IDEAS FOR EFFECTIVE PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP

• Every innovation has an expiration date.
• Everything that is currently in place began as a challenge to the status quo in a previous generation.
• What's ugly now was beautiful then.  
• What feels irrelevant now was cutting edge once upon a time.
• We are foolish to assume our ideas are transgenerational.
• We are equally foolish to assume that we will intuitively be able to sniff out the need for change in our own organizations.
• Any system will unconsciously conspire to maintain the status quo and prevent change.
• The problem is much deeper and more complex than inflexibility or stubbornness.
• It's a systems problem.
• Consequently, change is rarely perceived as a solution.
• In most cases it feels like an interruption.
• So yeah, just about everything in your current "system" is conspiring against you.

Each of the above statements is from the mega-effective church builder Andy Stanley.  

We want the church to go well.  God wants it to go far.  At a very key--the key--point in history of all of God's immeasurable work, He came through the back door of success.  He took out "the" key player in His outreach plans.  

His Son was executed.  

The Pure Hope of the world was taken out.  

The darkness in mid-day was stark and shocking.

Eternity gasped.

God was more than living on the cutting edge.  He framed a rescue model on the dying edge.

It matters not how old we are nor how long we have served, God will lead us day by day into the ever and always new.  Brave and bold ideas will one day be just like the man-process of aging; old, weary, and very tired.

The lost of this enormous creation cannot afford for us to live lethargicly  rather than largely.  We must have soldiers willing to risk life and link to our shining past to the most current and brighter presence.  What we speak of today as new in the church will one day be hampering the same church due to age.  

God's process for life will always baffle the best minds in leadership.  

Yippee!  We will, therefore, never exhaust the Creator's brilliance.  Our job is to stay tuned!