Tag: Culture

Trustworthy Character

Our culture has a great propensity to act one way, yet at the core be something completely different.

We refer to this as hypocrisy. We need to understand, however, that our culture has worked on this long enough it is now accepted and normal.

Hypocrisy tends to destroy every opportunity to influence others.

The core of our leadership needs to be characterized by integrity, justice, and truth.

These three characteristics highlight a leader worthy of God’s trust and the trust of those who follow. The result points to powerful influence.

Cultural Leadership

Certainly, culture has an influence on leadership and leadership has an influence on culture.

From a spiritual point of view, leaders cannot allow the culture to dictate the direction of God’s people, but leaders must shape the culture.

How can leaders shape the culture today?

Leaders must understand culture.
Leaders must recognize needs within culture.
Leaders must provide an example for cultural context.
Leaders must lead into a different culture.

Just a step in the right direction will help shape the changes needed in culture to direct a greater focus toward Jesus.

Flexibility

Travel increases the awareness of flexibility. Cultures vary from one country to the next. At the same time, each culture establishes their own practices and finds a rhythm that flows through the people who participate in the daily activities of life.

While leadership is complicated enough, add the cultural factors among the various backgrounds and relationships of people who make up the church, and complexity reaches a new level.

Leaders need flexibility. I do not mean compromising truth, but leadership focuses on the needs of those who follow.

Flexibility becomes critical to the twists and turns that factor into leading a multi-cultural people.

Empathy

We often fail to recognize that most of what we see in life is biased by who we are: how we were raised, the environment, culture, and hundreds of other areas, rather than reality.

Interestingly enough, how we see things becomes reality to us. Because this is true, we become entrenched in our beliefs to the point of dogma.

No one is exempt, but we need to understand the importance of patience and love when attempting to help others grow.

Leadership requires us to have empathy, the ability to understand and enter another person’s feelings. The more we do so, the greater our influence.

Measuring Success

Various cultures around the world view or define success differently than other cultures. Oddly enough, even within the same culture, success is often defined differently.

Exploring the way God defines success is a bit more challenging, yet far more important to consider.

The most common factor defining success is quantitative. An increase by a specific number determines the measure of success achieved.

If we examine the Bible, we will find that the success is measured by those who followed the word of the Lord.

When it comes to defining success, as God defines it, a good place to start is 1 Samuel 15:22-23.

Think Before Speaking

The challenge of any generation is living in a culture that gives little thought to the impact of words. The old acronym GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) identifies far more about the heart than we might want to acknowledge.

How can we learn to improve the words we use? One particular family set up a coin jar where each time they yelled, it cost money.

Imagine the impact if inappropriate language, words spoken in anger/frustration, or spoken in haste took money out of our wallet that we could not get back. Maybe we would learn to think before we speak.

Knowing Who We Lead

Is it possible to spiritually lead others without knowing them? Leaders must know their dreams, aspirations, hopes, and personal goals.

Years ago, a former boss told me, “If you take care of those under you, they will take care of you.”

A leader cannot look out for the well-being of people without knowing them.

Nothing is more important than knowing the needs of others and providing for those needs.

The four basic needs include physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Our culture generally uses this order. However, spiritual leaders understand the necessity of reversing it.

We must be given to meeting the spiritual needs of others.

Responsibility in Leadership

Leadership involves responsibility. The higher one goes in leadership, the greater the responsibility.

We could also say we live in a culture where the common practice is one of blaming others. The problem is not cultural. This practice has been in place since the creation of humanity. We have not changed much as people in the twenty-first century.

Leadership seeks and takes responsibility for their actions.

Leaders give credit to the team in victory, but take full responsibility in defeat.

Rarely do we find such integrity and leadership. Yet, when leaders seek and take responsibility for their actions their influence grows.

Abnormal Spiritual Leaders

Normal in one culture will certainly be different in another culture. As well, normal in the mind of a child will not be normal in the mind of an adult.

Regardless of how we might think about a normal life, there is nothing normal about spiritual leadership.

Spiritual leaders…

are concerned about the nature of their influence.
live consistently with what they believe.
know the mission.
work for a cause far greater than themselves.
share the planning and development of the goals.
produces results that glorify God and fulfill His will.

Look at how the first word of each thought develops a spiritual leader.

A Leader’s Influence

Does leadership influence culture, or does culture influence leadership? There is a great deal of controversy over the answer.

There are times when it seems the culture influences leadership. At other times, leadership influences culture, as with Harry Truman during World War II.

Amazingly, the definition of leadership often changes in relationship to the culture and the current leadership.

While we may never have a definitive answer, one thought is clear: God intends spiritual leaders to influence the culture and not the reverse.

The task before us is to be the influence in our world. We must arise and accept the challenge with courage and boldness.