When my zone is called to board an airplane there is a competitiveness that rises up in me. I have to maneuver to get the best spot in line as possible. I’ll step over babies and elbow old women aside to make sure I get to board before others in my zone. And I’m not alone, seasoned travelers have a variety of tricks to score the best place in line. There is Ms. Camper who hangs out right next to the red carpet awaiting her chance to pounce. Señor Loiter hangs out nonchalantly around the desk until the announcement and then dashes to the front of the informal line that has formed. My favorite is Mr Oblivious who continues to talk on his cell phone as he pushes his way to the front as though he is much too important to be bothered with things like “lines”.  I lean toward Loiter, though I’ve been known to Camp as well. The funny thing is that we gain no advantage pushing to the front. The seats are assigned and, unless you have a window seat, all getting there early accomplishes is having to stand to let the other people in your row get to their seat. (If you’re in the final zone there will be no overhead space by the time you board regardless where you are in line.)

I see this desire to be #1 everyday on Facebook and Twitter. We have the most awesome mom, the hottest wife, the most talented children. The volunteers at my church are way more awesome then the volunteers at your church. And when it comes to community service my congregation absolutely kicks butt!!! We baptize more, we serve more, we are just more. We’re #1. I’m #1.

Where does this thirst for first come from? What reward are we fighting for? I think it comes from deep insecurity. I must constantly prove I have value. I need a marker that says I am better, smarter, quicker than you. Or at least that guy. The airlines feed that insecurity by providing a well-defined pecking order. The most important are in 1st class, then Sky Priority, then Zone 1, then Zone 2, then the worthless peons seated in Zone 3 and beyond. Social networking gives us the platform we’ve been looking for: “Look at me, I am at the head of the line. I am winning and you are losing.”

It is this instinct, this deeply seated evil, Jesus challenged when he wrapped a towel around his waist and began washing his disciples feet. This is one of the most absurd pictures in the Bible. The God of the Universe taking the role of a slave. Peter saw the irony and begged Jesus’ to stop, but the lesson was more important than the protocol. The competition is upside down. The desire to win must be subservient to the command to serve. The first must be last. You’re #1.

Jesus knew that the drive to win, to come out ahead, to do whatever it takes to be at the front of the line could, would subvert the invisible Kingdom he came to establish. When I strain to finish first, elbow others aside, “sacrifice the individual for the good of the team”, surround myself with a culture that recognizes the supremacy of me, I ignore John’s admonition “He must increase, but I must decrease.” A lot of what passes for “success” is nothing more than heroin for my addiction to me.

I am seeing more and more the damage this addiction does both in my life and in the American church. We are building a Kingdom built on the greatness of us. Unless we humble ourselves and call on God we are headed in a direction that will not end well. And my biggest fear is that I will get there first.

I got an email yesterday from a friend asking for help. I actually like those kind of emails. It makes me feel good to know I have something to offer, something a friend finds valuable. But that wasn’t really the kind of help my friend needs. His challenge is he has more opportunity than he knows what to do with. National organizations are playing tug-o-war over him and the group he started is exploding at a rate he can’t even track. What he needs from me is advice on how to handle all of this opportunity. As I read the email I discovered something very ominous rising from inside. My first thoughts, “Well, isn’t that wonderful for him? Isn’t he just Mr. Special? He is already winning the recognition game and now doesn’t know where to store the trophies. So he wants my help. I’ll tell him where he can store his trophies.”

You have to understand a couple of things. First, this is one of my closest friends. This is a guy I would gladly take a bullet for. (I thought until yesterday) Second, this is an extremely humble man. Jesus would describe him as a man in whom there is no guile. The thoughts I felt coming up like vomit in my mouth came entirely from deep inside of me. My friend would be stunned (he is stunned if he’s reading this post) that anything he said led to this kind of reaction. That makes it even more vile.

Ashamed of my thoughts I mumbled a prayer for forgiveness and headed off to a staff meeting at the church where I work. There the pastor asked me to read aloud a passage from James 3, ask the group to meditate on the passage for 2-3 minutes and then read the passage aloud again. Here is the “random” passage I was assigned:

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.

I do not serve a subtle God.

There in black and white are my twin sins da jour: bitter jealousy and selfish ambition. I might as well have them tattooed on my arms so everyone can see the truth. James describes my little pity party as earthly, unspiritual, demonic. That’s some pretty deep doo doo. And James says bitter jealousy and selfish ambition are gateway sins. Every other vile practice, the stuff I pretend I’d never do, are the natural next steps.

I am incredibly thankful my friend reached out to me for help. I hope I can help him sort through his opportunities, but the greater good for me is that his email revealed something so vile inside of me it will destroy everything I am and love if I do not deal with it. I am reminded again that every thought, every motivation, every desire must be filtered for jealousy and ambition, and where I find the twins growing I have to ask God to do immediate and radical surgery.

If you battle what I battle here are a couple of excellent posts to wrestle with.

http://t.co/mZWTeFWyj5

http://careynieuwhof.com/2013/05/for-every-leader-whos-ever-struggled-through-a-monday/

I had the chance to hang out at my house today with eight incredible church planters from all over the country. We spent the day kicking around some questions they sent me a few days ago, so I thought I’d share some of their questions and my answers here on the blog. Let’s start with the counting question:

What are some measurable things we need to keep an eye on in the church that we might not currently see value in?

If I were leading a church I would count four things:

1. Attendance
It is popular today to say that attendance doesn’t matter, but it does. If you don’t have people you don’t have a church. Bigger numbers don’t mean a better church, but small numbers mean people are going away and there is a reason. So I would track attendance, I’d just resist the urge to brag about it on Twitter. (Yes that was a shot at you, you know who you are.)

2. Giving
Giving indicates growth both as a church and as an individual. If giving is increasing then there is growth happening, and if giving is shrinking something may be out of whack. Not always, but often. The two most important giving numbers are the giving per adult (I like annual giving per adult, it’s easier for me to understand), and year over year total giving. Week to week and month to month is meaningless.

3. Leadership Pipeline
Who are the leaders being developed? Every staff member should be able to name two or three people they are developing as their successors and to describe exactly what they are doing to develop those leaders. This should be a main discussion point at least one a month when you sit down with your leaders. I would have a scoreboard that lists ever major leadership position in the church and the leaders who are being apprenticed in each position.

4. Discipleship
Are you  making disciples who make disciples? That seems to be the point of doing church. If we aren’t making disciples we should sell the buildings, stop leasing the schools and go fishing. A couple of maxims here:

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done
You have inspect what you expect

To measure discipleship you have to define what a disciple looks like and then ask the people if that is who they are becoming. To me a disciple is someone who serves the local church, prays consistently, reads the Bible daily, engages in biblical community, actively participates in community transformation and develops other disciples. I wrote about how I would use the acronym SPREAD to measure this type of disciple here.

One of the glaring omissions from my list are baptisms. I think baptism is a huge deal and essential in the life of a Christ follower. The challenge I have with using baptisms as a major measurement is that it is easily manipulated. A decent preacher with a pond and megaphone can drive up the dunking number with a well-timed “spontaneous” baptism. The more important number to me is how many people are becoming disciples who make disciples.

So how about you? What do you  measure?

I recently heard a minister share how he dialogs with God. He asks questions and God answers in complete, unambiguous paragraphs. When the conversation is over this young leader knows exactly what God’s will for his life is because God has revealed his will in outline form. I have no reason to doubt that this is exactly how it works in his life, but I can’t help being a little jealous.

God doesn’t talk to me like that. For me he speaks mostly through the Bible, through the wise words of other Christians and through impressions. I don’t always know exactly what God wants me to do next, and there are times when I think I know what God is saying only to realize later that I just ate too much pizza the night before. I long for the kind of dialog the minister describes, but that hasn’t been my experience.

I don’t know how God talks to you. In the Old Testament he came and talked face to face with Abraham and Moses. In the New Testament he sent an angel to speak to Mary and Joseph. Paul saw a bright light. The disciples ate dinner with God. It is obvious that God speaks in different ways to different people in different times. It is also seems that direct, face-to-face communication is the exception rather than the rule.

I think God speaks in the manner he chooses based on the message he wants to communicate and the person he wants to communicate with. He knows that if he talked to me like he talked to Noah I would spend too much time blogging about it and not enough time building an Ark. The communication style God chooses to use with me draws me back to him in faith building reliance on his word and his messengers. While I’d love to have back and forth dialog in paragraph form it would neither build my character or accomplish God’s will.

The key for me is to be honest about my communication with God. I am tempted to make up dialog and convince people that I have an inside track on God. But I fear when I do that it might make you feel like you aren’t as connected as I am. You might wonder why I get paragraphs while you get impressions. So as much as I’d like to say that I never struggle to know exactly what God is saying, I’ll be honest when I’m just not sure.

How about you? How does God talk to you?

My heart as a parent breaks for Rick and Kay Warren in the tragic loss of their son Matthew. While the pain of losing a child is almost incomprehensible to me, I can’t imagine having that loss splashed across the home page of every leading news website. And piled on top are the idiots who have never met Rick or Kay, but feel now is an appropriate time to spew their special brand of evil hatred. While I can’t alleviate their pain, protect them from the prying eyes of the insatiable media or throttle the fools who attack a family while they are down, I can at least share what I know of the character of this family.

During my time working for Rick at Saddleback I saw the heart of a gentle and loving father and grandfather. Between services almost every weekend most of Rick’s grandkids come busting into the greenroom with their parents in tow looking for Papa Rick. In doesn’t matter if George Bush, Tony Blair or CNN is there, Rick has time for a game of Tubby Tubby. (For the uninitiated, Tubby Tubby is when Rick lays on the floor and stacks the grandkids on his stomach. He then wraps his enormous arms around them and rolls from side to side calling out “Tubby Tubby” while the children collapse in squeals of laughter.) After a round of Tubby Tubby everyone grabs a juice box out of Papa’s refrigerator and Rick heads to the stage to preach another sermon to the Saddleback family.

Kay has amazing mother’s heart which has been broken again and again as she has seen her children struggle with enormous challenges. She walked with her son Josh and his wife as Jamie went through a terrifying battle with brain cancer. She comforts and supports her daughter Amy through years of struggle with a difficult to diagnose immune disease. In the midst of all of the challenges her children faced Kay waged her own war with breast cancer. And she did all of this with beauty and grace in the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny that she never asked for.

Woven through all of the challenges of leading a world famous church, answering the demands of thousands of church members and hundreds of thousands of admirers, fueling a worldwide movement to stamp out AIDS and to care for orphans, Rick and Kay have dealt as quietly as possible with the mental illness that finally led their youngest son Matthew to take his own life this past week. Very few people outside of family, close friends and Saddleback staff members realized the daily anguish Rick and Kay dealt with as they desperately tried to help Matthew. Many times Rick or Kay had to cancel public appearances at the last minute to try to help Matthew through another crisis. When I got the email on Saturday morning saying that Matthew had died I knew all that I needed to know. Matthew had ended his long and tortured battle the only way he saw possible. And a family who have known more pain than most could endure now have to face the worst and face it while the world looks on.

My prayer, and I hope your prayer, for Rick and Kay and Josh and Jamie and Tommy and Amy and all of the Warren family is that they will experience the peace that Paul speaks of in Philippians, a peace that passes all human understanding. Rick and Kay are wonderful parents and grandparents. They are remarkable leaders. They are kind and caring people. But today they are hurting and brokenhearted humans, just like you and me. Will you join me in praying for healing that can only come from God?