Main Session 4

Description: Why do some community initiatives fly and others fall flat? Bill Donahue investigates how certain strategies flounder, the missing essentials that can lead to their failure, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. Or if you´ve made them already, learn how you can get back on your feet.

Speaker’s Bio: Bill Donahue’s passion for helping churches develop leaders through small groups led him to Willow Creek in 1992. Bill is currently the Executive Director of Group Life for the Willow Creek Association. Prior to that, he served on the staff of Willow Creek Community Church for six years, helping launch and develop the church-wide small group ministry. He was also leader of the Couples Ministry, Director of the Willow Creek Institute, and headed the Leadership Training Department. Bill has a Ph.D. in Adult Education from the University of North Texas, a Master’s in Biblical Studies from Dallas Seminary, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Princeton University. He and his wife, Gail, have two children, Ryan and Kinsley.

Bill is the co-author (with Russ Robinson) of Building a Church of Small Groups, The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Group Ministry and Walking the Small Group Tightrope.

Notes:

Good ideas, great strategies, and our best laid plans can turn out to be disasters. Sometimes we think we’re being creative or revolutionary, but we just end up being stupid.

We have a saying around Willow Creek, the only thing worse than no drama is bad drama.

Sometimes we make decisions out of selfish resasons that stem from selfishness, pride or insecurity. We recruit a willing person instead of waiting for the best person. We’re looking for the next big idea instead of waiting for the still, small voice. Paul told Timothy to look out for people who are rash, conceited and lovers off pleasure rather than lovers of God.

But sometimes we fail after doing things for the right reasons, and that’s harder. We’ve prayed, we’ve worked hard, we just have to chalk it up to, “Well, it’s a fallen world, and it’s fallen on me.”

2 years after I became a Christian I decided to start a group. I worked hard to make it work. I had 3 other guys who were my core group. Within 6 weeks, that group of 4 burst forth into the huge number of 1. I did everything right. We started on time, ended on time, didn’t do any small talk, we got down to business. I realized what I had on my hand was a group of losers. The Holy Spirit informed me that wasn’t the case. I’ve often thought about writing a book, “How to turn your small group into a quiet time in just 6 sessions.”

What do we do when our group fails? How do we learn from failure in ministry and leadership.

Four reasons things fail:

• An obsession with vision while ignoring reality
  You begin to evaluate, and you get around visionary people, get feedback. You see how you’re doing after 6 months. You start telling stories about success, but it’s all about the same person. It’s like you’re trying to cultivate an orchard, and you focus on one tree.
  You ignore feedback. Bonhoeffer: If you love your dream for community more than the community itself, it will fail.
• Implementing a strategy without building an infrastructure
  Campaigns can be amazing things. A lot of people tried a 40 day approach to something to generate energy, but if it’s a strategy without a structure, it can be 40 days of purpose followed by 40 weeks of chaos. You can’t just do that and slap a bunch of groups together. No one knows why you gather, who to call if there’s a crisis. People will just sit there week after week in a stupor. It happens at the small group level as well.
• Empowering leaders without developing them
  Small group leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure that we get developed, to ask our leaders to provide it, to tell them where we feel weak and where we need help.
  Point Leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure that small group leaders are equipped.
  Sometimes you need a “grouper scooper” to clean up a mess in groups, but we probably caused it by not supporting our leaders.
  Groups can be led by 4 different things: process (like 12 step), values (gathering to pray for our kids in college), curriculum (tells you what to say, when to say it, etc.), and a leader. I happen to think when you put all four together, you have a great thing, but the leader is the most important part.
• Launching groups that never really learn to become communities
  It was based on an assumption that if you place people in a circle, they know how to be a community. You know that right? That first meeting when everyone arrives and they’ve never experienced good community before in the past, and we say things like, “Be open. Be vulnerable.” Very few people who have grown up in our individualistic culture know how to live in redemptive community.
  We had to develop some group training material after developing our leader training material. Part of what we have to train people to do is to learn how to have relationships again.
  Anyone can start a group, but who will help them become a community? That’s you. That’s your responsibility.

How you respond when you have failed really matters?

You have to admit that some of our failures are the result of something darker, pride, etc. If this is the problem, we just need to own that. Before God and all of those who are affected by it, we need to apologize. If we’re willing to name reality, people are willing to respond and often with grace. People just want us to own that. They know we’re going to make mistakes.

That’s the easy part. The harder part is often forgiving ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves was fractured in the Fall. We ask ourselves, is there really hope for me? I failed again. Why didn’t I follow up and pray for that person? Why didn’t I call them? Why am I a leader? I shouldn’t be a leader.

What you want is the same thing that your people want. If you feel desparate sometimes and need hope, that’s what your people need as well. They need hope. When people come together in groups with their battered souls and weary bodies, they ask themselves, “Is this the day I will find hope? Maybe this is the day I will find wisdom, the strength to confront my addiction, that someone will show me love. Will someone see my heart today?” Jesus knew we needed community. He called the 12 together, and it wasn’t just a good idea, it was a great idea, the best idea, that Jesus would come to be with us. Christ is our hope, the anchor of our soul, and he wants us to be hope filled people.

Erwin McManus: Faith is about conviction, but hope is about confidence.

We need a theology of failure that says God can go back and redeem those failures. The story of the Bible is a failure story into which God has stepped and redeemed it.

I needed to fail in that first group. Sometimes when a leader is away, they learn to turn to Christ. That’s the point. There’s a ministry of absence, and sometimes we can only experience that in failure. It teaches people that their trust must be in Jesus and not in a leader who was imperfect.

We think failure is fatal, but there is hope. There is hope in Jesus Christ who is the anchor of our soul. I want you to leave this conference hope-filled, not just hopeful.

A few weeks ago I started a small group. You never know when God is going to show up. We had been reading some material about expectations, about hope. One of the men shared how he hoped God would redeem some of the mistakes he had made as a father. He had that look in his eyes like, “I hope it will change.” There was a guy across the circle who had his head down. His son had leukemia for the last five years. He struggled with alcohol. He goes to an AA meeting at least once a day. I watched another man share how he had struggled with a season of infertility. Years ago they adopted a son, and later met the birth mother out of the blue. And the adoptive family was worried they would lose their son, and was able to speak hope into the man’s life. Two other men were quiet. Another man got an e-mail from his daughter who had a friend killed in an accident a few months ago. The e-mail said, “Thanks for teaching me to pray through hardship.” A man across the circle, the CEO of a $100 million company has a daughter with chronic pain. He looked across at a man and said that your son met my daughter at college and ministered to her.

I realized that people want and need to be connected to hope. That’s your job. That’s your priveledge and opportunity.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Chasing Daylight by Erwin McManus with a group of guys from my church. The premise of the book is that we need to seize our divine moments, to grab hold of the opportunities that God puts in our path and to make opportunities when they are not readily apparent. The primary illustration in the book comes from 1 Samuel 14. In this chapter Samuel explains how Jonathan, the son of the king of Israel, and his armor bearer climbed up a cliff (or mountain, hill, etc.) to reach a Philistine army outpost. Jonathan and his armor bearer killed twenty Philistines and started a chain of events in which the Israelite army routed the Philistines.

What makes this story so interesting are the circumstances under which Jonathan decided to act. So often we want God to speak in a booming voice, giving us explicit instructions about what we are supposed to do next, but God doesn’t always work that way. In 1 Samuel 14:6, Jonathan says to his armor bearer, “Come, let’s go over to the outpost of those uncircumcised fellows. Perhaps the LORD will act in our behalf. Nothing can hinder the LORD from saving, whether by many or by few.” He didn’t have an assurance from God that everything would be okay. God didn’t give him a 10 point battle plan. Jonathan did what he believed was right, and God honored his faith and his action.

We see a similar story in Judges 6 and 7. God told Gideon that Gideon would save Israel from the Midianites, and so Gideon went to fight the Midianites with an army of 32,000 men. But God said that Gideon had too many and sent 22,000 of them home. God said that there were still too many and left Gideon with a mere 300 men…

…and no plan.

While had God very clearly told Gideon that he would conquer the Midianites, God didn’t spell it out. He simply told Gideon to go fight and then took away 99% his fighting force. Gideon had only 300 men left, and we have no record of God telling him how to defeat the Midianites with such a small complement. Gideon had to forge ahead into battle, trusting that God would fulfill his word. While the Israelite army surrounded the Midianite camp and blew trumpets and broke jars, God caused the men in the Midianite army to turn on one another, delivering the army into Gideon’s hands.

What has God told you to do? Is there something that He’s laid on your heart? Has God given you a passion for AIDS victims, for underprivileged children living in the ghetto, for the homeless, for prisoners, for victims of war, for battered women, for the fatherless? Are you waiting for God to tell you exactly what to do next before doing anything at all? Have you been sitting on this passion for years without taking any action? Perhaps God isn’t going to tell you what the next step is. He might not spell it all out for you.

Even if you don’t feel like there’s any one particular thing that God wants from you, there are plenty of things that He has already told us to do: feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, care for widows and orphans, preach the Gospel. I don’t think God is going to get mad at us for doing the things that He has already commanded. If you start a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen or a prison ministry that changes the lives of many, I have a hard time picturing God coming down on your head because you missed His “true calling” for your life.

Perhaps the opportunities that you need to seize are not (on the surface, anyway) so lofty as these. If God has given you a passion for art or music or writing or whatever else, don’t let that passion go to waste. Glorify God by being a good steward of the skills and talents he has given you, don’t simply let them rot away in the ground.

Chasing daylight is risky. You run the risk of failure. We’re not going to succeed (by our definition of the term anyway) every time we step out in faith. Even when God specifically asks something of us, there’s no guarantee that we will achieve our goals. God may have other plans for our work. Perhaps your undertaking will serve only to teach you a lesson that God wants you to learn. Perhaps God wanted you to do it for the benefit of one person, and in this life you may never know what a success your “failure” was in God’s economy.

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of a “failure” is the ministry of Jim Elliot. Jim Elliot, along with several others, was a missionary to a tribe in Ecuador that had previously had very little contact with the outside world. Jim and several of the men with him were killed by members of the tribe, and if you stop the story there, it seems as if Jim’s life was wasted. But the fact is, the story does not end there. Jim’s wife and daughter later went back to work with that same tribe and led many of them to a relationship with Jesus. Jim Elliot looked like a failure, but he died chasing daylight. And his work laid the foundation for Elisabeth and Valerie Elliot to carry out the dream that God had placed in him.

In fact, the redemption of mankind looked to be a failure when Jesus was crucified. The hope of all the world was dead. Because we know the end of the story we easily forget the desperate situation that the disciples faced when Jesus died. They couldn’t just read ahead three paragraphs to find out that everything turned out all right. The very Son of God seemed to have failed, but three days later, Jesus rose from the grave, having conquered sin and death.

I don’t have enough minutes left in my life to let them go to waste. Many of you know that God called me into ministry years ago when I was in high school, and you may also know that when I graduated from college I didn’t have many opportunities to fulfill that calling. But on Good Friday of this year, God renewed that call on my life. After months of trying to figure out how what to do next, I was presented with the opportunity to do a one-year internship program at my church. It was a hard decision. God didn’t come down and tell me to take it, and as excited as I am about the program now, initially there was part of me that really didn’t want it.

This will be my fifth internship in a church or ministry, and I had to swallow a lot of pride to become an intern again. At a point when I likely would have been advancing to a mid-level position I made a decision to go back to the bottom. However, I believe that pride is one of the reasons that God put me on a three year detour after college. He has been teaching me the hard lesson of humility. It doesn’t matter if I’m in charge or at the bottom of the ladder. It doesn’t matter if my name is in lights or no one ever knows who I am. What is important is that God is glorified and that the work of His kingdom is done.

Those of you who are reading this and who aren’t followers of Jesus may think that all of this is a crock of crap. In fact, I would bet that you’ve already stopped reading, but perhaps there is something you can take from all of this as well. I can only imagine that most of you, if not all of you, want more out of life. If you’re like me you are tempted at times to just sit back and watch the world go by, to come home from work, flip on the boob tube, and waste the night away, but isn’t there more than that? Help a child learn to read. Clean up a state park. Serve the families of soldiers who are serving overseas. I believe that total fulfillment can only be found in Christ, but you can experience the joy that comes from serving others. I think that we all know that there’s more to life than our simple lives behind our white picket fences.

So in other words, chase daylight. Seize your divine moments. Take risks. Grab opportunities. “Perhaps the LORD will act in our behalf. Nothing can hinder the LORD from saving, whether by many or by few.” You might not always succeed, but as Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”