Kris Vallotton, Wednesday February 20, 2013

Teams, Goals and Steps

• Yesterday we talked about having vision for a generation you’ll never see, missions and plans.
• So get a team around you of people who are better than you in specific areas and don’t think just like you. Powerful people need a vision, mission and plans. You want people to have the same core values.
• If you put broken people on your team, you’ll have a broken team.
• Yes, it’s important to bind up the broken hearted. So minister to people, but don’t put them on your team until they are whole. There are some exceptions and this is an opinion, but it’s a good rule.
• If I am selling hotdogs in the park, I don’t care so much where the person is at, but if I’m doing something powerful, I want powerful people. Because broken people in authority break teams.
• People aren’t perfect, but there is a difference between people who have rough days and people who are broken.
• It’s really important that when you develop teams you aren’t giving authority to people who are low functioning or dysfunctional.
• I want you to give people grace and believe in them more than they believe in themselves, but positions of authority require trust.
• Say I’m a level 10 leader and I’m insecure, I will put 8’s on my team because I am afraid of them usurping my power. I’ve demonstrated to them that they need to put smaller people underneath them. Then as we grow we get smaller and smaller people.
• Great leaders take people who are better than themselves, at least in some areas.
• Say you aren’t very good at finances, invite people who are financial geniuses into your life. If you are insecure, this will be hard to do.
• If you are a 6, look for 8’s who will respect you.
• Find those areas that you are weak in and find people with your same core values who carry strengths in those areas.
• I am so tired of visiting churches where you have a king and a bunch of slaves.
• Many famous ministries have one incredible man who everyone knows and nobody else is known. Then what happens? When that man dies or moves on the ministry dies. After years of ministry, there is nobody who can step in and take their place. So then they might take in somebody powerful from the outside with different values who takes the ministry in a new direction.
• Every time we hire people on our leadership staff we have to intentionally move away from people who are weaker than us. We want to be aware in our hearts that we are not hiring people based on our insecurities.
• If you are training people to be bigger than you, you are building a powerful ministry.
• The bigger we get, we are still relational as a church. This is done by having a structure of powerful people. Weak relationships is not inherent for big congregations. It’s about having a structure and a plan to get people together. No, not everyone has personal relationship with Bill Johnson, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t relational. We are more relational now than we ever were as a 200 person church.
• Some people are great leaders and very poor managers.
• A great manager knows how to actually stimulate people to do things without pressuring them or manipulating them.
• If you set a goal, a goal should create urgency. If it’s too high or two low, you won’t set urgency.
• If I am trying to catch the bus and it’s 20ft away as the door is closing, I will urgently run to the bus. But if it’s already 3 blocks down, I won’t be urgent to go and get on it. In goal setting we need to give people a sense that they are accomplishing something and give them a far enough reach that they are challenged to grow, but not too far that it creates frustration.

 

• Every great leader has a football field inside of them.
• In american football, every team has four chances to go 10 yards, if you make it you have 4 more chances to go 10 yards and it goes until you either down’t make the 10 yards or you score a touchdown.
• Great leaders have 10 yard plans as well as touchdowns and field goals.
• In business, if the goal is selling 100 widgets per day, that’s a win. There is some way to measure whether you are winning or losing.
• Part of the problem with the ministry is to determine whether you are winning or losing. Because it’s not about money.
• We need to know more often how we are doing. The plan has to have a long term goal, but also be broken up into short term goals so we understand what we are accomplishing.
• Ministry is a hard cultural switch from ministry because you don’t know how to tell if you are winning.
• The way I measure success should be directly related to winning the game.
• It would be weird if in football we measured success by how dirty your uniform gets.
• Having a big church could be related to the goal God has for me, but it’s not necessarily the case.
• If I’m an apostle, I’m measuring success by cultural transformation. That’s a general term. What would the vision be? Putting more people in the seats of my church is not necessarily going to accomplish this goal because it could mean a bigger influence or it could mean more broken people to work with. The pastor might be excited about that because their objective is to heal the broken, but the apostle is not being successful.
• Nobody wants to watch a game if they don’t know the score. The first thing people are asking if the scoreboard isn’t on the TV screen is “who’s winning?”
• Part of the struggle with life is that you don’t know the score.
• A goal is a clear objective with a timeline.
• If I want to build a house but I don’t know when, it’s a plan but not a goal.
• This could be semantics, but in leadership it’s not. It’s important.
• If my goal is to change the culture of a city, I could measure the change by the negative statistics: crime rate, abortion, divorce rate…
• So then you might have Danny Silk, so with him you might have the vision that this will be a 10% divorce rate in your city. Then when you have a marriage clinic and 10 divorces are canceled, you have a 1st down.
• When you know the goals you can plan around that. You can cast vision and in an hour have a presentable plan for solving these problems.
• If your goal is a no-divorce zone, you can come up with plans (marriage clinics, training for singles, intercessors at the divorce courts…) and people can get behind that because there is a vision in mind.
• Say the goal is eliminating poverty, that’s complicated because poverty is a mindset. But once you have that goal, you can get to people with you and come up with plans.
• There are seasons in your life where you can’t win. And that’s when you need measurable goals in yards.
• In football, when the team is guaranteed to lose, the sportscasters begin to talk about  the personal goals of the players. They explain how Joe is 10 yards from making a record in carries for his personal career, so that then you watch with smaller goals in mind.
• If you have a vision but no small goals then you have a pipe dream.
• What is your 10 year plan? What is your 5 year plan? What is your day plan?… Some people don’t have one.
• Some people say “i just live by the spirit” and then you are just spiritualizing your dysfunction.
• God is previous so what you are living he already new before hand. He pre-destined you. God had a plan, you should too.
• Don’t tell me that it’s more spiritual to not have a plan.
• If you are a worship leader but you don’t have a setlist, then you aren’t being more spiritual, you just don’t have a plan.

 

Steps

• Psalms 23
• Sometimes you don’t know where you are going, but you just have steps.
• It is important that our steps are directly related to the mission and vision.
• When I can connect where I am with what I was born to do, then there is purpose in my life.
• If I can’t connect being in school of ministry to the plan of the Lord in your life, then you’ll be bored, frustrated, discouraged…
• All of us take steps that aren’t related to our destiny. We’ve all watched TV.
• It’s ok to have time off and rest. But if your whole life, there aren’t steps related to your vision, then you aren’t being successful.

What do you look for in a person you are trying to add to your team?

• I look for where we need help. If I’m going to pay someone to do something, I’m going to make sure that I’m paying someone who we need and who is gifted to fill the role that we are lacking.
• I also make sure that (in my world) they see Bill as their father. In an apostleship, it’s important that people see the apostle as someone who is a father to them.
• I see that they have our core values and respect for us.
• And I make sure that their personality is someone who I can work with. Because I want people who will be able to love me, and if I hire sensitive people, I’m very direct so it will cause problems.

 

How do you handle a team when your core people are or become broken?

• Do your best to try to get them healthy. If you aren’t skilled in that, then send them to someone who can help them. Sometimes you have to get away from your own team to a similar team because perhaps the problem is relational.
• When you get with another team, that gives you an opportunity to see how much of the issue is you and how much of the issue is something that you can’t deal with but you will have to get strong enough to manage yourself.

Leholohonolo (Blessing) Motale, Wednesday February 20, 2013

Cultivating the Kingdom Mindset

• Jesus commissioned us to go all over the world and preach the good news to all creation.
• Einstein said “the problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we had when we created them”
• Problems have been created on the second heaven with the angels and demons that have affected level one, earth. So since we have the mind of Christ, we can go to level three and solve the problems at level 1 and 2.
• Gen 31:50-52
• Names are passed on by our parents.
• My name means Blessing, and it was given to me because my mother had 5 miscarriages before she had me.
• The first two sons here were deliverance from trial and then productivity and influence. So Joseph is saying here, in order to be productive, God has to deliver you. That is how he saw life. That was his logic. Joseph would have said if you wanted to solve the problems in your life, your conditions had to be perfect first. But something significant happened when his father was about to die.
• Genesis 48:19
• Jacob was about to die, so Joseph took his sons to him, the grandfather, for a blessing. But Jacob blessed the younger son first. The reason is that Jacob knew that you need to be blessed before you are delivered.
• Your fruitfulness will deliver you from your troubles.
• He knew that Israel would be blessed, not when they are delivered first, but when they use their productive potential first to move from their troubles.
• The kingdom mindset that we have to choose.
• In Africa, people have a lottery mindset that says, something will happen someday and all my troubles will be solved. But we need to show them their potential instead because when God created us, he created us with the ability to be powerful and bring deliverance with the potential God has given us. This is how we will break the cycles of poverty. We will use what we have to get out of trouble.
• When Jesus was with his disciples, he had 2 fish and 5 loves. And the disciples
• In the world from 5000 people you can get 5 loaves, but in the kingdom you can get 5000 out of five. We have to look at the potential from heaven.
• When you appreciate the potential of five loaves and put them to use, you will solve the problem.

RGP Panel, Wednesday February 20, 2013

RGP Panel Q&A

Crystal Stiles, Sara Webster, Jake Veach, Eric Allen and Chris Cruz

This is an opportunity to close the gap. And testimony is the spirit of prophecy, so anything in their lives that you want in your life, grab that and take it for yourself. Take the bread from their lives and eat it today. You can respond any way you want. School is not just some thing we do, we are free to do whatever we want to do today.

Chris, what was your most significant encounter with God while you were a student?

• I remember when I was in 1st year, we had mandatory home groups with people in the church. I was going to Marlene Arinson’s home group.
• One night, they began to prophecy over me and I cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my life. They prophesied as if they knew everything in my life. I sobbed as I realized that God knew this stuff. I had to leave the room because I was embarrassed about how hard I was crying.
• That was the day I got my identity. I was reaffirmed by God and I had new confidence.
• My encounters with God before I got to school and while I was here changed my life every time.

Jake, what was your most significant encounter with God while you were a student?

• They are all significant because they build on each other and change your life so it seems like the most significant one was just the one we experience last.
• I remember when I was younger I wrote a letter to God and held it in my hand and said “I need you to talk back to me”. I didn’t know how he would but I had that expectation.
• I was in a meeting where they played a cd from Matthew 5 and I began weeping heavily.
• I couldn’t remember what had happened after I was done.
• Afterwards the Holy Spirit reminded me that I had written in my journal while I was weeping and as I read it there was a letter that my hand had written that was back from Him and it affirmed me.
• Chris: I encourage you to write in your journal a letter from God to you. At the beginning of my first year, I wrote a letter “from God to me” that I felt like I was just making stuff up, but God spoke to me and said it was actually from him but I wasn’t ready to believe those things for myself.

Sara, what was your most significant encounter with God while you were a student?

• I can’t remember which year it was but I had an encounter when I finally realized I was in love with Jesus.
• I knew that I loved God, but how do you know if you’re really in love with him? So I was on a quest to discover how to love God from our hearts.
• A speaker came in and at the alter call, I was up front wanting to get prayer from this speaker. As I was there praying something changed. I knelt on my knees and went into a vision with Jesus at this table. He got up to get something and was going to be right back and I remember saying “no, please don’t go, I want you to stay close to me”
• I didn’t understand it all, but as I came out I was drunk, and this was back before I thought that was really real, and I went to bed with that feeling and woke up with that feeling and I’ve never lost that feeling of “I am in love with Jesus” and it’s something that I will always carry.
• During this last trip to LA, a girl came to me and confirmed that vision with a prophetic word.

Eric, what was your most significant encounter with God while you were a student?

• I went on a trip with one of the leaders and they prophesied over me and said “you’ve been so stoked to win first place in your life, but I’ve made you to set world records”. And it took the lid off of my life.
• I remember as I was in LA I was stepping out of my fears and we had just been told about a murder that had happened early that week and as we stood there I felt called to pray over this man who I didn’t know and I had that feeling like it was now or never and God lead me over there.
• So I walked over with no words and God gave me the word boxer, so I asked “are you a boxer?” and he shifted, he was interested and the two people next to him started shaking and freaking out saying “this can’t be real, this is our purpose” and it opened up a time for me of incredible words of knowledge.
• I encourage you, take the steps for it.
• Missions trips create an environment for you to focus on that.

Chris, what did you burn for (were passionate about) as a student?

• I burned to see God’s power. I would pray and say “give me the people in my path who need your power.”
• We had times on the streets where people would line up for prayer from us.
• I remember one time we were in the car and I saw in another car a boy giving sign language to the girl next to him so I rolled down my window and yelled “is she deaf?… pull over and we will pray for you” She got healed.
• One other time I saw a guy who God said his name was Erin and I yelled “hey Erin” and he turned around and said “how do you know my name” and I got to pray for him getting radical words of knowledge. And I told him “stand there, I’m going to walk so my shadow hits you and you’ll get healed” and he did!
• Pray in private and take risks in public because that’s how you grow and become more powerful.
• We used to pray that we would do radical things so that we would look like fools if we didn’t.
• One other time we went to a stage in Mexico and I said “hey we are a miracle team from California and we’d like to offer our services for free” and they gave us the stage in front of 2000 youth for half an hour to call out words of knowledge and see radical miracles.
• Just risk, and see what God can do through you.

Jake what did you burn for (were passionate about) as a student?

• I wanted to see jesus first and closely.
• I spent hours calling out to him and saying I need you, I need to feel close to you.
• The more I read the bible I saw that the more he showed up everything was different.
• So that forced me to think, does that happen when I come into a room. Because I don’t want them to just meet me, I want them to meet Jesus.
• And I would go to the secret place and say “jesus I just want to see you”
• And it was normal for me to come home with no shoes and no shirt because I had given them to the homeless.
• I would go to the thrift shop and fill my car with clothes and go around town giving them out. That was amazing because it was where jesus was.
• I felt Jesus the closest when I was taking risk to love people because that’s what Jesus was doing.
• I met Jesus on the other side of that risk and he was there on the other side to say “good job”
• I met a guy who was covered in burns and I was moved with compassion to say “If jesus was here, this man would be cured” and I prayed for him. The next day when his bandages were removed he was fully healed.
• You can’t fully pursue him without manifesting his nature everywhere you go. Pursuing risk, generosity… feeding the poor, raising the dead…

Eric what did you burn for (were passionate about) as a student?

• I remember seeing this diagram for the DISC test and there was a pin in the middle with Jesus written there and I was hit with this desire to be for everyone what they need.
• There was a passion to be like Him and not just limit myself to one strength and carry the other ones like a crutch.
• I feel like there are a lot of Jesus’s in this room where God is calling you to have a circle over those four boxes.

Chris, finish the sentence “if only we could be a school that…” (this is a prayer)

• I would dream about a school that never justified a walk without power. A gospel that was just about good efforts.
• I would dream of a school that had the answers to the questions of the world. That the world would come to us for questions.
• That we wouldn’t be afraid.
• That we would burn for the integrity of scripture, valuing the word and presence of God. That we would have all the pieces that make us a christian. That we would have a hunger for an exploration of God.
• What would it look like if we operated in the raw power of God?
• People sometimes think “I’m not evangelistic, therefore I don’t need to do this” and I want to kill that.
• Give place for God to work in power through their lives.

Sara, finish the sentence “if only we could be a school that…” (this is a prayer)

• I dream of a class of people who are comfortable in their own skin, who are confident to look in the mirror and love what they see despite flaws. To know that what God has put inside of you is just as important as what God has put inside the people beside you.
• My risk might not look like standing on the table and preaching, but I do need to find what risk looks like for me so that I can purposefully look at that.