Seedplots

Many in positions of Christian leadership do not have a typical 9-5 type job.  Since their day is not structured for them, they need to structure it themselves.  For many, this is not as easy as it sounds.  Matt Perman’s article on the “Four Things You Need to Do Every Day” (Routines, Office tasks, Projects and People related activities) provides some helpful suggestions for doing this.

I introduced these four things in an earlier posting. In
this article, I want to discuss the first item: Daily Routines.

Daily workflow routines refers to those tasks we do each day, such as cleaning up our work space, planning our day, processing our e-mail, etc.  Perman suggests we ought to 1) take these routines seriously and 2) spend an hour or less on doing them, in a batch, right at the start of the day. “They will only get in your way if you don’t nail them out immediately” he argues.

I have found Perman’s suggestion extremely helpful.  I experimented with several approaches and finally settled on using a daily checklist covered with plastic.  When I complete an item on this list, I simply cross it off with a dry erase felt marker.  At the start of the next day, I erase the list and start over.  If I don’t finish everything on the list in an hour, I simply leave it for the next day.  Somehow the satisfaction of crossing things off the list helps motivate me.

As I began to implement this habit, I realized that in my own life I actually had three different sets of routines:

• Daily Spiritual disciplines related to my walk with God
• Daily household tasks
• Daily office tasks at the start of each day

Eventually I ended with three checklists of daily routines.  Here is a photo of the daily routine checklists I’m currently using.  A person needs to find what works best for him/her – this system is working great for me.

Practicing this habit has help me get these routines out of the way at the start of each day and freed me to concentrate my attention and energy on projects later in the day.

Last summer a missionary working in the Balkans recommended the following article.  I read it, was struck by its message, re-read it and then shared it with my wife.   Then I copied it and filed it away.

Yesterday I ran across it and re-read it once more.  Again it challenged me.  I’m not sure why it resonated with me like this.  Perhaps because here in the Balkans, where I live, spiritual transformation in people’s lives usually does not occur quickly.   In the hope that the article will encourage and challenge you as it did me, I share it with you:

You have to trust the Gospel to do what it promises to do…  [There are] two mistakes to avoid:

• Making your own agenda the “To do” list for the Holy Spirit. That’s a big leap: from “I want it to happen” to “God wants it to happen.”
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• Turning to other motivations – like guilt, condemnation, guilt, manipulation, guilt …  – to get the work done.  Really. This is so important and so true.

If the Holy Spirit isn’t going to produce it by constant, earnest presentation of the Gospel to the people of God, then does it need to happen?  And if the Holy Spirit isn’t the primary motivator, how can other motivations – like guilt and condemnation- actually do anything worthwhile?

I love Paul’s advice in Ephesians 6.  Take up the whole armor of God…and having done all, just stand there.  That’s so good. Put on God’s resources, God’s vision, God’s heart. Do all that the Gospel commands and demands.  Then … stand.

We take this and do something like this: We use some of God’s resources, and things don’t go the way we want. So we start doing things our way, and finding what does work. Or we just get frustrated and start beating ourselves and other people up with guilt and condemnation for what’s not happening. They we are upset at people, ourselves and God because nothing’s working.

Scripture has a better way. Stay with the Gospel. Speak the truth in love. Design a path of radical loyalty to Christ, specific repentance and clear obedience. Does those things and do them God’s way.

Then stand.

I believe that part of the method of Paul in I Thessalonians was to do his ministry God’s way and to then look for the resulting work of the Holy Spirit and to ENCOURAGE GOD’S PEOPLE with what he saw the Spirit doing.  Even when Paul is strongly correcting the church, he does so from the standpoint of the grace of God in the Gospel, never by resorting to guilt.

That’s very different from setting the agenda, living in frustration that things aren’t working, then resorting to beating up yourself and other Christians in hopes something will change.

Life is too short, folks. Grace is the good stuff. Stay with it. Don’t quit and take the road back to legalism as so many do. Preach yourself happy in God, then encourage, persuade and exhort God’s people in the grace of Jesus.

Here’s the original link.

Current reading  . . .

In an effort to encourage others to read, I share what I’m currently reading.

1 Samuel: Looking on the Heart
Dale Ralph Davis,  2007, Christian Focus
A practical, non technical explanation of 1 Samuel, chapter by chapter, based on careful exegesis.  Davis is currently a pastor and was formerly an Old Testament seminary professor.  This is a delightful book – spiritually rich and a pleasure to read.

The Cross and Christian Ministry:  Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians,
D.A. Carson,  2004 [1993], Baker
Through his exposition of sections of  1 Corinthians, Don Carson explains what it means to make the cross central in preaching and ministering to God’s people. I’m enjoying working my way through this book.

God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis,
Philip Jenkins,  2007, Oxford University Press
This is the third of Professor Jenkins’ Future of Christianity trilogy (along with The Next Christendom, and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South). Jenkins arrives at some surprising and controversial conclusions.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (audio book)
I first read this classic many years ago.  Now I am listening to the audio version.

This Psalm has been called the “Gateway into the Psalms.”   Two ways lie before a person – the Way of the righteous (vv 1-3) and the Way of the wicked (vv 4-5).

This metaphor, which runs throughout Scripture, frames the Psalm (vs 1 “the way of sinners”;  vs 6 “the way of the righteous / the way of the wicked”).  I’m struck by how these two ways of living are characterized:
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Fruitfulness during one’s lifetime
A person on the Way of the righteous is “blessed” or fortunate because that person is 1) stable” in times of trouble, 2) fruitful in season and 3) successful (”prospers”) in efforts aimed at helping others.  In contrast, a person on the Way of the wicked is unstable, especially in difficult times.  The Psalms, using vivid  language, compares such a person to “chaff blown by the wind.”  Chaff, unlike fruit, brings no benefit to anyone.
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One’s standing at the final judgment
The Way of the righteous ends differently from the Way of the wicked.  In the final judgment, those on the Way of the righteous will enter the “congregation of the righteous” and enjoy the approval of the living God (implicit in the term “watches over”) while those on the Way of the wicked will be judged, excluded from the “congregation of the righteous” and “perish.”

Life certainly looks different when looked at from this perspective, doesn’t it.

A few weeks ago I read this simple conclusion of a church leader,

“I’ve been a Christian for 32 years. I’ve worked for or been a part of many churches. A good chunk of my degree work focused on analyzing how churches operate. I think I have some qualifications to express my opinion here. If anyone were to ask me what the one essential ingredient was for a successful church, I’d say this:.

The people in the church are genuinely friendly
and loving toward strangers and each other.
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Now before I get thumped by some watchblogger out there, I am, of course, assuming that the church assents to one of the Christian Church’s major creeds, such as the Nicene or Apostle’s. Otherwise, the use of the word church would be gratuitous.

As I see it, a church filled with loving and friendly people can overcome just about any obstacle. I’ve seen it too many times to think otherwise. And churches that lack this trait can have everything else in the world and fail miserably.

Can Jesus make any pagan misanthrope into a loving believer? Sure He can. My only question: Why then are so many supposed Christian churches filled with people who could care less about the person standing next to them?” (here’s the original link. The comments to the post are also worth reading).

Pretty simple stuff, but it helps explain why so much of what Jesus tells his disciples, and what Paul tells the young churches he writes to is related to the command to love our neighbors, especially those in the “household of faith.”

Personally, I would want to emphasize the centrality of the gospel more overtly.  The author hints at this in his last sentence and stresses it in the comments that follow the article.  Perhaps it would be better to say, “The one essential ingredient for a successful church is the gospel” and then move point out that the fruit of the gospel in our lives is expressed most clearly in loving and holy living.  Interestingly, this is the flow of thought in John’s first epistle.

The big questions, of course, are the Why? and How? ones.  If love is the fruit of the gospel, as the New Testament so clearly teaches, why are we not seeing more warm, welcoming, loving behavior in our churches?  If this is a problem in our churches, how do respond as leaders?  Which again brings us back to the gospel and its importance for believers.

I found this to be a helpful article on legalism,

No one leading God’s people wants to be accused of “legalism.”  But what is it and what does it mean?  I found the article that follows by Tony Reinke helpful in better understanding just what legalism is.

Rules and Scripture
Almost 900 passages in the Bible contain the phrase “do not” …  There are a lot of rules in the Bible… If you apply the entire Bible to the Christian life, you can end up with a long list of helpful rules and reminders (i.e. the “one anothers”)… The fundamental danger of legalism is not living or not living by rules… Legalism points to a much deeper heart issue.

A false gospel
At its most dangerous level, legalism is a soteriological problem. That is, legalism is a false gospel and a false hope. Legalism is the lie that says God’s pleasure and joy in me is dependent upon my performance rather than the finished work of Christ.

It is legalism that causes the Pharisee to look proudly into the sky in the presence of a tax collector. It is legalism that causes a poor missionary in Africa to think God is more pleased with him than an American Christian businessman driving a Mercedes. It is legalism that causes the preacher behind the pulpit to think God is more pleased with him than the tatooed Christian teenager sitting in the back row.

Legalism causes the heart to forget that God sings over us because of the work He has done, not because of what we have done (Zeph. 3:15-17).  Believers equally bring pleasure to God because the pleasure He receives in us is the purchased pleasure of the substitution of Jesus Christ. Any imagined superiority to other Christians (not rules or a lack of rules) is the sure sign of the legalist.

Rules are not the problem
And whether our convictions are biblical or unbiblical is another issue altogether. Legalism is not so much objective (are my convictions biblical or not?) but subjective (what do my convictions get me?).  And this is what makes legalism dangerous whether your convictions are biblically accurate or not.  From what I hear, often what is labeled as legalistic too often focuses primarily upon rules or a lack thereof rather than the gospel.

As I’ve seen in my own heart, what sustains self-righteous legalism is a failure to boast only in the righteousness of the Cross of Christ. Once I take my eyes off the Cross I begin boasting in my list of rules or boasting in my lack of rules. Either way, I know I have fallen into legalism.

Current reading  . . .

In an effort to encourage readers to read, I share what I’m currently reading.

The Cross and Christian Ministry:  Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians, D.A. Carson,  2004 [1993], Baker
Through his exposition of sections of  1 Corinthians, Don Carson explains what it means to make the cross central in preaching and ministering to God’s people.

An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach, [selected sections] Bruce Waltke,  2007, Zondervan
An Old Testament theology by a leading Old Testament scholar who combines a technical with a spiritual understanding of the Old Testament… written with the conviction that the unifying theme of the Old Testament is the “breaking in of the kingdom of God.”

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (audio book)
I first read this classic many years ago.  Now I am listening to the audio version.
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Recently finished  . . .

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, D.A. Carson,  2008, Crossway Books
Don Carson tells the story of his father’s church-planting and pastoral ministry in Quebec during the difficult decades of pioneer ministry in French Canada.

Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community, Tim Chester, Steve Timmis,  2008, Crossway Books
The two authors, who lead the Crowded House (a church-planting initiative in England) outline and apply a pair of overarching biblical principles (gospel and community) that call churches to a fundamental restructuring of their life and mission. This dual focus to evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world missions, discipleship, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, apologetics, youth and children’s work.

Abandoned to God,  Dave McCasland, (audio book)
The life story of Oswald Chambers (1874-1917).   Chambers is remembered for the devotional book, My Utmost for his Highest.

Important choices, turning points in our lives, often pop up unexpectedly and shape the course of our lives in radical ways.  Both Abram and Lot faced such choices.

The God Almighty appeared to Abram, seemingly out of the blue, and told him to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” (Gen 12:1).  Abram was living in one of the world’s commercial centers.  He was surrounded by family, and enjoying stability, prosperity and a bright future.  Leave it, God said, and go.   And he “went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).

Lot, his nephew, also faced a choice.  His uncle asked him to choose, “So Abram said to Lot, ‘Please let there be no strife between you and me.. Please separate from me; if to the left, then I will go to the right; or if to the right, then I will go to the left’ “ (Genesis 13:8-9).   By all rights, Abram should have decided.  He was the older uncle, Lot’s provider and protector.  But Abram acted with graciousness and generosity.  And Lot took advantage of his uncle.   “Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the valley of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere…  So Lot chose for himself all the valley of the Jordan” (Genesis 13:10-11).

In Scripture, Lot’s foolish, self-centered choice is contrasted with Abram’s God-centered choice.  Abram made his choice with an eye to the future.  The book of Hebrews tells us that Abram’s choice was a step of faith.  He lived in tents, as a alien, “looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb 11:10).   Lot’s choice was more worldly wise.  He criteria for choosing was different.  He looked at which option promised success, prosperity and a comfortable life.  There was one glaring problem with Lot’s reasoning.  His choice required that him to live among wicked, ungodly people.  Scripture calls them “great sinners against the Lord.”

So what was the result?  Because of his choice of faith, Abram became a “friend of God.” Of the many ways God blessed Abram, I think this was the greatest.  He became the “father” of the people of God and his seed was none other than Jesus himself.  Lot?  His life is a tragedy.  Look at the consequences of his decision:

1.  He lost his “spiritual” bearings
Living in this ungodly setting his soul was corrupted.  Peter tells us he ended up “greatly distressed … tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard”

2.  He lost his way
Instead of being successful, as he expected, Lot ended up in trouble – a prisoner of an invading army.  He had to be rescued by the very uncle whom he had failed to treat with respect.  Had not Abram intervened, at great risk to himself, his household, and his “business” Lot would have lost everything.

3.  He lost his family
Instead of influencing those among whom Lot lived, the ungodly people around him influenced his family. His daughters were pledged to be married to unbelievers.  When Lot was told to flee Sodom, he was told to “bring with your son-in-law, and your sons, and your daughters” they thought he was jesting.”  Only his daughters followed him out of the city.  He had lost his moral and spiritual authority.  His wife too had been affected by life in that environment and was loathe to live it behind.  She ended up losing her life in the judgment.

4. He lost his reputation
Lot’s end was tragic.  His business success, the motivation for his initial choice, collapsed overnight.  Lot lost everything.  He ended up in a lonely man living in a cave with his two daughters.  He ended up the father of two nations, conceived as a result of incest with his daughters.  Two peoples that were bitter enemies of the people of God.

Our choices are important.  The consequences of our choices are often more far-reaching than we can imagine.  God, give us the grace to make wise choices, and remember that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

In an earlier post I introduced Matt Perman’s list “Four Things You Need to Do Every Day” (Routines, Office tasks, Projects and People related activities).  I’ve already written about “Routines.”

Here are Perman’s suggestions for the other three activities:

Office tasks

After doing your routines, take maybe 30 minutes to an hour to clear out non-project actions. These are basically the “next actions” in the GTD system. If you clear some out every day, you can keep up. Again, knock these out in a concentrated batch early in the day, before the phone starts to ring and new email starts to come in.

Projects

After your routines and releases are out of the way, turn to concentrated time on your priority projects for the day.  Interruptions are going to start, but that’s OK.  If you got your routines and small office tasks out of the way, you’ll be able to handle interruptions better without getting too side-tracked.  The amount of time spent concentrating on projects will vary with your job.  I’m thinking that it might be best to divide up weekly time in this way:

70% on core projects: Things that execute and improve those things that are right at the heart of your business / ministry / nonprofit model.
20% on progress projects: Things that will generate entirely new growth and approaches that did not exist before.
10% on learning projects: Developing your skills and knowledge. Do this “on the clock,” so to speak. It’s too important to only leave to evenings and free time….

The principle behind designating time to both core projects and progressive projects is: “preserve the core, stimulate progress” (Jim Collins).  Be doing both.

People

I don’t have a time recommendation here. This could be the rest of your day, depending on the nature of your job. As long as you got in time to get rid of your routines and some standard action items, along with some concentrated focus on projects, you’re doing well and should be able to focus the way you ought in regard to meetings and interacting over your work.

Free

The core principle behind my above thoughts is to get routine stuff out of the way at the start of the day and then make some progress on your small office tasks.  Then you can work in more small office tasks between meetings and project work and be more discretionary in how you use your time. In other words, be disciplined so that you can be spontaneous. If you aren’t keeping up with at least some baseline of progress at the very beginning of each day, the spontaneous time will never feel like it comes. You will always be trying to “keep up.”

If you want to be able to spend 70% of your project time on core projects and 30% of your time on advancement and learning projects, you need to be able to group your work into some type of “categories.” If you don’t, it will be harder to single out your project time from other time.

Simply doing projects, and even next actions, “whenever they work during the day” has never worked for me. In order to have the “whenever it works” time, I need to also have some designated time for them as well.

Here’s link to the complete article.

Scheduling one’s day can be a challenge for those who lead God’s people.  They don’t have an “8-5″ job nor, in many cases, a boss telling them what to do hour by hour.  Demands on their time pour in from all sides, yet books and messages exhort them to spend more time with God, pray more or study the Bible more.  Have you every thrown up your hands and wondered – “Why does it have to be so complicated?”

In the secular world, two basic approaches to Managing your time / managing your life have won the respect of many leaders (actually they command a cult-like following among many):

• David Allen’s Getting Things Done [GTD]
• Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits

Both are helpful, both have their strengths and weaknesses.  GTD is based on tasks to accomplish in specific contexts, Covey’s is based on Roles in a person’s life and weekly deciding what is most strategic in each role.

Matt Perman, building on both approaches, made some very practical suggestions in a blog posting last month that I found extremely helpful. I have tried putting these suggestions into practice in my own life and commend them to you:

I believe in having a general framework from which you approach your day… a basic schedule of sorts that gives some behind-the-scenes guidance for how to slot things in your day. This template is not something you literally put on your calendar, but is more of a mindset.

The Four Things You Need to Do Each Day

It seems to me that there are four types of things you need to carve out time for in any given day:  Routines, Office tasks [he terms this Releases, I have renamed it], Projects and People.

• Routines means your daily workflow routines, such as processing email and your physical inbox.
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• Office tasks are small actions that are not project related. GTD has you put these on your next actions list. I found that doing so actually ruined my next action list because I would always end up with six trillion mosquito tasks staring at me all day long. I’d want to do things just to get them off my list, and not because it was the most strategic use of time.  Now I group all of these mosquito tasks together into a project of their own, which I keep outside of my next action list.
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• Projects are any unique initiatives you are working on which have a beginning and an end.
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• People means interaction, networking, general management stuff, meetings, stuff on your calendar, and so forth.

Suggestions on how to do this will follow in a later posting.  Here’s the link to the complete article.

Current reading  . . .

In an effort to encourage readers to read, I share what I’m currently reading.

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, D.A. Carson,  2008, Crossway Books
Don Carson tells the story of his father’s church-planting and pastoral ministry in Quebec during the difficult decades of pioneer ministry in French Canada.

Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community, Tim Chester, Steve Timmis,  2008, Crossway Books
The two authors, who lead the Crowded House (a church-planting initiative in England) outline and apply a pair of overarching biblical principles (gospel and community) that call churches to a fundamental restructuring of their life and mission. This dual focus to evangelism, social involvement, church planting, world missions, discipleship, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, apologetics, youth and children’s work.

Abandoned to God,  Dave McCasland, (audio book)
The life story of Oswald Chambers (1874-1917).   Chambers is remembered for the devotional book, My Utmost for his Highest.

Have you ever noticed the division of the Psalms into Books (I-V)?  The first Psalm in Book I begins with a beatitude (Psalm 1:1) and the last Psalm in Book I begins with a beatitude (Psalm 42:1).

This has the effect of “framing” Book One, i.e. signaling to us its emphasis. Some scholars go as far as suggesting has the effect of signaling that the Book One in the Psalter is “to be read as a guide to a “happy’ [i.e. blessed] life.”

Professor J. Clinton McCann, Jr., an Old Testament Scholar who has specialized in the Psalms, writes:

The occurrences of the beatitudes in Psalms 1-2, 40-41 … seems to be more than coincidental; indeed, it seems highly significant.  In any case, the effect of this pattern is to provide a frame for Book I that is especially noticeable, all the more since the first and last psalms of the book begin with the beatitude.  This framing device reinforces May’s conclusion that … Book I is to be read as a guide to a “happy” life.  In other words, not only are Psalms 1 and 41 about happiness, but so are all the psalms in between (in The Book of Psalms: Composition and Reception, Flint (ed), 2005).

In a similar way, Psalms 1 and 2 are framed by a beatitude at the beginning (Psalm 1:1) and at the end (Psalm 2:13), forming a pared introduction to Book I of the Psalter.

So what are Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 about?  How do they introduce the Psalter?  What do they teach us about the life of “happiness”  or blessedness?

Here begins “Seedplots” – a modest attempt to encourage those who lead God’s people in the Balkans and beyond.  The beginning of a new year, and a new website.

If Solomon were alive today, perhaps he would have changed Ecclesiastes 12:12 slightly to read, “Of making many websites there is no end…” But I have greatly benefited from the websites and blogs of others and it is that fact that encourages me to take a stab at doing it myself.

While “Seedplots” is aimed at encouraging and helping Christian leaders, I hope it will indirectly help me develop writing skills and lay the ground work for future writing projects in the small “seedplots” that will emerge from these entries.