Today I feel hammered. I went to sleep last night at midnight after the Sunday feast. I’ve been working six days a week for the past three or four months, and Sunday is my only day for preaching. So I don’t have any recovery days.

On Thursday night Prahlad and I are going to NZ for a week, so that will be some recovery time for me. Otherwise I am wearing down. This is an important point to remember: one day a week is not enough. If the only opportunity you are offering to people to engage and get involved is Sunday, it’s not going to work. My realization is that I cannot sustain myself in the long haul engaged outside for six days. Even though my engagement each Sunday is a complete immersion for the entire day, late into the night, it’s not enough. The material energy is too powerful. During this period of increased focus on my job I’ve dropped the Loft and other programs during the week, and I can feel the burn.

Here are some realizations that I’ve gathered over the course of this series, Live to SERVE:

• Keep it simple. Make the logical chain as short as possible. Due to my lack of time I wasn’t able to put as much preparation into last night’s class, and it paradoxically came out well as a result. Usually I lose people with too much information and / or too complex an argument. This time I felt it was a lot closer to the content density and mass that the audience required.
• Risk turns people on. They like to see someone walking between two buildings on a tight rope with no safety net. That engages them. I can put my finger on the difference between Carly Fiorina and Marcus Buckingham at the recent seminar. Carly didn’t take any risks. Her presentation was super scripted and she stuck to it. She didn’t do any high-risk humour. High-risk humour is where you put yourself out in a way that you will look dumb if people don’t laugh. This puts people on the edge of their seat, and when you pull it off, people appreciate your skill and become more engaged in what you have to say. If you are a little bit on the edge people get engaged. They are waiting to see what will happen next.
• Leaders must be clear. Preaching is a specific arena of leadership in general. It’s all about getting people to follow you. You have to be clear, consistent. From week to week in all mediums you have to project a clear message. People can debate about whether your strategy or your preaching focus is the correct one, but they can’t debate about what your strategy or focus is, or whether you even have one at all. For us, it’s very clear: Service brings Significance. Live to Serve.
• If you want the guests to commit, get the staff to commit. It’s not realistic to expect the guests to be more committed than the staff. If your idea is that you want the guests to become progressively more committed and more involved (and it should be), then the staff have to model that. If new guests arrive at the published starting time and your staff slouches in after that, don’t expect much. The commitment of the guests will almost always trail the staff commitment. So to get the guests to up their commitment, have the staff up theirs.

  We have one lady, Sheryl, who comes with her partner John each week from the Gold Coast, one hour by train from Brisbane. Each week she stays behind after the program to sweep and mop the floor. This is late on a Sunday night (that’s another issue). One week I approached her and said: “Sheryl, I’m really inspired by your commitment in staying and doing this”, and she replied to me: “Well, whenever I look at how much you guys are doing it doesn’t seem like so much.”

Whenever I’m setting up and start to think to myself: “This is my one day off work, and instead of resting here I am doing this, under pressure to get it done on time. Why can’t I just kick back and relax?” I remember something Rick Warren wrote in The Purpose-driven Church..

Saddleback Church did not have a campus for the first ten years. They would meet in theatres, halls, and eventually schools. Every week they would set up 54 environments. A team would go in in the morning and draw a diagram on the blackboard of each room, detailing its initial state. They would then configure it for the program - adult Sunday School, children’s Sunday School, etc. Then in the evening, after the last service, another team would come through and put it back to the way it was on the diagram on the board.

One day Rick was carrying children’s toys from the boot of his car across the school parking lot, and he was thinking to himself: “Why do I have to do this? Other pastors have it easy - they have their own facility and they just have to show up and preach. Why do I have to go through this every week?”

Then, he says, he suddenly had a realization of what Jesus had gone through for him, and he just stopped in his tracks and started crying right there in the parking lot.

I am sure that one day we will have a facility with a fixed P.A. system and ceiling mounted projection system, where we don’t have to spend so much energy on setting up and can devote more time and energy to relational networking, study, and teaching, and a sizable percentage of the 963,000 inhabitants of the Brisbane metropolitan area will come every week for spiritual solace. Until that time however, it is necessary to push on with determination and model the commitment that we want others to develop.