Group Life Conference Session 4 – Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Blog entry from Session 4 led by Bill Donahue:
Life puts us in challenging and difficult situations that force us to make a decision.
There are times where we don’t always make the best decision – despite our best strategies, ideas, and intentions.
(Reminds me of an early date with Leanne where I thought it would be “cool” and “impressive” to slide down a long banister at the student union of Grove City College when we were returning to the campus for the date. Let’s just say that I didn’t make it to the bottom of the stairs before I went flying over the banister onto my rear. This was the first of many embarrassing things that Leanne has had the pleasure of experiences thanks to me.)
Sometimes we make decisions out of a desire to satisfy our egos. We exchange expedience for wisdom – convenience for conviction.
What do you do when a good idea goes bad? When something we work hard on fails? How do we learn from failure in our ministry?
Reasons for failure:
1. An obsession with vision while ignoring reality.
2. Implementing a strategy without building an infrastructure.
3. Empowering leaders without developing them.
We need to mobilize every resource possible to support, shepherd, and enable our leaders.
4. Launching groups that never learn to be in community.
We need to help people in Relationship 101. People are self centered and don’t naturally know how to relate.
How do you recover from these failures? Is there hope?
How you respond to failure really matters.
– We need to own up to our mistakes, and we need to say that we’re sorry when we mess up. “I’m sorry, I made a mistake.”
– We need to forgive ourselves.
– We need to remember that there is hope. God can redeem our failures. (Just look at the Bible-a story of failure redeemed.)
– We need to cling to Christ – the anchor of our soul.
Our job is to be make sure that people know that there is hope. We need hope, so we can pass it along to those in our community.
Do you have hope? Do I have hope? Where/who do you place your hope in? Hope can change the world. We have Christ to hang on to!
Great session!
Stay tuned…