Little Insights
29 Lessons From Along the Way
1. Look beyond the plan to the relationship. Ideas don’t thrive in ministry where there is no relationship.
2. Learn people. Appreciate the ones you gravitate to and ones you don’t. Don’t just look at visible leaders (though you should learn from them too). Look for the overarching influential relationships and grow from them.
3. Teams morph. Players move around. Sometimes it’s like soup. Other times it like a SEAL team that embeds itself with Marines or Army. They are helping those on the ground complete their mission by serving a specific role. Watermark is full of teams that can bleed and morph into other teams because we’re all on same team. Every person on staff must learn to play well in different sandboxes as well as know their role. Each is here to serve a role. A team dynamic is just as important as a person’s role. So it’s important to develop trust in the leadership and remain agile.
4. Not every promotion is an upward movement on the org chart. Some roles serve as becoming a stronger load bearing wall. Until you are captivated by the mission instead of your advancement, you will never be fully effective. Or better said, until you are captivated by the One who is leading the mission and His heart for those you’re reaching, you’ll never be fully effective. Every structure needs strong load bearing walls to support the weight of the next level of growth. Also it’s God’s grace, that in His providence, He puts you in places of high leadership or influence and then low levels of leadership and influence and switches you back and forth. It keeps your evaluation meter of a job honest sometimes. And it is shows where you can have a tendency to show your resume’ rather than love even more faithfully toward someone’s growth (which will grow your own life too).
5. The word “perseverance” has the word sever in it. Because something of you must get severed in order to endure. If you want to be in this for the long haul, patience is mandatory. Learn from grace…the kind found in forgiveness but also in being faithful. Choose the long view.
6. It’s not about achieving a dream but more like Him breaking you in to the dream He’s already begun. Looking back, it’s not about a road to working in vocational ministry. It was simply His road of deepening your faith in His faithfulness…to show His grace is sufficient.
7. Before you critique, try to absorb the heart of everything you haven’t seen before that God has done. Appreciate the unique work of God in every person and every place.
8. Learn to receive & give feedback. Recognize the triggers that come up that could impact this process.
9. With repetition, every new thing becomes familiar. And eventually becomes a part of you. There is a beauty and a risk with that. The beauty is it can grow a culture. The difficulty is that it can make you hard to adjust to other cultures.
10. Everyone needs encouragement & prayer. Remember that as you go. Notice the edges. Specific, intentional, thoughtful, sincere encouragement & prayer is as important as completing any task or having any conversation. Don’t schedule it as a task. Learn to be more aware and actionable. Develop a heart that prays and encourages, and I guarantee God will give you the eyes to know when to share it.
11. As you sharpen your skill, widen your view. Early on, I had a board of magazine cutouts where I put faces of everyone I’d naturally see at watermark. Then I’d put faces of everyone I didn’t usually see at watermark that live in Dallas so I wouldn’t forget them as I designed.
12. Learn from everyone. If all you learn is from is someone on stage, then your learning will be stunted.There’s always something to learn from every person. And at the same time, know there is a lot that goes into leading on stage or leading an organization. Learn from what they speak and learn from when they choose not to speak.
13. Discern when an act of worship has become an idol of worship. Every gifted person (which is everyone) in getting to use their gift and passion have to discern when an act of worship becomes an idol of worship. Ministry and lupus taught me that. There was a season in lupus when I couldn’t do what I usually do with design & leading. I had so wrapped my ability to worship around my gifts that I completely lost perspective. I looked at God like “how then can I worship if I can’t use these gifts you gave me to worship You anymore?” He responded, “I will never take away your ability to worship Me. But I may change your tools & gifts often. It’s not about the tools. Your heart is always what I’m after.”
14. Abide, Abide, Abide. If you cut through the job, stance, vision, mission, and can’t find sensitivity to the Lord’s truthful voice, you’ve missed the calling.
15. Limits test love, forces priorities, makes you in touch with your weakness and His strength. God had a purpose for the Sabbath and making you have limits. One reason is to grow your faith and focus.
16. Understand the voice you are carrying. The longer you are faithful in ministry, the greater the weight of your voice. Understand your voice and what’s informing it. And make sure your abiding is growing at a stronger rate than your influence. The longer you follow Him, there will be a rising number of those who revere you or resent you. The trouble is both won’t let you be who you were made to be. You need to be grounded in your identity and understand the voice you are carrying to be able to serve well.
17. Certain things won’t grow until the roots go deep enough. And that takes time and engaging in the waiting. There’s no timetable for that because all seeds, conditions & farmers are different. And God is sovereign. He knows what He planted for a purpose in that spot. There is a time in ministry where folks simply need the shade of a green tree. There are times when they need the fruit of what comes after many years. In early days here, Watermark needed me to simply crank out a graphic. Now, it needs me to think how it impacts more campuses, can be flexible on far more platforms, help create environments and build upon what He’s done in the past.
18. You got to figure out if it’s a people problem or systems problem. And then as a team prayerfully work from there toward a solution.
19. Cuts come in Worship & Creative Processes. At every point of true worship, something gets laid down. Something gets taken up. So it is with every pitch. There is always stuff on the cutting floor (especially things you love) when someone finishes worship or any creative process.
20. There are “many ways to skin a cat” but make sure it’s still a cat. There can be a lot of ideas that can work but don’t get so lost in the ideating, you forget what needs to get communicated & what people need. As a related corollary, you don’t need to say everything with every piece. You can communicate more of who you are with less sometimes.
21. There’s a difference between excellence and perfectionism and a difference between honoring and people-pleasing.
22. You don’t have to be like (insert any leader’s name)’s personality to fit on a team. All different kinds are needed.
23. Money is not what runs a ministry but the support of giving hearts and prayerful people. In early ministry, Gregg taught me money is a river not a reservoir. Later I added any resource should be a river not a reservoir. Use it as it was intended.
24. Let stories breathe. In the process of telling people’s stories in ministry, be aware of the temptation to hijack their stories to say what story you are already wanting to tell…which could lead to a misperception of what happened in their lives & reduce them only to your point. Listen better. Let their story breathe to see how uniquely God is at work & what He may be trying to teach you even if it’s layered. It might be different than what you’re projecting into it. Let the truth of their story surface. Give it dignity. You might land in the same place, or it might lead you in a different direction.
25. Distracted minds become forgetful minds. Receive God’s interruptions but cut out useless distractions for they can get you easily off mission and lead you away from obedience.
26. Resources can go to places where relationships haven’t yet been built.
27. Wrestle the bear in learning to deal with conflict. Elevate the relationship about the issue. Watermark taught me this. So grateful. Nothing will kill an organization faster than an inability to deal with conflict. Ministry/Church politics are sure to follow if left unchecked. It serves nobody to let things fester. Matthew 18 is your guide for everyone. No one, not even the leader at the highest or lowest level in the organization is exempt. Remember everyone is still in the sanctification process. Give and receive grace as you work through the process. So as far as it depends on you, pursue peace and reconciliation. There’s no room for gossip. Learn to draw a circle around yourself in seeing how you added to conflict, confess, and make amends. Learn to love each other through conflict so everyone grows. Ask for help. The goal is never to pit people against one another but to come together and work toward unity through humility. For more info, this Conflict Field Guide PDF is an awesome tool. https://www.watermark.org/community/conflict-field-guide
28. If you keep moving from ministry to ministry, eventually you’ll lose your ministry. This doesn’t mean you can never explore or leave a ministry. But it does speak to those who keep moving because a ministry wasn’t interesting enough, or it got hard, or you weren’t appreciated enough, or you want to keep using new sets of gifts every semester, or simply have a lust to always be with the newest ministry, or simply addicted to motion, etc. You miss the lessons of cultivating a field, deepening your love for a people, dealing with authority and community, and watching God grow something greater than you can imagine. In early college this advice was given to me because I kept jumping from ministry to ministry. Exploring is good, but there comes a point when to grow at another level of discipleship, you have to plant yourself and weather the seasons. The motions of starting and adjusting and leaving and searching take time. If it’s all you do, you may miss ministry in your midst. A friend of mine several years ago started volunteering with us as we ministered to kids. After a few months, he was frustrated that the kids wouldn’t open up. I told him it would probably take a year. They are waiting to see if you bolt. You don’t have to be the most charismatic person. The kids are looking for faithfulness (whether they communicate it or not). Keep praying. Keep showing up. In time, things will change slowly. And it did. The seeds he sowed then and cultivated still grow today.
29. Faith to go, faith to stay. The decision to take an opportunity or forego an opportunity comes down to this. God is working underneath all of our lives and ministries asking our hearts this question. Is it faith to go or faith to stay? Whether we go or stay, it should always be rooted in walking by faith wherever He leads.