Mark Williamson's Blog, page 8

John Wesley: Accountability Questions

Accountability questions can be a great way to help you in living out the life of holiness and integrity you aspire to. Finding an accountability partner or group you can be totally honest with, and who will ask you such questions, is a great marker on your path towards Christian maturity.

John Wesley devised a series of accountability questions for the members of the Methodist movement, to help ensure they were all growing in holiness as a key part of their discipleship.

Band Meeting Questi...

Ephesians 1:15-19 Prayer

The prayer Paul prays for the Ephesian church members in Ephesians 1:15-19 has become one of my favourite prayers. Along with the Lord’s Prayer, it’s one I now pray each day.

Paul begins by thanking God for the Ephesian’s faith in the Lord Jesus and their love for all the saints. So each morning I pray that my faith in God and my love for all people would grow. And then Paul prays the following:

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit...

Leaders Provide Questions Not Answers

There’s often a pressure that leaders feel they should have all the answers. I want to suggest that the best leaders provide questions not answers.

The best leaders realise that they don’t personally need to have all the answers. It’s the responsibility of the team to find the answers. And working on answers together ensures you have more wisdom, more points of view, and will therefore get to a better solution than one person (no matter how gifted) might be able to come up with alone.

Searchi...

Overcoming Ridicule – Nehemiah 4:3

Nehemiah 4:3 teaches us one of the most important leadership principles in the Bible. One of the first things someone who has discerned a vision needs to learn about is overcoming ridicule.

When God places a vision in someone’s heart, the first opposition they invariably encounter is other people laughing at them; mocking them or their work, and saying such a vision could never come to pass. I think this ridicule probably stops about 80% of the visions we have from even being attempted. We ei...

Top 5 Leadership Biographies

I love reading biographies from high profile people to try and learn leadership lessons. I read about successful business people, politicians, football managers, explorers, journalists and ministry leaders, all to pick up leadership lessons. Here are the top five leadership biographies I’ve learned most from, and recommend to you:

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This is the authorised and standard biography of Jobs, though other biographies since his death in 2011 are now starting to come out...

Amy Carmichael: Creating a Holiness Movement

Amy Carmichael knew the importance of discipling her team, to ensure the success of her work of rescuing Indian children from slavery. She developed a holiness movement for her key team members called the Sisters of Common Life. They met every Saturday to encourage one another, and they developed a vow and a rule of life to ensure they continued to grow in holiness and in grace throughout their working lives.

Vow of the Sisters of Common Life

My Vow: Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, by thy gr...

What is Leadership?

What is leadership? It’s a subtle and sometimes confusing mixture of so many things. Ask ten different people what leadership is, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Here are some of my favourite definitions, from people who have walked the journey and know what they’re talking about:

“Leadership is influence”, Oswald Sanders

“Leadership unlocks”, Geoff Elliott

“Leadership is the capacity to rally men and women to a common purpose, and the character that inspires confidence”, Lord Montgomery

“Leadership is taking people on a journey when you’ve not been there yourself”, Andy Stanley

“Leadership is a relationship; the relationship is one of service to a purpose and service to people”, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

“Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen”, Alan Keith

 

And my personal definition that I’ve started to use recently – leadership is taking responsibility.

What is leadership? It’s all of these things, which is why it can be so complex. John Maxwell states that leadership is ultimately the ability to get followers. If people follow you, then you’re leading. If no one is following then you’re just taking a walk.

I like all of these definitions, and have found all of them helpful in various situations over the years. They remind me of what my responsibility is whenever I find myself in a leadership role. But I’ve also started to unpack these definitions into a series of six key skills and character traits that I now try to work on. If I can develop each of these, then I think I’m exploring further what is leadership, and growing in my abilities as a leader. The six are:

Vision: Seeing with clarity the future that I am working towards.
Integrity: Maintaining a good character, with a reputation for honesty, trustworthiness, reliability and goodness.
Planning: Being able to translate a vision into long and short term goals, and ensuring time and other resources are well managed, so we make progress.
Communication: Listening well to understand others, and being able to clearly articulate vision, plans and roles, etc.
Building Teams: Empowering others to use their gifting to contribute to the vision, and become part of teams that can achieve more than any individual could alone.
Coaching: Teaching skills and encouraging development in individuals so they are growing.

What is leadership? To me it’s consistently doing these six things well. And if I keep on studying, developing and practicing them, then I hope to be able to make a difference in some of the ways listed in those definitions above.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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10 Questions for Creating a Rhythm of Life

Here are ten questions I used to help me create a personal rhythm of spirituality, or rhythm of life. Maybe you will find them useful.

What’s your image of God? How do you relate to Him, and how would you like to relate to Him better, e.g. as Father, as Lord, as Husband, as Spirit?
What practices help you meet with God, and enable you to know Him better in these ways?
What Christ-like qualities do you most want to develop? E.g. faith, hope, love, etc.
What measures do you have for each of these, i.e. how do you measure your growth in them? How do you know when you’re doing well, or know that you’re failing in them?
What practices develop or deepen these Christ-like qualities in your life?
When and how can you incorporate the practices from answers two and five regularly into your life? Are there things you want to be doing daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc?
What addictions or negative behaviour patterns do you fall into regularly, that pull you away from God and that you want to eliminate from your life?
What are the triggers for these behaviour patterns? And what can you replace these patterns with?
What is the negative narrative that Satan would have you believe about your life? He comes to steal, kill and destroy, and does that by accusing, lying and tempting? What are the accusations and lies he throws at you most regularly?
What is the narrative that your Father in heaven would have you believe about your life? Much of this may well be a counter narrative to the lies from above.

Doing this takes a lot of time, and often takes more than one sitting. You can create initial answers to some of these questions, but may want to keep coming back to the questions every couple of days over a period of a couple of weeks.

If you persevere with it, you can come up with your own personal rhythm of life that features a Godly narrative you can regularly remind yourself of, a series of practices that will deepen your spiritual life, a series of measures for how well you’re doing, and a list of alternative practices to take up whenever you feel triggers towards sinful, addictive or negative behaviour.

Once you’ve created your Rhythm of Life, regularly follow the daily, weekly and monthly practices you’ve set for yourself. And hopefully you’ll find yourself growing in God, and growing in faith, hope, love, etc, and growing towards Christ-like maturity.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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Planning the Next Meeting

Here’s a great tip for any leader: start planning the next meeting immediately after one meeting ends. Make creating the agenda for next time you meet the first thing on your to-do list.

Over the past few years I’ve regularly chaired meetings for boards of charity trustees, for a church leaders fraternal, for a community arts festival, for a church leadership team, and for a charity staff team. Each of them present their own challenges, and each have a different frequency of meeting. Some met weekly, some monthly, some every two months, some every four months. But each one benefitted from the same principle of planning the next meeting immediately after the previous one ends.

At the end of a meeting is when you have the clearest plan in your head for what needs to be done immediately, what needs to be discussed when the team next comes together, and what needs to be done in the interim. So it makes sense to immediately put that together into the next agenda, before it all gets confused or forgotten.

It’s now the first thing I do when a meeting breaks up and other people leave. Even if I’m the one writing up the minutes of the previous meeting, before I do that I start planning the next meeting by creating the agenda of what we’re going to do next time we meet. And it’s made my meetings much more productive, with a greater sense of progress from one to the next as we all sense we are moving forward.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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What is Anointing?

What is anointing? It’s one of those elusive terms we often use in church circles, but don’t have a clear definition for. And as such we can end up confusing it with related but subtly different concepts.

Talents: These are areas where we have a natural aptitude. People can have talents in areas as diverse as sports, creative arts, learning languages, solving problems, getting on with people, and so much more. It can be easy to take credit for talents ourselves, but we need to remember that all our talents are given by God, whether we consider them to be ‘spiritual’ talents or not.

Spiritual Gifts: These are gifts God gives to us so we can glorify Him and serve others. They are the contributions we make as team members of the body of Christ, and they are the result of God’s grace and God’s Spirit at work in our lives. There is no exhaustive list of spiritual gifts in the Bible, but many commentators agree on around 24-28 of them. They include things as diverse as administration, giving generously and speaking in tongues. (To study more on them read 1 Corinthians 12-14, Ephesians 4, Romans 12 and 1 Peter 4.) They can overlap with areas where we already have a talent, but they can also be in completely different areas.

Skills: These are things we’ve become good at doing through repeated practice. Often we develop skills in the areas where we have natural talents and spiritual gifts – it makes sense to work on these strength areas. And I’d encourage you to develop skills in your areas of talent and spiritual gifts, since I believe that gives you and God greater freedom in then using them to serve others. But skills differ from the above two because we’ve put some effort into developing them ourselves.

Anointing: This is when God supernaturally blesses our ministry, and works through us in such a measure that we know it wasn’t just us. Our talent or skills may achieve some things, but when God anoints us the fruit and the impact is greater than anything we can achieve alone. Anointing is often accompanied by a greater awareness of God’s presence, both in the one serving, and in those receiving. We should be constantly offering our talents and skills to God, asking Him to anoint them so we can bless others. And anointing should be the standard way in which we use our spiritual gifts. In fact, anointing is the ‘extra plus’, the ‘spiritual factor’ that makes spiritual gifts truly come alive.

A great question therefore, after ‘what is anointing?’ is ‘what work of yours is God currently anointing?’ Not just what are your talents, your gifts, or your skills, important though these are. But where is God currently bearing fruit through your work? Where do you see His impact and feel His presence as you serve Him?

Whatever He is anointing you for is a great clue towards His vision for your life.

I believe two areas in which God has anointed me is in teaching biblical truths, and in drawing church leaders together for mission. One of these is a more classic spiritual gift (teaching), the other (church leader unity) is perhaps less common. But it seems to be something that God anoints me to do. So I’m learning to try doing more of those things where He does anoint me, and see what ministry happens and what Kingdom doors are opened as a result.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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