

What drives our unwillingness to stop doing? We have a culture that just doesn’t think that way. When was the last time Congress got together and said, what are we going to stop doing?

The Shack is a parable.
The human heart is damaged. It’s full of shame. It’s held together by lies. We build a façade that we want people and even God to believe in.
People are sick and tired of religion. People want relationship.
Many people see the book as heresy.
It is not a book about the trinity. It is a book about relationship and God’s love at the most difficult time.
We got lied to. We got told that the Father is just like our own fathers.
In the book, Papa has scars on his wrists.
On the cross, for the first time Jesus knows what it’s like to be absent from the Father.
God heals us not so He can use us but because He loves us.

Once we leave our families, the people who have the most influence over us are often people who have no authority over us.

It is called moral authority. It occurs when people see alignment between what we say and what we do.

The majority of our leadership will come from the well of our moral authority. It is something that can be easily lost.

In the U.S. people expect their religious and political leaders to have moral authority.

Most of us have experience working for someone who we have lost respect for. They may have authority over us, but we lose respect for them.

Moral authority is so important because for most of us, all we have is influence. At the end of the day, even most people we may have authority over can leave at any time.

For the next couple of days, you are going to get incredible insight in terms of leadership.

If there’s not alignment between creed and deed, all of the leadership tricks in the world will not overcome that hypocrisy.

We will follow even poor leaders if they are authentic. They draw us in even if they have no official authority in life.

Nehemiah works for King Artaxerxes. Nehemiah gets permission from the king to go back to Judea to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem. He returns as the governor. He shows up in a context where the economy is almost non-existent. People had loaned money to people who couldn’t pay back loans with high interest rates, so people had to pledge their homes and fields (and eventually their wives and children) as collateral for these loans.

Nehemiah shows up and gets the people all psyched up to rebuild the wall, but Nehemiah realizes that these people can’t take time off of work because they owe so much money. Nehemiah bails the people out. He buys the people’s loans and charges the people no interest.

The people begin to complain. He realized that just because the people’s debts were paid didn’t mean that they knew how to manage their finances. The wealthy nobles had begun re-loaning money to the people, and the same process started all over. The wealthy were undermining the project of rebuilding the wall that Nehemiah was undertaking.

Nehemiah 6
It was against the law to charge a fellow Jew interest.
Nehemiah: As far as it was possible, we bought back our countrymen, and now we have to buy them back from you! Knock it off!
The nobles promised not to do that any more, and Nehemiah made them promise before the priests.
As governor, Nehemiah was entitled to a certain amount of food from the people’s crops. Taxes, essentially. Nehemiah wouldn’t take it out of reverence for God.
Nehemiah devoted himself to working on the wall. In other words, he did what he asked everyone else to do.
He didn’t acquire any land. He did not take advantage of depressed prices to enrich themselves.
Additionally, Nehemiah fed 150 people out of his own pocket, not the money that he was entitled to as the governor.

This is why he could stand up to the rich and powerful in the community. He wasn’t asking them to do anything that he hadn’t been doing for the past 12 years.

Forgiveness, Family, & Finances

• Forgiveness – our message is the message of forgiveness. We have been forgiven; therefore, we must forgive.
  We must practice what we preach.
  If you’re a leader, you’ve been hurt, stabbed in the back, betrayed, have not gotten your fair share, not been recognized when you should have.
  Here’s what Jesus said: The servant is never greater than the master, and this happened to him, so why would you think it wouldn’t happen to you?
  Some people’s stories are so bad, we want to give them a pass. We don’t want them to forgive the people who hurt them.
  There is no excuse for angry, bitter church leaders. Because when we are that, we lose moral authority.
  You can’t help others forgive from a heart that is not forgiving.
  Don’t bring unresolved junk into the context of ministry. We’ve been forgiven. We must forgive others.
  Perhaps the boldest leadership move you can make would be to get on your knees and release all the crap you’ve been holding onto for so long.
  If you’re ever going to speak, teach, counsel, or encourage in the area of forgiveness, you need to do so as one who is and has forgiven.
• Family – If your spouse feels like the Church is your mistress, you are part of the problem that you are trying to solve.
  If your family feels neglected, not IS neglected, FEELS neglected, then you are part of the problem. We live in a society that prioritizes many things over family, and we MUST be able to speak with moral authority.
  For some of you, the boldest leadership decision you could make is to leave this conference and go back home and see your family. If you’ve missed your kids’ last three games, if you haven’t had dinner with your spouse in a long time, then you need to fix that.
  You need to prioritize the role that no one else can play (your role in your family) over the one that many other people could play (whatever you do in ministry).
  This is the root of many problems in our country.
• Finances – most of us work for a non-profit (that’s true for even more people now ).
  If you work in an organization where your paycheck comes from people’s donations, then you must have moral authority in your finances. We must practice good stewardship. Any time God lets us manage $100, we need to give $10 to God first.
  Do you want to lead generous people? Then you need to be a generous person. Don’t worry about this verse or that verse, NT, OT. Be generous.
  Give, save, live on the rest.
  What if everyone in your church/organization had been giving first, saving next, and living on the rest?
  The Christians in our country would be able to stand up and say that God’s financial principles are the ones that work.
  Perhaps the boldest leadership move you can make is go home and write a big check, and give it away.
  The best leadership decision that Nehemiah made is when he walked into Jerusalem and said, I’m not taking my fair share.

People will have confidence in us if we are authentic, when our walk matches our talk.
If we don’t get this right, everything else we say will bounce off. No one cares what we say if we don’t follow our own advice.