Unleashing The Power Of Rubber Bands (7 page)

defining
Moments

LEADERS LIKE TO TALK
about defining moments: critical timeswhen we draw a line in the sand, put a stake in the ground. Defining moments are vivid times of commitment where direction is clarified, corners are turned, hills are taken. You can’t always predict when they will occur, but it’s this very element of surprise that adds to the drama.

We cannot live or lead without defining moments. We need them both individually and corporately. They write our history. They help us start new chapters, give us the courage to turn over new leaves, and breathe fresh wind into complacent and mediocre institutions. Defining moments are new beginnings and fresh starts.

They are all those things and at the same time, theyare just moments. Anyone who has experienced a defining moment knows this. Some moments “take” and some don’t, but the ones that count are those that somehow have the power to produce a new way of living.

Sometimes we mistakenly think that the power is in the defining moment itself. But the power is actually in the resolve following the moment, the momentum that emanates from it. It may be more accurate to say that the power is in the tandem of the two: the defining moment and the plan that follows. Defining moments are only as significant as the lifestyles they produce. If defining moments don’t change things, they didn’t define anything.

During my time in Axis, I experienced two particular defining moments, one that resulted in widespread lifestyle change, and one that didn’t. Therefore one was truly a defining moment and the other wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time.

During the first few months in my leadership role at Axis, I joined regular attendees and people new to the ministry at a weekend retreat in Wisconsin. We started with a great teaching and worship session on Friday night, and then another similar session followed small-group experiences on Saturday morning. The afternoon was full of great outdoor free-time activities, and after dinner on Saturday evening, we had an evening worship service.

To say that the worship service was an event is an understatement. The band was amazing, and the energy in that room was just short of “rock concert.” People wouldn’t let the band finish, they kept clamoring for more, and as it got closer to midnight, I told my staff that I was going to bed and to be sure and wake me if they ended up having to call the police. Mostly that was a joke (although as myson constantly reminds me, in order to be a joke it needs to be funny), but that’s how high the energy was.

Defining moments are
only as significant

as the
lifestyles they produce.

The next morning I thinkmost of the people were suffering from a “worship hangover,” and breakfast attendance was sparse. By the time the final morning teaching session was ready to start, many people had told me how amazing the worship had been the night before.

I was sure the concert itself had been amazing, but I wondered if people were trying to make it into something it wasn’t. When I spoke that morning I said this: “When the day comes that this Axis community—myself included—is giving at unbelievable levels, serving the poor with the same kind of energy I saw last night, and living deeply in authentic, Christ-centered, transformational relationship with one another, then I will believe that what we experienced last night was true worship.”

But without all those things, our concert was nothing more than intentional frenzy that may have felt good in the moment but had no real, deep connection to the inner core of God. On the outside, the event had all the markings of a defining moment. But a closer look revealed that it was more like cotton candy: one bite and it dissolved. Nothing significant or lasting came from it.

(Now, as a side note, here is what I think is one of the most difficult things about leadership: I could have been wrong. It wouldn’t have been the first time. My internal hunch could have been completely off. So saying what I said was a risk. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was off. Let me be even more honest. I wish it
had
been a defining moment. It would have been great for my reputation as a leader to have one so soon after starting.)

Fast-forward a little over a year later to a summer series we did in Axis called “21 C: How to Live an Authentic Faith in the 21st Century.” We wanted to highlight people in their twenties and early thirties who were living out their faith in unique and authentic ways, and one of the people we invited to speak was Shane Claiborne.

Shane’s talk was a defining moment that shifted Axis into a lifestyle change. One hot August night, and the following morning, Shane talked to our community about what it meant to follow a Jesus who talked more about serving the poor than about prayer and what it means to be born again, put together.

In a winsome way that had more teeth than we even knew at the time, Shane spoke words that were prophetic. Through the teachings of Jesus and numerous Old Testament passages, he clarified for us the call for our discipleship to be infused with service to the underresourced. You can read a longer version of this story in
Looking for God
, but the end result of Shane’s sermon was an altar of sorts, made up of more than seventeen hundred pairs of shoes, which were given to be distributed immediately to the homeless in Chicago.

Most of Axis left the services that weekend in bare feet.

But this time, Axis did the hard work of determining what would come after the bare feet. Our staff, as well as our key volunteer leaders, met together and talked and prayed about how we could keep this weekend from being just another moment. How could we build a lifestyle and a legacy around the holiness of what had just happened? We recognized how far away our ministry was from the vision that Shane had painted for us.

The beauty of what had happened led to pain. And perhaps that is the key to moving from a defining moment to a lifestyle, this mixture of beauty and pain that prods us to movement and change. Heather, one of our Axis staff members, spent countless hours working with Axis people as well as community volunteers until she devised a rhythm of weekend serving opportunities.

Soon, the first weekend of every month, a team was heading into downtown Chicago and working with Bethel New Life, an organization that served the children of homeless families. The second weekend of every month, an Axis team was working with Feed-A-Neighbor, a downtown group that distributed food and clothing to the homeless. The third weekend of every month, a group from Axis was serving with Habitat for Humanity, doing construction on local sites. And the fourth weekend, a team was in the juvenile prison system. Every weekend, like clockwork. Regular teams were in place for each of those causes, and in addition any individual or home group could join up with these teams.

We began to make serving the underresourced
central
to our community. Not just a yearly event or a good idea. Not simply a thought with no reality, but a “set your watch by this” commitment. In addition, we began to ask all of our home group leaders in Axis to lead their groups to serve together regularly each quarter. Many of them chose one of these monthly ministries, but they were free to find their own if they wished.

We intentionally moved serving from the outer ring of influence more toward the center. Shane’s sermon became more than the catalyst to remove the shoes from people’s feet, a one-time deal. It spawned a reaction throughout our entire ministry that led us sweetly down the road of real discipleship.

The reciprocity was staggering. The serving, which was directing our resources and our efforts toward those in need, was only the beginning, as that God-given energy flowed back toward us from those we met in life-changing ways. In our weekend Axis services, we often told stories and showed pictures of children being helped, houses being built, and meals being distributed. We also told about the changes that were occurring in the lives of our Axis attendees who went for the sole purpose of giving and were stunned to see how much they gained in the process.

This will seem like a little thing, but we also rearranged our bulletin for the weekend services. We moved the order of the service over to the side, and used that front-and-center spot for ways people could connect into community groups or participate in weekend serving opportunities. We wanted even our bulletins to reflect the change and remind us of it weekly.

In our membership classes and our new leader training,we embedded this value of serving. We taught about it, told stories about it, and made it one of the functions of becoming a regular part of Axis. We just expected that people would join in. As much as reading the Bible, prayer, worshiping together at the weekend services, and being in community, service became a part of our fabric.

We contacted community leaders in neighboring Palatine, a fairly affluent community with a pocket of immigrants living in a small area that tilted the average income downward. They found ways for our Axis people to help teach ESL classes and to do after-school tutoring. We became partners with the Palatine Police Department in their summer efforts to keep kids out of gangs by sponsoring a day camp.

You couldn’t come to Axis without understanding that an enormous part of how we were being transformed by Christ had to do with giving of ourselves to others, especially those in need. We took seriously and leveraged the gift that Shane had given us, to change us. The two-way street of serving did just what God had always intended: It changed us. It changed the shape and texture of our ministry, and over time, serving became part of our reputation. It began to define us, and it all started from that one moment.

There is a downside to defining moments that we can’tignore, however. While defining moments can propel us to great things, they can also become major obstacles to moving to the next levels. It’s tempting to rest for too long on last year’s defining moment—talking about it, replaying its details, telling stories about it, all the while becoming oblivious to the fact that we have stopped living it. Defining moments can be like quicksand that way. Before you know it you are underground, confused as to how you got there.

Our consulting team worked with a fabulous marketing agency for about a year. I often say that we get called in to work with an organization in three different scenarios: a group that is going through major upheaval; a group that is going through some transition and needs help; or a good team that simply wants to get better. All three have their own unique joys and challenges. This was definitely a good team that just wanted to get better, and those are fun clients to work with.

They were highly motivated, which came as no surprise since in their sleek, modern offices were tasteful displays of multiple awards they had won for their work in the industry. During the first few visits to their headquarters, one of my partners and I counted over thirty awards, plaques, and trophies from the last five years alone.

At one of our meetings with their executive team, anumber of the team members were bemoaning the fact that they felt “stuck.” They were certainly well respected and successful, but unlike the early days of the company, they lacked that hunger that had led them to enjoy their reputation for creativity and innovation.

As they went on talking about that, one of them reminisced, “Do you remember how we all felt the night we won that first award?” Those who had been there at the time nodded, as did the rest, who had heard about that experience many times. That night had been a defining moment for them. And for a while, it propelled them to great heights. But somewhere along the way . . .

As we talked about that defining moment, someone had an idea. I think a really great idea. In two days they would be having their monthly all-staff meeting. In preparation for that early morning meeting, what if they decided to go in and remove all the awards? What if when the staff arrived for the meeting, it looked like a burglar had stolen all of their awards—representations of all their defining moments?

We could hardly control the rest of the meeting. The energy that emanated from that one idea was unbelievable! The team talked for nearly an hour, imagining the response as well as planning what the meeting would be like after that. The ideas tumbled out, and sixty minutes later they had, at least on paper, the makings for another defining moment.

Sure enough, the meeting was everything they thought it would be, and more. The buzz in the offices was deafening, and by the time everyone had walked through the building and gathered in the large meeting room, it took them nearly five minutes just to get people quiet enough to get started.

After a great introduction by the leader, the staff was divided into fifteen or so smaller groups. One person from the leadership team sat with each of the groups, and for the next sixty minutes plus, they discussed how each person reacted when he or she saw that the awards were missing. Interestingly, something else emerged clearly in each of the groups. Nearly everyone in the company shared the same frustration that the leadership team had been expressing just days before. Those who had been there at the beginning missed the energy and excitement and productivity from those early days. Those who had only been there long enough to have heard the stories wondered if those stories would only be in the past.

The meeting allowed for a release and an unleashing of ideas, hope, desire, and commitment that had been simmering just below the surface, but took a “burglary” to tap into. That day, another defining moment occurred. And after the initial group work, another idea emerged. Those groups spent the final few minutes of the meeting writing out on colorful poster boards all the words that described what had won those awards.

Then, they took eight-by-eight-inch poster boards and placed them on small stands to hold them upright. With words like
whatever it takes
,
bold
,
relevant
,
inspiring
, and
What’s our next award?
each stand was placed into the spot where just yesterday an award had stood.