Upgrading Your "Life Vehicle"

 

 

You may be satisfied with your life as it is right now, but I have suspicions that there are things that you still want out of life. We should always be looking for ways to advance our situation in life, and to help others advance in their lives. Our life "vehicle" has brought us to where we are, and will take us further.

 

Your vehicle should be equipped to take you to the next level in life!

 

"Vehicle" comes from the Latin vehiculum (a means of transport) which is derived from vehere (to carry). The dictionary meaning is 1) a thing used for transporting people or goods, or 2) a thing used to express, embody, or fulfill something. We each have a "vehicle" that takes us to where we want to be in life, but everybody's vehicle is different.

 

The "vehicle" that takes us to where we want to be in life is our knowledge, skills, and abilities. Some of us have great and reliable vehicles that takes us to places we want to go, however we should always be upgrading. Because life is a journey, it is as much about the vehicle as it is about the road or the destination. Even if your vehicle is adequate for now, we should not be satisfied.

 

You should always be upgrading your knowledge. It is often said that knowledge is power. Every job, career, organization, or discipline has information that is unique. A person that goes to work for Alltel may be a RF engineer and know everything about wireless communication, but still has to learn information that is unique to Alltel. A young man was hired as a leasing coordinator for a company. He worked in a pool of other leasing coordinators, but while the other coordinators did their jobs and earned a paycheck. This young man began to learn how the company as a whole worked and soon became a project manager because he gained the knowledge about the company the other lease coordinators did not.

 

My daughter works for a restaurant chain. Not being satisfied with just earning a check and because she has an inquisitive mind, she determine that she wanted to know everything about the restaurant chain. As a result of her gaining more knowledge and showing her dependability, she has become a manager and goes to other restaurant grand openings to assist. She is on her way to having her own restaurant--and she is only twenty years old.

 

Upgrade your knowledge and become an expert in an area that is vital for the company success or can become a marketable asset. Become the "go to" person in that area.

 

As you upgrade your knowledge, upgrade your skills also. A skill is a combination of abilities, techniques, and knowledge that makes a person do tasks at a higher degree or standard. Skills are primarily learned behavior. We attend college, trade schools, or take on internships to gain the skills needed to advance our careers. Skills come from putting knowledge into action. Knowledge that it not followed up by action is useless.

The third upgrade should be to your ability. Ability is the generic make up of a person that is generally inherited. Abilities are either cognitive or physical and everybody has an inherent level of abilities. Ability is part of a person's overall make up that includes personality, intelligence, and emotions. However, abilities can improve or diminish. 

 

Knowledge, skills, and abilities work together. An athlete may be big and be able to run very fast, but that ability will not make him a football player. The athlete must gain football knowledge. Being big, able to run, and having football knowledge still does not make that person a running back. Skill comes when a person's ability is combined with knowledge and put into action. This continual action produces skill.

 

This combination of knowledge, ability, and skill is the vehicle that will take you toward your destiny.

Coaching Questions:

1. Are you satisfied with your level of knowledge, abilities, and skills and are they able to take you to the next level?

2. Which is your greatest strength?

-Knowledge
-Abilities
-Skills

3. What is your greatest weakness

-Knowledge
-Abilities
-Skills

4. Which of these three need the biggest upgrade?

5. When and how will you start this upgrade?


 

Do you need help in advancing to the next level?

 

Have you considered getting a coach?

 

Coaches can help you identify your next level and work to achieve it.

 

For more coaching information email me at jimbayes4@hotmail.com

 

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Declining Churches Need Empowered Members

The young shepherd boy, David, went to battle against the giant enemy. David took charge of the battle and did not wait for the generals to sound the charge.

When Christians begin looking around it appears that Satan, our enemy, is winning the war. He has certainly won many of the battles.

 

Why does it look like the enemy is winning on many fronts? Doesn't the Bible declare the Church victorious? Why has the church reached a plateau and started to decline?

 

To be fair, not all churches are declining, however, most of the churches that are growing are getting bigger at the expense of other churches--transfer growth is not growth. When we begin to realize this, we will all be more motivated to do something about it. Many pastor's whose churches start syphoning off others members use the excuse, "Its not my fault that they prefer go to my church than their old one." I have heard pastor's us the phrase unchurched or under-churched to describe people that may attend a church, but are not fully engaged into the body and mission of the church. The truth is, it is just easier to attract Christians to church than non-Christians. If non-Christians were easy to reach, then all churches would be growing.

Psychologists have a term for when a person has conflicting values and try to reconcile them--cognitive dissidence. The conflict that pastor's have is that in their heart they do not like the notion that they are stealing members from other churches, but they also want to grow a church and more members means more resources. They are seduced by the thought that they are preferred to the others. It plays into their pride. They say to themselves that when my church grows large enough, then I will have the resources we need to evangelize.

Back to my question--why are churches declining?

 

I want to make several observations from my experience, from what the Christian leadership literature says, and from personal discussions with pastors and church members.

 

1. Churches decline because they have lost their ability to impact their community.

 

Many churches are not impacting their community and don't seem to know how to make a difference in the lives of the community. This is a leadership problem. In my opinion, one of the problems is that most of our churches are led by men whose primary gift is pastor. If a church is led by a man whose primary gift is pastor, they should surround themselves with men with other gifts. Pastors whose churches are growing have done this either on purpose or by accident. We need church leaders with strategic insight that can target and impact their communities, many pastors lack this strategic ability or are too busy shepherding the flock. The lead person (usually called pastor) must put together a team of gifted individuals to lead the church.

2. Churches decline because we are not training leaders that can impact their communities within their areas of gifting.

For all of the literature and discussion on Ephesians 4:11-13, it seems few churches are actually good at it. The current teaching says that the apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher are given to the church to train workers to build up the body of Christ. If this teaching is correct, I know of only a handful of churches in my community that does it well. If those with the gift of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher cannot impact their community, how then can we expect those that they train to do much better?

Am I saying that we should never change churches?

Glad you asked...that is NOT what I am saying.

Assuming that the doctrine of the church you are attending is acceptable to you and there are not obvious signs of heresy, discord, or immorality, then you should stay and make a difference. "I am not being fed," is the most common excuse that I hear for a Christian to change churches. When I hear that, I really hear, "I am not satisfied at this church and this is the only excuse that puts the blame on the church and not my dissatisfaction."

The only good excuse for changing churches is for an opportunity to use your gifts for the glory of God. Some churches have enough people with your gift that you may not have a place to be used. If that is the case, there are many churches that need mature Christians that know what their gifts are and how to use them--go there, they would love to have you.

What is the Lord saying now?

Don't wait for the generals (church leaders) to lead you into battle. Be like David and take the fight to the giant.

Empowerment, Innovation, and Sliced Bread

Organizations must learn how to change to respond to the world as it is in the Twenty-first Century. The world is rapidly changing and organizations must adapt or innovate to this change. Adaptation is making adjustments to existing practices for improvement. Innovation on the other hand tends to look for future trends and make preemptive changes to grow their customer base. The hope is that these improvements will meet the expectation of the consumer. Innovators often create things that customers didn't even know they needed. No one knew that they needed a device to store and play their digital music until Apple develop the Ipod. They created a solution to a need, before the need even existed.

Innovation is empowering!

 

Innovation comes from a person's creativity or their ability to create. Although most organizations do not encourage their employees to create, every employee should be able to offer creative solutions to their companies that make their jobs easier and faster, satisfy the customer, or bring in more revenue to the company. Many organizations have seen the benefits of encouraging creativity and have developed programs and have started to establish a culture of creativity. Creativity and innovation is the key for organizational success in the modern world.

Apply this to the church

 

For a few years now, I have been studying change. I have seen many churches struggling to grow in today's world, while other churches seem to be thriving. Many researchers have studied this phenomenon and have written many good books on the  subject. The facts speak for themselves. The majority of growing churches are less than twenty years old. Many of the large archetype mega-churches, although have a very large weekly attendance, have leveled off. Many mega-churches that are making a difference and seem to keep growing have adopted the multi-site paradigm. Meanwhile, every church is faced with change. The simple fact of the matter: every established organization, church or otherwise, must change with the times or continue their decline.

That leads to my other interest; understanding why some churches struggle to change and others don't seem to? We all can agree that change is inevitable. Looking in the mirror each day and watching our children grow up tells us that life is always moving forward and that everything changes. As it turns out, this is a very complex question and not easily answered. It is safe to say that I will not be able to answer the question in one blog. However, I have one observation that will help.

Churches must innovate. I heard one church health expert say that churches must adapt or die. This is true, but I am suggesting that churches should not merely adapt, they should innovate. The definition of adapt is to become adjusted to new conditions. The definition of innovate is to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.  You might be thinking that they sound the same. However, there is a nuanced difference between the two concepts of change.

First, adaptation is doing thing differently to solve the problem. For example, a church that has leveled off starts to decline. All the church leaders and members notice the drop off in attendance and offerings. They begin looking for something or someone to blame. All of the usual suspects are named--economy, possible conflict, the non-denominational churches that have lured many away, spiritual warfare has been waged against them, the location of the church, the state of their facilities--the list goes on. The next obvious step is to look at the churches nearby that seem to be growing and learn from them. Established churches cannot change their core values or their doctrine, but they can change other things that seem to attract people, so they begin adapting according to what "seems to be working" in other churches. They change worship style, they begin small groups, they start a children's ministry in the park, or change their name with the hopes of reversing the declining trend.

 

Many of the adaptive changes some churches undertake do not make considerable differences. I can list over twenty churches that I know of personally that have undertaken adaptive changes with minimal results. They instead should be innovative and look for different ways to accomplish their mission in creative ways. Churches that adapt, see the their problem as losing members, but their real problem is what it always has been--reaching the lost and ministering to the hurting, and discipling new converts. The reason that the church was founded is the same today as it was then. The solution is to find creative ways to accomplish their mission.

 

One innovative church in New Mexico found a creative way to reach people in their community especially the youth. They started a nonprofit organization. The purpose of the nonprofit was to help stop unwanted teen pregnancy in their community by promoting abstinence. This message was one that they could take into the High Schools and Community College. The nonprofit was awarded a grant to purchase a truck that the bed raised up into a rock climbing wall. They would set this truck up at parks, local events, fairs, and anywhere youth would assemble. All events were co-sponsored by the church and all of the workers at the events would wear shirts with the church name and logo. Depending upon the venue, they passed out tracks, shared their faith, and invited them to church. Since the nonprofit was its own entity, they did not receive money from the church and had the ability to raise their own funds. If memory served me, the nonprofit eventually paid the salary for the youth pastor who served as the Director of the nonprofit also.

This church didn't adapt, it found an innovative solution to accomplish its mission. It didn't just find a new way to slice bread, it found an alternative to sliced bread. 

Do you have a story of how a church found an innovative way to accomplish their mission? I what to hear about it!

Please submit the story below.....

 

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