General Posts

Dreaming Big

So a few days ago at small group I was praying for Jeff about dreaming big. As a lot of you know Jeff is pretty into theoretical / visionary kinds of ideas, but he wanted some prayer about that kind of stuff. So we oblige him since he is the pastor (j/k). Anyway, while I was praying for him, I had a couple of sensations / feelings. One was really weird, when I went to put my hand on him it felt like an odd grating sensation…almost like cold friction on my arm. I don’t know much of what to make of that, but the other one was the important bit. The second impression / feeling I got was that we (the team…or more specifically me) have to enable Jeff to be that way, to think big. I didn’t have a good way to say it in the prayer, so Jeff said I should think and pray about it and get back to him…and I did yesterday. He is going to write more about it on his blog, or talk about it at church or something later, so I won’t go into a lot of detail what I told him.



It’s odd the situation we have in this church plant. We have a great team, an oddly great team. I’ve heard horror stories about other planting teams, and I pray that none of my friends ever end up on a crappy team (not a failed plant….cuz a good team can fail…just wanted to make that distinction). But our church plant has a cluster of gifts (I think around worship and dicipleship / teaching), and then the rest are pretty evenly spread out. Plus, we are all have led in the past, and we have a lot of experience in church (i.e. a lot of us have been very involved all our lives in a church).

So, I was thinking why wouldn’t we (or more specifically me) be enabling Jeff to dream big, or to be visionary? A few ideas came to my head in thinking about this, and I might say a few of them, but I would more like to know, what do you think it means to working under a leader in such a way that it enables him / her to lead most effectively. That would encompass their visionary talents / dreams and their management abilities. I want to really know that looks like in others heads.

My thoughts were concerning this team that it would be difficult to handle a talented, trained team if you didn’t believe in yourself, and you didn’t trust them to do what they should be doing. Both in a situation like ours would seem pretty easy to feel very real. Plus, leading leaders is always something odd since they have their own ideas about how things should go, and what things should look like.

So my thoughts were run with it. Just let us do what we do, and only work as hard as you have to, to keep us in line with the big picture. Seems vague right? Well it made sense in my head, and I could lay out a pretty detailed picture of what that would look like, but instead since Jeff is the one supplying the big over-arching vision for our big visions I’ll let him talk about what that looks like in his head…cuz that is more pertinant to this than what it looks like in mine.

Anyway…the big question I’m asking is, how do you enable the people over you to lead you more effectively, and how do you treat that when they fail (an added bit since I just remembered I’ve told more than one leader over me they have to be allowed to fail).

X-posted to my LiveJournal.

General Posts

Dreaming Big

So a few days ago at small group I was praying for Jeff about dreaming big. As a lot of you know Jeff is pretty into theoretical / visionary kinds of ideas, but he wanted some prayer about that kind of stuff. So we oblige him since he is the pastor (j/k). Anyway, while I was praying for him, I had a couple of sensations / feelings. One was really weird, when I went to put my hand on him it felt like an odd grating sensation…almost like cold friction on my arm. I don’t know much of what to make of that, but the other one was the important bit. The second impression / feeling I got was that we (the team…or more specifically me) have to enable Jeff to be that way, to think big. I didn’t have a good way to say it in the prayer, so Jeff said I should think and pray about it and get back to him…and I did yesterday. He is going to write more about it on his blog, or talk about it at church or something later, so I won’t go into a lot of detail what I told him.


It’s odd the situation we have in this church plant. We have a great team, an oddly great team. I’ve heard horror stories about other planting teams, and I pray that none of my friends ever end up on a crappy team (not a failed plant….cuz a good team can fail…just wanted to make that distinction). But our church plant has a cluster of gifts (I think around worship and dicipleship / teaching), and then the rest are pretty evenly spread out. Plus, we are all have led in the past, and we have a lot of experience in church (i.e. a lot of us have been very involved all our lives in a church).

So, I was thinking why wouldn’t we (or more specifically me) be enabling Jeff to dream big, or to be visionary? A few ideas came to my head in thinking about this, and I might say a few of them, but I would more like to know, what do you think it means to working under a leader in such a way that it enables him / her to lead most effectively. That would encompass their visionary talents / dreams and their management abilities. I want to really know that looks like in others heads.

My thoughts were concerning this team that it would be difficult to handle a talented, trained team if you didn’t believe in yourself, and you didn’t trust them to do what they should be doing. Both in a situation like ours would seem pretty easy to feel very real. Plus, leading leaders is always something odd since they have their own ideas about how things should go, and what things should look like.

So my thoughts were run with it. Just let us do what we do, and only work as hard as you have to, to keep us in line with the big picture. Seems vague right? Well it made sense in my head, and I could lay out a pretty detailed picture of what that would look like, but instead since Jeff is the one supplying the big over-arching vision for our big visions I’ll let him talk about what that looks like in his head…cuz that is more pertinant to this than what it looks like in mine.

Anyway…the big question I’m asking is, how do you enable the people over you to lead you more effectively, and how do you treat that when they fail (an added bit since I just remembered I’ve told more than one leader over me they have to be allowed to fail).

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