I see a lot of leaders acting like, well…followers.  I’m guilty at times.  Bet you are, too.

It’s easy to become reactionary, to read a situation and simply respond to it.  With our families, at work, in social settings, with friends, in the church, I see lots of leaders (myself included) easily, almost impulsively at times, morph into “lick your finger, stick it in the air, see which way the wind is blowing, and go with the flow” kind of people.  It doesn’t take much skill, much risk, much wisdom to live like that. That’s easy, the path of least resistance, and it’s really not leadership at all.

Leaders are supposed to lead, and leadership isn’t passive.  Leaders create environments, they don’t just respond to them.

I want to throw a challenge out to you that I’m laying down for myself.  Regardless of how I feel, what circumstances are telling me, how those around me are acting or responding, I want to be the one who brings life into every situation I encounter.  I want to create the temperature, not react to it.

When I hit my front door at the end of a long day, I want to bring excitement and energy into my home.  When I encounter a challenging situation in our church, I want to bring hope with me to the meeting.  When circumstances around me say “throw in the towel,” I want to bring renewed passion to the situation.  Not fake.  Not disingenuous.  Not manufactured.  In reality, the Life of Jesus Christ living in, through, and out of me.

I don’t want to just manage what comes at me.  Anyone can do that.  I want to create what doesn’t exist.  That’s leadership.  I’ve got some work to do.  You?

There’s always an underlying motivation driving the birth of something new.  A felt need, a discontent, frustration, passion…a desire to be different, to add something new to the conversation.  There are lots of churches out there trying to be different, trying to grasp the direction of the culture and speak to it, us included.  So over the last decade or so we’ve seen a wide-spread shift to implement expressive changes like contemporary music, casual dress, social networking, you name it.  We could easily compile a very long list.

And much of what we do at City Community Church would be reflected in that list:  our musicians are cutting edge, we’re all over Twitter and Facebook, and if I needed a tie for some unexplainable, cruel and heinous reason, I’d probably have to make a trip to Goodwill to pick one up (I’m firmly convinced neckties are a result of the fallout of original sin).

But those things are window dressing.  We can very easily fall victim to changing the outward expression without really dealing with the core of our motivations and worldview.  That’s the hard painful work most of us choose to avoid.

So what drives City Community Church?  What’s our motivation?  Why did we start this grand experiment?  I’ll at least share our hope:  It’s in how we want to see people.

Let me tell you a dirty little secret.  I believe in Jesus, I’m creative, I’m passionate, I’m motivated…and I’m innately and hopelessly selfish (and so are you…sorry).  It would be so easy for my buddy Nathan and I to leverage our influence and entrepreneurial capacity to turn CityCom into a pathway to fulfilling our own personal dreams, and to simply see the people around us as commodities in that pursuit.  If I’m being completely honest (shhhh…come real close…I have to whisper) a lot of churches do exist simply to fulfill their own organizational agendas or those of their leader.  No one would admit it, but it’s true.  It’s human nature, it can sneak in subtly, and we all have to guard against it.

So as we launch City Community Church, our deepest desire is to unearth the unbelievable, untapped, uncultivated God-imparted possibilities that reside inside of everyday individuals.  We want to be curators of people potential.  And not just so we have musicians to staff Sunday services, workers for the children’s ministries, and ushers to collect the offering.  It’s not that those things aren’t valid (or needed), they’re just not our ultimate definition of success.  We don’t just want to mobilize your Sunday, we want to empower your Monday.

So don’t just wait for us.  Our job is to help you uncover your God-birthed vision, not design, create and implement one for you.  Look for us to push, prod, inspire, challenge, and flat out irritate you into becoming all that God created you to be, in the context of the daily life He’s called you to live.  For the record, that starts with Jesus.

Now you know.  Now we’re accountable.  Let’s get to it.

I don’t know.

Those are liberating words. Yeah, really. Not words a leader is naturally drawn toward, but words I’m trying to become more and more comfortable with everyday. Those words don’t make me weak. They make me honest. Fact of the matter is, sometimes you don’t know either (yeah, I know who you are).

Having it all figured out is not a pre-requesite of leadership. If it were, only good actors would lead. But just like all of you, I fight the desire to always have the perfect answer, to know the score, to have thought through every possible situation, equation, and outcome before it happens. Oh, and we also have to innately know the contingency plan, too.

As a church planter, I involuntarily desire to eloquently answer every structural, organizational, and visional question that comes at me. “Of course I know the strategic intent of our planned infrastructure’s capabilities to handle economic downturn over the next three years.” (Liar! I don’t even know what that question means).

And as a pastor, I’m required to understand all the theological minutia of God’s will, His plans, and His ways. Right? If not, why am I even here? So we make ourselves look good. We give the pat, trite, Christian answers (that really help no one). We squish the ungraspable nature of God into our little box so that people think we’re good at what we do.

Here’s the deal. Sometimes we just don’t know. All of us. And that’s OK.

I don’t want all the organizational answers. Not knowing gives me the liberty to experiment, to dream, to try new things never done by anyone before. It gives me the right to fail and get up and try again. That’s where greatness begins.

And I don’t have all the theological answers. I don’t want a God I can fully explain, that I can fit within the scope of my little world and perspective. I want a God that blows my mind with the unfathomable scope of His nature and being. Sometimes His will is simply beyond my ability to comprehend. It keeps me honest. It keeps me dependent. As Andy Stanley so eloquently says, “focus on the undeniable, not the unexplainable.”

In my life, I’ve found that God often gives me just enough of the picture to keep me moving in His direction. I’m learning to live with that ambiguity, to thrive within those unknowns. It’s a beautiful thing.

So, here’s the deal. I don’t know. Yeah, I said it. I don’t know. Feels good. Maybe you should admit it, too. Wisdom begin there.

Nathan and I just got back to the hotel after the opening night of the ARC All Access Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.  It was a great evening of worship, challenge, and reconnecting with new friends and church planters from all over the country.

I love the spirit of ARC pastors. My heart is naturally drawn to them.  There’s a sense of reckless abandon in the ARC, of freedom to follow God-given passions without boundaries or barriers.  That’s so refreshing in a culture where most churches are more concerned with looking backward than into the future.  I really feel at home here surrounded by like-minded people.

But back home I’ve also found myself interacting with pastors and spiritual leaders who question the validity of my innate expression and vision for church.  There are days when my mind swirls with the all the different voices and opinions, and in earlier days it would have overwhelmed me.  Today, I’m honestly learning to welcome it.

One of two things always happens when I open myself to challenge:  my mind is exposed to something I just wasn’t thinking before, or I deepen my beliefs and solidify my “why.”  Either way I win.

I think a lot of good-hearted, God-fearing people run from challenge.  They only hang out with people who think like them, talk like them, act like them, and encourage their preconceived notions.  But if our perspectives can’t survive exposure to opposing viewpoints, how authentic are they in the first place?

In the midst of all the voices, ask yourself one vital question:  “what is God really saying?”

Here’s a hard question.  If you’re a leader (and I dare say all of you are in one way or another), are you driven more by helping those you lead or by impressing them?  Do you view your position through the lens of what you can do for others, or are you addicted to what you need from them?  Leadership is an incredible responsibility, but like a any old drug addict, the role that should be seen as an humble honor can easily become our own personal ego fix.

Pastor, teacher, business owner, mother, mentor, coach, grandfather, community organizer…you name it. Help or impress?  What’s driving you?