Please DON'T 'Press On'

More lessons from the Camino. But first I must digress.

Vacations for our family were all about the destination.  Definitely not the journey.  Dad was the driver, and I don't just mean the noun.  He DROVE to the destination.  Breaks were few and far between.  If you didn't pee at the scheduled stops, there was a glass jar with a sealed top in the back seat you could use.  Good thing we were 5 boys.  Never was sure how it worked out for my mom!

No joy in the journey.  It was all about the destination.

I grew to be attracted to phrases and sentiments like "press on".  I even signed my emails with this phrase.  Not anymore.

·        This penchant for pushing and pressing on was one reason I ended up needing a sabbatical. (see my first blog in this Camino series).  One of the greatest ironies and insights I found in the first few days of walking the Camino was how my walking habits were a metaphor for my life, and they weren't working well for me.  What follows is lifted directly from my journal.  Its a bit raw and I apologize for the language, but it reflects the level of frustration I felt at my condition.

      Day 11.  Liendo, Spain.  Yet another blister dammit.  Enough of this.  Enough of walking in pain and toughing it out.  I have done enough of that in my life. This is such a metaphor for my life.  Time for shorter stints and talking care of my body.  The point of this sabbatical was to take care of myself.  Now I see that I have basically walked this Camino like I have lived my life: Is my soul or heart injured?  Tough it out. Keep walking. It’s admirable on the surface.  Its great leadership optics.  But it’s an UNACCEPTABLE WISDOM.  The cost is enduring pain, a limp and an inability to fully engage the journey in joy.  Shit.  I’ve done it again.  I walk wounded far too often.  Sometimes we cannot avoid walking with some pain but most times, I can and should slow the pace and even stop in order to recoup and then proceed.  What’s the rush anyway? My importance?  My significance to the project or the issue?  Oh how I over-inflate my importance, which then makes me plow through because “if not me, then who, and if not now, then when?”  God is the power.  I am the servant. He asks me to participate, as I am able.  I am not an indentured servant with a whip at my back.  So why do I live that way???

My 'walking metaphor' taught me some things applicable to the vocation of leadership:

I tolerated rocks in my shoes for too long. Instead of taking ONE minute out of a 6 hour walking day to deal with the inevitable rocks in my shoes, I'd usually set a goal and say: "Once I get there, then I'll stop". Then I'd get there and foolishly set another goal, without dealing with the rock. (What motivated me to do this is too deeply pathological to explain!) Bottom line: I'd plow ahead in pain to reach a goal, instead of stopping to deal with the irritant.

• Leadership Reflection: We all have the strength to press forward and ignore small irritants. But little irritants, left long enough, develop into significant obstacles. STOP and deal with the irritant, whether its physical, spiritual, or relational. Life just works better this way. It's not worth walking the rest of your journey with a limp, or worse not being able to walk it at all.

You don't have to walk so fast. I set out to walk at my own pace, but got caught up in the Camino Pilgrim Scramble to get to the next location quickly in order to ensure a place to stay for the night. (Hostels were first come first served). This race for the destination took over the pace I desired in order to walk freely and with joy. The race mentality meant I was losing out on the beauty of the surroundings, the pauses to enjoy Spanish culture and food, the views (o those views!) and the rest opportunities at beaches, cafe's or mountaintops.

• Leadership Reflection: How you walk the path set out before you is what, in the end, distinguishes you and creates your quality of life (more on this in a future blog). Is it that important that you leave the legacy of: "They got there first"? In this short life you have, it's just not worth losing out on the beauty and joy of living. A famously rich philosopher-king named Solomon wrote about this in Ecclesiastes. Read this Biblical book.

Do not tough it out. This is more than a 'rock in your shoes' moment, or about the times when the situation demands some personal grit and determination. It's about when you are exhausted and spent in your leadership but decide to press on anyway. Some days I chose to keep walking despite horrible blisters. I remember one day after a few days of toughing it out, another ailment emerged: a shin splint. But as you have probably gathered about me - I plowed on that whole day anyway and limped into a forced day of rest.

• Leadership Reflection: Too many leaders press on so hard that they are then forced to rest because of complete exhaustion. That's costly to them personally, to their organizations and to the purpose/objective for which they have committed their lives. Build a regular 'sabbath' into your life, a time to step away from everything. Not only will it afford a time for healing where you may be hurting, but it affords your mind body & soul space for renewal and strengthening.

Get a grip on your pace of life and get yourself out of the race of life.

Harv Matchullis 

Can't You Read The Sign?

   

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

5 Man Electrical Band 1970

Essential to the El Camino are its signs.

My choice to walk the Camino del Norte only using the signs set out along various places like roads, curbs, walls, buildings, bridges, and trees meant I had to be vigilant.  No map. No GPS.  I wanted to walk like a pilgrim of old, sans tech. There was actually an excitement to intuiting the path 'au naturel' and if necessary, facing the challenge of getting lost!

After 281 KM of this I concluded that when you are consciously watching for signs rather than having a GPS (read: cultural) voice tell you where to go, your skills of 'noticing' become heightened.

We live in a world where others set out signs for us to follow.  Their aim is to prescribe the way you should go.  Political, media, religious, vocational institutions and a host other forces in our lives regularly set out their signs, beckoning us to walk in their stated direction.

People are reading a lot of signs and reacting to them, but I contend we don't 'notice' them very well. Just watch your Facebook feed and the comments section.

To notice is to discern.  Discernment is the process of making careful distinctions in our thinking about the truth of those signs for us.  Discernment asks questions like:

• Is this sign pointing in the general direction of where I want to go?
• Does this sign make any sense being here, now?
• Based on the signs that have brought me to this place, can I trust this sign?
• Do I actually want to go where this sign will direct me?
• Where will I end up if I actually followed this sign?

Unfortunately it's now a rampant habit in our culture to latch on to a position and lock into ways of thinking and looking at the world.  Any signs pointing to potential new ideas, new routes and new ways of thinking/being can't be 'noticed' because our eyes have become unaccustomed to looking at a sign and discerning it's meaning.  Signs are given attention only as far as they fit our existing biases.

How can you 'see' a sign for its own merit and make a decision? Some of my thoughts from following Camino signs:

1. Define the signs you are looking for. Not all signs have to do with you or your journey.  On the Camino it's a yellow arrow.  The arrow exists in a few different formats, but there's a distinctiveness about it you recognize as a pilgrim.  Those arrows (among many other arrows on the route) were the ones that had a reference to my ultimate goal of reaching Santiago de Compostela.   Life is full of signs, but which ones matter to you?  Much depends on your reference points. If your life & goals are ill-defined, any sign will get you somewhere. Reminds me of a quote by Lily Tomlin - "I always wanted to be a somebody.  I just should have been more specific."
2. You can't see if you are not looking! That's a Captain Obvious declaration, but...  Early one morning as I left Lezama, Spain I walked behind a fellow pilgrim who was very agitated. He was on his phone with someone, frustrated he could not see the signs. Somehow he hoped a remote person on the other end of the line could help him see! The comical irony was while on the phone, he was regularly walking past the very signs pointing out his way! The need for speed kills insight, so slow down in order to really see.  My best advice - if you can't find the signs it's time to stop, retreat, and reorient yourself. It may be you have forgotten what signs to look for. In the rush of life, you can only see well when you have silenced your mind and calmed your spirit.
3. Beware the Crowd.  Once while walking through a city I saw a crowd of pilgrims a few blocks in front of me.  So, believing they were on the path I wanted to be on, I lowered my personal sign-seeking vigilance and followed them.  After all, safety in numbers!  In one instance however, that crowd took a collective wrong turn.  If it wasn't for a personal check in at that moment on my commitment to look for the signs for myself, I would have blissfully been wrong with them.  I stopped, saw the sign they missed, and turned. BEWARE. The crowd can be safe and helpful but it can also cause you to pay less attention to the signs laid out for your unique pilgrimage. Crowd-sourcing your direction in life will cause you to lose the awareness and discipline of looking for your signs.  An example from my vocational context is the production and use of commonly themed, large-scale training programs for Christians, and the one-way communicative patterns of most church's' public gatherings.  It can produce a version of 'group-think'.  As a result of the need and desire for orthodoxy (and orthopraxis), the Church inadvertently produces pilgrims who can only walk with the crowd. I see this revealed in the rhetoric of many who can spout off clichés, platitudes and simplistic responses to life issues they commonly learned in these contexts. They have not always learned the discipline of discerning the signs for themselves. Frankly this applies to our politics too. ATTENTION: We each must walk our own journey and make up our own minds. This is not a declaration of independence from human community or absolute truth. However there also exists a walk that is unique to you and Jesus. He will set out the signs for YOU.  Are you building capacity to see His signs for your unique journey?
4. Train your eyes.  You can fall out of the practice of noticing and might even become lazy at looking.  After I had taken a day-long break from walking, on my return to the Camino the next day I struggled for a while to re-adjust my eyes to searching for the signs.  When you stop seeking the signs that point you toward purpose and meaning (and that affirm you are on the right path) your eyes will cloud over and perhaps even become desensitized. A host of avoidable and unavoidable life circumstances will affect our vision.  We all deal at times with  stress, transition, resignation, exhaustion and even just struggling to survive. But if not careful we can become used to not looking for the signs that guide our ultimate journey of life. If you are in a break-time for whatever reason, your vision may be cloudy.  Make the choice to keep looking.  The signs are there.  You just have to see.

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs,

Blocking out the scenery of your own beautiful life journey,

Breaking your God-given, unique mind!

Don't settle for other's voices of 'do this' or 'don't do that'

Can't you read the signs for your life?  

Harv Matchullis

The Way of Wilderness

A few km east of Santander, Spain

Authors note:  After a period of sporadic engagement with this blog, I'm back.  I begin with a series of thoughts and reflections stemming from my sabbatical experience in 2017.  For part of the sabbatical I took a (very) long walk to rest, rejuvenate and relax after a period of burnout.  That walk was on the Camino del Norte in Northern Spain.  281 Km in 15 days along the mountainous coast along the Bay of Biscay.  Though I was still in the dry and cracked personal and leadership wilderness, I encountered the incredible beauty of this natural wilderness...and found Jesus waiting for me there.

If you have not yet walked into a personal wilderness, you will.

My story:

I WAS DONE.

For 34+ years I  have been a Christian ministry leader in Canada and around the world.  I thought I was resilient and indefatigable, but I had reached a breaking point.  For many reasons I found myself in a new landscape - a dry, barren wilderness of mind, soul and body.  I told my ministry board in Feb of 2017 : "I am done.  I'm exhausted physically & emotionally. While I can still 'see' into the future of this ministry, I am completely disconnected.  Professionally I can still perform, but its like I am having an out of body experience each time I speak or serve.  I can do it, but I am an autobot.  I can't go on and I don't know what to do".

With that I declared my leadership bankruptcy.  I had no plan of what to do. The first and only act I knew to do at that point was finally admit it.  Yet it took a long time.  I am fiercely independent and a 'press on' kind of guy, so this was a monumental admission.  There was no plan on my part for what was next, but I knew if I didn't take the first step of personal acknowledgement, I truly was 'done'.  Time to exit ministry and maybe even faith. It was that bad.

My board graciously granted me (and worked hard to provide) a 3 month sabbatical.  I owe them a great deal.  To my board - if you are reading this - I am humbled and indebted to your faith and courage to make this happen.  I know it wasn't easy organizationally. You did the right thing.


On my flight from Canada to start the El Camino in Spain I started reading Eugene Petersen's "The Jesus Way".  How serendipitous.  "El Camino" in Spanish means "The Way".  One quote pierced into my personal situation:

"Wilderness time.  Desert time.  Time to see the way of Jesus tested against the devils' way.  Time to  feel the terrible pull of temptation away from Jesus' way and realize it is a temptation to embrace illusion and to believe a lie.  Time to become aware of the immense and hidden abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan." (pg 30).

Jesus was deliberately tested in a wilderness to determine if He would choose to act according to the ways of His Father or the way offered by Satan (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4). Jesus, the Son of God was led into a wilderness experience.  Did you read that correctly?  He was led into it.  A wilderness.  Deliberately.  By God. I emphasize these things because while at times I beat myself up for ever getting to the point of burnout and 'wilderness', my experience was not beyond the purposeful intentions of God for my testing and maturing.

On the road of leadership are tests.  Often wilderness is the context where God administers those tests.  In the wilderness you are stripped down to the essentials.  Survival becomes paramount.  What's most important comes into a focus you likely have never before experienced, because your very survival depends on that level of clarity.

My wilderness experience was a time to feel at a core level just how much I had embraced the illusion and lie that personal leadership skill and effort was the means to accomplish the mission of God in this world. I had plunged into the abyss between the way of Jesus and the way of Satan.

Jesus is our 'Camino'. He is our Way.  Jesus as the Way also means that the ways of Jesus are a part of the Way.  Once you have abandoned doing things according to His ways, you have succumbed to an illusion and believed the lie of Satan.  Over time, I had developed my own 'way' - driving to the ends according to my own means.  My ways were respectable and frankly, a reflection of  Western Christian leadership culture and expectations. Optically it all looked good.  The industry of Christian leadership training & seminars would affirm my approaches.  People went along with my tactics.  However, behind this illusion was a self-determined striving that lead to cynicism, emotional distance and a soul-sucking emptiness as a Christian leader.  When you live in contradiction to the Jesus way, even while trying to serve His purposes, those are the results.

Are you headed for a wilderness?  Are you already in one?  At the risk of over simplification, I offer  4 starting thoughts for your wilderness journey.

1. Don't beat yourself up over it.  Jesus is there and He is intending to test you.  Surrender to the lessons that will confront you.
2. Be courageous and admit where you are. Stop 'sucking it up' and plowing forward. You can do it for a while but at some point you will implode.  Your mind, body and soul were not built for that level of stress.  Something is gonna give.
3. Confront your fears around vulnerability and tell someone. I told my wife before anyone else, but she saw it long before I admitted it.  It was also hard, but necessary to eventually tell those who shared leadership with me.
4. Surrender any sense of control over what's next.  You are likely in this place because of control issues.  Jesus' full intent is to shift control from you to Him. (That truth easily rolls off our preacher-tongues.  It does not so easily show up in our daily service to the Master).

Much more to come...I'd love to interact with you if this is useful to you. Sign up for this blog to get regular updates, leave a comment or contact me personally at hbmatch@gmail.com

Harv Matchullis
...still leading, but from a different posture... 

The Cautioneers

Just when I thought I had invented a new word, Google Search popped my balloon. Turns out the term ‘Cautioneers’ preceded my innovative musings. It’s the name of a band out of Toronto! It is also a term used by the Enneagram. Interestingly the Enneagram captured some of the essence of my (once innovative) meaning: ‘safe, secure, reliable, predictable, cautious’. I will take this definition & expand on it in the context of leadership, especially those who lead the followers of Jesus to their mission of restoring the world back to God.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a leader who occasionally demonstrates the characteristics of The Cautioneer. If we did not display some of these qualities (or was connected to someone who does), leadership and followership would be chaotic. Ask any follower of a purely idea-driven, “squirrel!” kind of leader.

However, to lead from the posture of a Cautioneer is what is bringing the church to a slow crawl in its mission to restore the world to Jesus. Shepherds and pastors by nature default to organizing systems and safe pasture for their flocks. These gifts dominate the paid leadership roles of the organized church. Thus, the resulting church has been defined and confined by boxes, programs and systems. It is certainly busy, but rarely is it found in the cracks of human experience and at the edges of society. There is still a “come to check out what we offer” mentality that drives the church’s mission. It’s safer that way, isn’t it? It’s a Cautioneer approach.

Interestingly the metaphors that describe the world changing ways of Jesus - salt, light, yeast and seed – inherently must be scattered in order to effect change. Yet the Cautioneer leaders find ways to gather and ‘nurture’ these elements rather than risk scattering them around. Thus, their churches are often active internally and launch out on a few forays into the world to ‘pillage the village’ and gather new recruits. Their activity makes them feel and appear they are on mission. Reality check: Activity does NOT equal mission.

I have two questions to pose, with my own answers (lest you think I don’t think about this stuff). I’m eager to hear your own responses.

1. What happened to us?

2. Can we do anything about it?

My personal opinion about what happened:

• In the past few generations or so, increasing wealth enabled resources to be poured into gathering places and then staff to take care of them.
• These places needed ‘pastors’, basically leaders who could manage the place and the activities that would justify the existence of the place.
• ‘Place’ came to define ministry and a programming boom ensued, which then elicited the need for more staff. This was helped along by a culture sympathetic to Judeo-Christian values that were eager to receive these services.
• This became the norm and our colleges and seminaries followed suit by training people for the model, but not necessarily the mission.
• We woke up to the reality that we are not in Judeo-Christian Kansas anymore, and have tried to tweak our model to be ‘relevant’.

Now here we are, in an era where many are speaking out about this. Hirsch, Barna, McLaren, Bibby, Devenish, Platt, Wright and a host of others are in various ways calling us out to cast off the Cautioneer mantle and discover new ways of thinking and organizing so that the mission can be forefront. In spiritual gift terms, the apostolic/prophetic and evangelist mantle needs a renewal within the leadership community of the local & global church. FYI those gifts will inherently seek out new models, forms and ways of being.

Frankly, I don’t hold out much hope for existing church institutions to be able to make the change. (I do hope they try). Mission rhetoric abounds, but it’s calling out from a model resistant to change and unable to change because it won’t face up to the fact parts of it won’t make it into the future. I see some churches tweaking at the edges, but unable to create a wholesale change without a decades long time-window or a commitment to disruptive change.

So to the second question, what can be done?

INDIVIDUALS or GROUPS - Start something. Don’t wait around for the wheels of institutional machinations to catch on and support your idea. The story of church growth has more to do with innovators walking out to the edge of cities, towns and social networks than it does intentional institutional initiatives. 

• Caveat: Don’t do it alone. Find mentors and advisors to help guide your endeavour. The truth is plans go wrong for lack of advice but many advisers bring success (Prov 15:22). A lot of harm has been done by Lone Rangers. A lot of good is done when pioneers rely on other pioneers.

• Encompass Partnerships is designed to assist you start something. It’s one of the key reasons we started in the first place. Contact info@encompasspartnerships.org if you want to start a conversation

CHURCHES – Become a hub of innovation. Your ship may not be able to turn easily or fast, but you can launch smaller vessels that use your ship as a resource hub. Within your gathering most definitely are those who are wired to go to the edge, to seek out new places and spaces for the gospel and do things unconventionally compared to what your church currently defines as ministry. They are those who by nature and gifting are the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists. You have already lost quite a few of them because of inattention and asking them to squeeze into what is. They leave and typically go somewhere else, start something on their own, or leave the church altogether out of frustration. So, why not instead embrace them (not too closely, because after all, they are pioneers) and develop an approach that encourages and coaches their ideas?

• Leadership is to equip ALL followers of Jesus for the work for He calls them. However, clearly your church programming is not capable of reaching as far as its people can reach. I hope that moves you to seek the answer to: How then do we empower those people? Struggle with that one! The Spirit will guide you. I’m not going to provide a 3-point answer.

• Appoint a staff person, create a department, assign time & space among existing staff – whatever works in your corporate environment, which shows and speaks to innovators that you are open!

• WHO can you partner with to ensure these people are given guidance and have some wind blown into their sails? Encompass’ coaching can help fill that role, but we have capacity issues too. You could find mentors for these people among current/former international mission workers or others who have worked in innovative, idea & project-generating environments. Find people with great coaching skills (not advice-givers) who can help a person walk through their thinking about an idea.

Whether you are that individual with a passion, or the church wanting to empower that passion, be ready for one common outcome: It will get messy. The world is messy. People’s lives are messy. Oppressive systems are messy. Yet this is where we are called to live the Life and show the Way of the One who is the key organizing Truth for a restored world.

Harv

When the Future Fails...

(A follow up and very personal reflection to the last posting I made)
Harv

Why Bother? Your Future Might Fail.

Are you contemplating a vision that will fuel your personal life or organization for the next phase? Do you want to ensure it will work out as planned?

Ten years ago when I was 48, I started to think about that arbitrary, yet significant marker of age 50. At that stage, I decided that I would not succumb to ‘retirement’ thinking and set out on creating a path to challenge myself vocationally & personally. I had a vision to achieve. Now that I am approaching the marker of 60, I am contemplating what the vision might be for the next stage of life. 

You should know there was a “disturbance in the force” while executing my previous vision.

The plan I put in place in my late 40’s and executed in my 50th year did not turn out as I imagined over the next seven years. There were twists and turns I never anticipated. In hindsight the path I walked enhanced and redirected my thinking and vocational orientation, but to be honest – this wasn’t the script I wanted to write. In fact, a lot of it hurt and just plain sucked.

Failure to achieve a vision as dreamed begs these questions:

Is it worth dreaming and executing on a vision?

Why dream about making things different in your personal or leadership life if what you start out with isn’t where you end?

Why pursue a future that may fail?

True personal and corporate leadership is less noun and mostly verb. In other words, leadership isn’t a position. It’s a risk.

Leadership by nature takes risks because to lead is to enter a process to discover the way to a place you have not yet gone. Thus not all people in positions of leadership actually lead. Many are managers. Not all people who say they want to lead their life forward actually do. Many are responders to life.

No one has a lock on the future. Despite all our geeky dreaming about time travel, no one has been to the future and sent back reports that will give you the information needed to come up with a no-fail

Many people ‘speak’ the language of risk and advance, but in practice simply manage their way forward. As an example from my world of Christian non-profits, church leadership teams can often speak about risk and mission advance to reach to the very edges of a society, but their default organizational orientation to safety, management processes, systems and orthodoxy of thinking and execution militates against their language, squeezing out those who are actual risk takers.

Risk is part of advance both personally and corporately. Real risk. Not the language of risk. That means:

Acting on your convictions. There’s a saying that in old age you won’t regret the things you did, but the things you did not do. Think about that. I have met many ‘leaders’ over the years in my work that possessed deep convictions about issues but never executed because they feared others wouldn’t follow, or they feared the potential change was too much for their organization. Some even feared they’d lose their job if they acted on their conviction. If any of these are your story, then…

…you are not a leader, you are an employee.
…something potentially significant was never birthed in or through you.
…the real you has been diminished

Prepare & Plan. Then be ready for it to change. German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke famously noted: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Risking doesn’t mean ignoring good preparation. It does mean that what you started with won’t last because the future is full of the unexpected and unanticipated. You will have to adapt and change. Will the prospect of that keep you from launching out?

Learn as you go. No one can ever know it all at the start. “Risk management” while it has its place, is also an oxymoron (and likely the creation of managers). Risks inherently can’t be managed but when faced; they can both inform and guide what needs to happen next.

Adopt a new perspective. A truly nomadic leader/thinker that is capable of navigating the changes life and leadership inherently contains, takes on a perspective I have taken from a book title: The Obstacle is the Way. (Author: Ryan Holiday). This perspective means we don’t view the obstacles that risk often presents to us as inhibitors to a vision but rather as the pathway to what’s next. You’ll need this if you have any hope of persevering. In fact, you’ll need this to even get started!

The next things in this world, whether it’s a cure for a disease, your personal dreams & visions, a new form of energy to be developed, a means to address exploitation, a path to get an organization ‘on purpose’, a way to bring true abundance to the marginalized etc., will ONLY come from those who say:

   This isn’t right.

      This isn’t enough.

         It can be better.

            I will try a new thing.

Be bold. God knows this world desperately needs courageous people.