V a l o r L e a d e r B l o g

Effective Spiritual Leadership

Stay Focused on Four Objectives

For many years, Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ has sent 100s of teams of staff, stu­dents and vol­un­teers on one to two year cross-cultural mis­sion projects. They’ve learned this truth—the teams who stay focused on “why they’re there” are both more faith­ful and more fruitful.

Love God

Love Your Team

Launch Move­ment

Learn a New World

As a min­istry, we have adopted these same basic objectives—with some minor revisions—to guide our local teams of staff and volunteers.

We want to fix them into your think­ing.  We’re con­vinced, that if kept in focus, these four objec­tives will help your teams be more ful­filled, more faith­ful and more fruitful.

In our strug­gle to eval­u­ate effec­tive­ness, we often look for tan­gi­bles to measure—decisions for Christ, num­bers in small groups, atten­dance at bible stud­ies, meet­ing or out­reaches.  None of these mea­sures are faulty in and of them­selves.  But, they may keep us from see­ing the for­est from the trees.

Let me sug­gest that you con­sider sim­ply keep­ing in mind these four objectives.

Love God. When asked what is the great­est com­mand­ment in the Bible, Jesus summed it up best—“You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.”  Let the bottom-line mea­sure of effec­tive­ness be our grow­ing love for God. How can we con­vince peo­ple of God’s love for them when our own expe­ri­ence of God’s love is shaky?

Love Team. Accord­ing to Jesus, the sec­ond great­est com­mand­ment is “love your neigh­bor as your self.”  In John 13:35, Jesus reminded his dis­ci­ples that “peo­ple will know that you are my dis­ci­ples, if you have love for one another.”  Our love for one another is the sec­ond bottom-line mea­sure of effec­tive­ness. How can we share how Jesus changes people—if we our­selves can’t love the folks on our team who are shar­ing Jesus’ love along­side us?

Launch a Move­ment. As we grow in love for God and for each other, we can’t for­get that we’ve been called to a task—to make dis­ci­ples of all nations.  Love for God and oth­ers finds its fullest expres­sion in mis­sion.  As a whole, the Mil­i­tary Min­istry has attempted to cap­ture this mis­sion in the words:  We are com­mit­ted to estab­lish­ing move­ments every­where so that every per­son in the mil­i­tary knows some­one who truly fol­lows Jesus.

In the fall, I’ll begin a nine months series on “move­ments and move­ment build­ing.”  Here’s a ques­tion to start the think­ing process:  What’s the dif­fer­ence between build­ing min­istries and build­ing movements?”

Learn and Serve for a Life­time. Lastly, we want to mea­sure effec­tive­ness in our will­ing­ness to con­tin­u­ously learn and grow while com­mit­ting to give our live away for oth­ers.  Unteach­a­bil­ity sig­nals a death of the spirit;  seek­ing to be served rather than serve points to the death of love.  What ever the tan­gi­ble results of our efforts, if we stop learn­ing and serv­ing we’re in trouble.