A Purpose-Full People. Part 2: Where Purpose Leads

by: VRcurator

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God created you with one-of-a-kind potential and placed you on earth for a specific purpose. Due to the busyness of life, you’ve likely never identified your unique calling in a way that brings life-changing clarity. Most haven’t and like a distinct echo, the promise of a vision-guided life remains illusive, drowning under the demands of life.

Your divine design—God’s design for your life—is more knowable than you realize. You are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which he has prepared in advance, that you should walk in them. With the right tools, you can discover your life vision and align your life vocation. You can and should know your Life Younique—your God-given identity and your God-inspired dreams. Most importantly, you can discern and design the practical next steps to get there.

THE QUICK SUMMARY – Visioneering, by Andy Stanley

Everybody ends up somewhere in life.
Wouldn’t you like to end up somewhere on purpose?

What breaks your heart?
What keeps you up at night?
What could be that should be?

Andy Stanley believes these questions are breadcrumbs that lead to the discovery of personal vision. With down-to-earth practicality, Andy extracts principles from the story of Nehemiah to help you discover your purpose in life.

Visioneering includes helpful exercises and time-tested ideas for visionary decision-making, personal growth, and leadership at home and at work. Catch a glimpse of God’s incredible vision for your life, relationships, and business—and discover the passion to follow it.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

What is clarity really about? How can pursuing clarity help us discover our purpose in life?

The concept of clarity means being free from anything that obscures, blocs, pollutes, or darkens. If you have clarity, you see things simply in an understandable and precise way.

Clarity will help you make your life direction unquestionable.

Honoring God involves discovering his picture or vision of what our lives could and should be. Glorifying God involves discovering what we could and should accomplish.

We were created and re-created with his purposes in mind. And until we discover his purpose – and follow through – there will always be a hole in our soul.

As Christians, we do not have the right to take our talents, abilities, experiences, opportunities, and education and run off in any direction we please. We lost that right at Calvary. But then, why would we dream of such a thing? God has a vision for your life. What could possibly be more fulfilling than that?

At the same time, we have no right to live visionless lives either. If God – think about it – if God has a vision for what you are to do with your allotment of years, you had better get on with it. What a tragedy to miss it. Missing out on God’s plan for our lives must be the greatest tragedy this side of eternity.

Your uniqueness and individuality will reach its pinnacle in the context of your pursuit of God’s plan for your life. Manmade visions all begin to look alike after a while. Unless you discover God’s unique vision for your future, your life may very well be a rerun.

Andy Stanley, Visioneering

A NEXT STEP

Andy Stanly, in “Visioneering,” says that “Vision gives significance to the otherwise meaningless details of our lives.” To further develop this thought, he wants you to realize how vision weaves four things into the fabric of our daily lives.

Reflect on each of the areas below.

Passion – vision is always accompanied by strong emotion; the clearer the vision, the stronger the emotion. How is your vision being expressed in powerful and compelling emotions?

Motivation – vision provides motivation. In what areas of your life is vision providing motivation on a regular basis?

Direction – vision sets a direction for our lives. How is your vision prioritizing your values and providing direction to your life?

Purpose – vision gives you a reason to get up and show up. How is your vision providing purpose in your daily life?

Network with 2-3 other staff members who live in close geographic proximity. Ask them these questions around their calling and process together how God might call you into greater collaboration together to reach your community for Christ.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix #75-3, issued September 2017.

This is part of a weekly series posting excerpts from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders.

SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; each solution is taken from a different book. Additionally, a practical action step is included with each solution.

As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS Remix provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<

Tags: Andy Stanley, Purpose, SUMS Remix, Vision, Visioneering

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Purpose Without Priority is Pointless

by: VRcurator

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How can you lead your team to believe “Less is more” in a “More is more” world?

Every day, ministry leaders spend too much time, managing too much church “stuff,” for too little life-change. It is safe to say that the church in North America is over-programming her calendar and under-discipling her people.

Behind this reality is a stark irony: The effectiveness of our gospel work is limited, not by a lack of ministry effort but by an excess of ministry action.

The gospel-centered, transformational impact of your church sits as a malnourished beggar beside an every-growing buffet of church ministry programs.

We get too little discipleship precisely because we have too much church stuff.

Church stuff is the whole of the ministry activities that make up your church calendar. Programming that ranges from weekly worship and groups, to monthly programming or quarterly training opportunities.

Church Stuff = Any event service, meeting, class, or group that your church offers this year.

THE QUICK SUMMARY – The One Thing, by Gary Keller

YOU WANT LESS. You want fewer distractions and less on your plate. The daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings distract you and stress you out. The simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what’s the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller paychecks, fewer promotions—and lots of stress.

AND YOU WANT MORE. You want more productivity from your work. You want more satisfaction from life, and more time for yourself, your family, and your friends.

NOW YOU CAN HAVE BOTH—LESS AND MORE. In The ONE Thing, you’ll learn to

• Cut through the clutter
• Achieve better results in less time
• Build momentum toward your goal
• Dial down the stress
• Overcome that overwhelmed feeling
• Revive your energy
• Stay on track
• Master what matters to you

The ONE Thing delivers extraordinary results in every area of your life—work, personal, family, and spiritual. WHAT’S YOUR ONE THING?

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

Complexity is the curse of organizations of almost any size. Many churches today are program profound and doctrinally dense – they are unnecessarily complex. The complexity is strangling their ability to grow and thrive. To the extent that today’s church has become political, institutional, or programmatic, we are making it more complicated than it needs to be.

We have bombarded our people with too many competing little ideas and the result is a church with more information and less clarity that perhaps ever before. The lack of clarity that churches give their people impedes the church’s ability to accomplish the mission of Jesus. “More” results in less clarity.

It’s time for the power of priority.

Purpose has the power to shape our lives only in direct proportion to the power of the priority we connect it to. Purpose without priority is powerless.

To be precise, the word is priority – not priorities – and it originated in the 14^th century from the Latin “prior” meaning “first.” If something mattered the most it was a “priority.” Curiously, priority remained unpluralized until around the 20^th century, when the world apparently emoted it to mean generally “something that matters” and the plural “priorities” appeared.

Watch your language. You may have many ways to talk about priority, but no matter the words you choose, to achieve extraordinary results your meaning must be the same – ONE Thing.

When each day begins, we each have a choice. We can ask, “What shall I do?” or “What should I do?” Without direction, without purpose, whatever you “shall do” will always get you somewhere. But when you’re going somewhere on purpose, there will always be something you “should do” that will get you where you must go. When your life is on purpose, living by priority takes precedence.

There can only be ONE. Your most important priority is the ONE Thing you can do right now that will help you achieve what matters most to you. You may have many “priorities,” but dig deep and you’ll discover there is always one that matters most, your top priority – Your ONE Thing.

Gary Keller with Jay Papasan, The ONE Thing 

A NEXT STEP

Again, select three potentially good ideas for ministry action, and write them on a chart tablet. These can be three new ideas or from Solution 1 above.

Plot each as a journey of activities, and highlight who is involved in each step such as volunteer leaders, staff members, congregation, guests, community members, etc.

Highlight those that are crucial to each step and discuss with your team if those stakeholders listed above remain motivated throughout the whole journey. What is their motivation?

How many steps does it take until the motivation becomes unclear? How many steps can it take for the motivation to be lost? Put a red dot by the steps that are unclear.

Repeat the steps above with the other two ideas and make the final count of red dots. The idea with the least red dots is the one that should be considered as the priority.

Taken from SUMS Remix 42-2, published June 2016

This is part of a weekly series posting content from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders. SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; and each solution is taken from a different book. As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<

Tags: Gary Keller, Jay Papasan, Purpose, SUMS Remix, The One Thing, priority

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Why Your Church Needs Clarity of Purpose

by: Jeanne Bliss

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Organizations beloved by their customers, those that are true and authentic, work hard every day to resist the pull of “normal” business practices to create a powerful human connection with their customers.

They are able to do this because they have something that binds everyone together, moving them toward a common goal: clarity of purpose.

Beloved companies take the time to be clear about what their unique promise is for their customers’ lives. They use this clarity when they make decisions so they align to this purpose, to this promise.

Clarity of purpose guides choices and unites the organization. It elevates people’s work from executing tasks to delivering experiences customers will want to repeat and tell others about.

• Apple’s clarity for creating its in-store experience has built a cult following. Apple stores wouldn’t have become the gathering place they are today without the time, angst, and thought that went into deciding what those stores would and would not be.
• Trader Joe’s, a grocery store so clearly focused on personal interaction with customers, obsessed over the decision to buy scanning equipment. They worried that the scanning equipment’s “pinging” sound would get in the way of their employees’ chatty conversations with customers.
• Newegg.com, banned pop-up ads after checkout. They won’t abdicate their well-orchestrated customer experience and final memory to a third-party partner’s pop-up ad, even though pop-up ads bring in extra revenue.
• For Genentech (one of the world’s fastest-growing and admired bio-tech companies), clarity of purpose fuels their growth. The personal knowledge of patients, and the details of the lives they are saving, motivates employees to make the right decisions for the customers they serve. It elevates their decisions from science . . . to saving lives.

Each beloved company makes key decisions to mark its place in the universe with customers. Beloved companies begin with a notion, an idea fueled by passion about their greater purpose for improving customers’ lives. It doesn’t matter if they are selling electronics or food, or saving lives; conviction helps them stay the course. Even in the face of sacrifice and, yes, sometimes pain, beloved companies press on for customers. They persevere until they get it right.

Read more from Jeanne here.

Tags: Jeanne Bliss, Purpose, Vision Clarity

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