| Last week we updated you on the motivation behind why we do what we do.
This week, I want to answer a question publicly that many of you have asked me privately over the past few years and that is the question: ”Why is our Strengths Initiative Not Working?”
Typically, this question is asked within the context of multiple scenarios. For some, you are simply starting out and people are not catching the vision for stewarding talents into strengths, but for others the problem is more advanced.
For some of you, you have coached literally hundreds of people within your ministry or circles of influence and initially there was exuberance and excitement. It was as if the veil had been lifted and a wildfire quickly began to spread . . . and then it stopped.
For some, coaches burned out as new coaches didn’t rise to take their place. For others, there were tangible issues that arose. Conflicts within leadership. Key people moving away and other symptoms could be pointed to . . . but let me challenge you that those are not what stymied the growth.
There is another issue that needs to be uncovered and highlighted, and this issue ties directly into last weeks email.
Simply put, people lost sight of the “Why” behind the what.
Strengths are not an end unto themselves.
The goal of training coaches to equip people in your context is not to simply identify that they are fearfully and wonderfully created by God.
It’s to equip them to take a step in a much larger process and when we lose sight of the larger purpose of why we exist everything else is simply a temporary distraction.
In my doctrine class, I teach my students that there is a difference between worshipping God and praising God.
We worship God for who He is, but we praise God for what He does.
At first, this may seem like a matter of semantics, but consider it carefully. If we teach people to worship God for what He does, then we are setting them up for failure due to idolatry. God simply becomes my magic genie in a bottle and if I do the right thing or pray the right way, then He is obliged to give me what I want.
The result is that His creation become our god.
The catechism teaches us that we Worship God because of who He is because we worship the Creator and not the created.
In a similar way, we discover our identity in Christ because it leads us to our ultimate purpose of Reflecting Christ not so that we can simply sit on the talents that He has entrusted to us. It is only when we are clear about our ultimate deliverable that we will lead people purposefully through the process of being engaged.
The church, parish, individual or ministry that is not clear about the “Why” will most certainly be unclear about the ultimate deliverable and the result will be plateau, dissatisfaction and decline.
I’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks, but I’d like to encourage you to discover what other ministries, churches and leaders discovered about the ultimate deliverable and how to engage people in the process by planning on attending our ENGAGED 4Leadership and Equipped 4Growth Training in 2012.
I’d also love to hear back from you. Do these scenarios strike a chord or sound familiar? Shoot us an email back and let us know your thoughts and we can even set up a time to talk. |
