Take a look:

School’s New Session in the latest edition of Fast Company.

A quote:

General Assembly is far more flexible than an Ivy League institution. It iterates and updates its offerings every few weeks, based on detailed student surveys. When its students said they wanted to study Android development, General Assembly ginned up a class two weeks later. A traditional college might take years to meet a new need. This close-to-the-ground, customizable model has been a missing piece of the innovation ecosystem. Top universities can’t always move fast enough to provide the technical and entrepreneurial skills needed in this new world.

Here’s an extract from a great article by the Center for Creative Leadership:

A research-based, time-tested guideline for developing managers says that you need to have three types of experience, using a 70-20-10 ratio: challenging assignments (70 percent), developmental relationships (20 percent) and coursework and training (10 percent).

The 70-20-10 rule emerged from 30 years of CCL’s Lessons of Experience research, which explores how executives learn, grow and change over the course of their careers.

Does this sound familiar?

Of course, CCL is missing one core dynamic: the spiritual dynamic.

Biblically, we know that there are four dynamics of transformation. Nevertheless, this is a very interesting confirmation of our model of leader development.

A dear friend of ours wrote this:

When I was going through the most difficult time of my life, I thought a lot about one question: I have always said I want to glorify God with my life, but do I allow God to bring about His glory as He pleases? Or do I define what God’s glory means and only accept it if it pleases me?

If I am blessed and successful in every area of life, with no pain, suffering or frustration, I may think that will glorify God; but God may have a totally different idea. He may want to glorify Himself in my life in a way that the world views as humiliation and destruction. Do I still want God’s glory?

This question helped me to clarify what I truly desire in life: God’s glory or my own ideal. I have to let God do it whatever way He pleases, and completely submit to Him.

Ask yourself this question: If it involves my pain and humiliation, do I still want God’s glory?

The only meaningful advice I can give on this question is:

Share what is life to you. Don’t merely share what you think you know or what you think the people need.

But share what is LIFE to you – what comes from life; what IS life. Share that and only that.

Then you’ll change people’s lives.

It’s a very difficult discipline but we must work hard at not being personally affected by criticism.

Criticism will always be a fact of life – for any leader. We simply cannot please everyone all the time. And many people (including very good ones) make their displeasure known. They have no idea about the multitude of other pressures the leader carries at the time. And they genuinely don’t realize the effect their words might have on the leader.

It is this that ends up derailing many leaders. They otherwise would have done really well, but they get discouraged and demotivated by the criticism. Years ago, I read that it only takes six (critical) people to get a pastor to leave – to leave! Even with all the tremendous affirmation and support the leaders get at some churches, there will still be criticism.

So we need to continually draw near to God. Allowing Him to crucify our own desires to look good, to be understood, to be treated justly, to be liked, to be vindicated, etc. etc.
It’s a deeper and deeper place of brokenness that we need to find. A deeper place of dependency on Him. A deeper place of union with Christ.

This is not easy and does not come naturally to any of us. I once asked a very old (and very deep) man of God, “Do you ever get to the place where people’s criticisms and attacks no longer trouble you?” His sober answer was, “No.”

But, in Him we can find encouragement and safety. In Him we can find life and peace. So that is where we must continually look. Coming apart from the busyness of the ministry work to look at Him and rest in His Presence. This is our hope and our path of longevity in serving the people of God – in Him. Only in Him.

Are we to love God (Matt. 22:37) or fear Him (1 Pet. 2:17)?

Is the Godhead three or one? Is Jesus Christ fully God or fully man? Is God sovereign or is man morally responsible? Does God love the world or is He its eternal Judge? There are many such apparent contradictions in the Bible. Clearly, these are not contradictions to God, since He states both truths frequently with no trace of dilemma. In all such apparent contradictions we must hold to both at the same time.

A fear of God that does not truly love Him will result in a life of harsh condemnation and legalism. A love for God that does not truly fear Him will result in a wishy-washy life driven by unstable, emotional sentimentalism and spiritual self-centeredness.

Just as, in a single moment, we must fully embrace the sovereignty of God and the genuine moral responsibility of man, so we must, at the same time, deeply fear God and deeply love Him.

It is our Greek (Western) tendency that pressures us to try to resolve such apparent contradictions, by choosing one side and then subverting the other to it. But to do so necessarily means the loss of both truths. The Hebrew mind had no such artificial limitations; he fully feared God and fully loved Him – at the same time.

And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? (Deut. 10:12-13)

…The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. (John 6:63)

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. (Heb. 4:12)

…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, (Eph. 5:25-26)

The Word of God is alive and powerful. The Scriptures are not only a source of accurate and reliable information – they themselves have the power to transform lives! When we are in the Word and the Word is in us, our lives are changed.

Books that are written about the Word of God are certainly useful (cf. Acts 8:26-35) – especially as they point us to the Word and help us understand it. But they do not have the same direct power as the Word of God; in fact, they have considerably less power.

Books that are written about books that are written about the Word have even less power. In a very subtle way, all in the name of scholarship, we get further and further away from life. The further away from the Word we get, the less the transformational power. We can still see bits and pieces of the Word – some vague reflections of Scripture – but we end up with our minds so cluttered with other things, and we lose the simple connection with the Word of life.¹ Then we wonder: Where is the power of God? Where is the presence of God? Where is the life-transforming truth? We knew it once but now it has been lost in the muddle of human tradition, in man’s debates about man’s debates.

We must return to the centrality and direct power of the Word of God.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. (1 Cor. 1:20-25)

¹ Even 3^rd or 4^th generation books can contain some wonderful insights and be of value. However, we question whether such should be included in the “core curriculum” for emerging leaders.

What else is the goal of theological education than to bring us closer to the Lord our God so that we may be more faithful to the great commandment to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37)? Seminaries and divinity schools must lead theology students into an ever-growing communion with God, with each other, and with their fellow human beings. Theological education is meant to form our whole person toward an increasing conformity with the mind of Christ so that our way of praying and our way of believing will be one.

But is this what takes place? Often it seems that we who study or teach theology find ourselves entangled in such a complex network of discussions, debates, and arguments about God and “God-issues” that a simple conversation with God or a simple presence to God has become practically impossible. Our heightened verbal ability, which enables us to make many distinctions, has sometimes become a poor substitute for a single-minded commitment to the Word who is life. If there is a crisis in theological education, it is first and foremost a crisis of the word. This is not to say that critical intellectual work and the subtle distinctions it requires have no place in theological training. But when our words are no longer a reflection of the divine Word in and through whom the world has been created and redeemed, they lose their grounding and become as seductive and misleading as the words used to sell Geritol.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

This is a brilliant presentation. And it would be even stronger if we added Jesus’ holistic approach to leader development.

The following was written by one of our Asian team.

I recently led a prayer time for our local church’s leaders. We read Acts 9:32 through the end of chapter 10. God took in me a direction, “Look for what God did and what men did in this passage.” So that’s the question I gave every one for 15 minutes of team reflection.

During the reflection, I saw how God initiated all the miracles, how He convicts people’s heart of His salvation, how He gives His servants ministry opportunities, and how He renews Peter’s mind and advanced His kingdom through his obedience.

While what men did was so little and so simple – they responded to God in simple faith, they grasped the opportunities God gave them, they declared the name of Jesus in boldness, and they obeyed God’s instruction in readiness.

God showed us how it was the genuine connection/union between man and Him that made all these miracles possible, and today, this is what God is building in our lives.

God revealed to me the experience that Peter had on the roof was actually a moment of crisis in his walk with Him. He showed me the spiritual depth of Peter as a result of his fellowship with Jesus, especially his brokenness, that in a moment like this, when God seemed to say something contradictory to His own teaching to Israel, Peter accepted it readily and humbly, and obeyed it promptly.

He told me the reason Peter could be used as a powerful vessel at a time of historical transition of the church – expanding from the Jews to the gentile – was because of his total surrender, his deep trust in God. He allowed God to take him from centuries of tradition – good and God-given traditions from His holy law – into a broader realm of God’s revelation and His kingdom. He readily yielded to God, and left behind what was so good and important to him, and what used to be part of his identity as God’s chosen…

He told me this is what he wanted to build in my life: deep surrender and yielding.

I was deeply moved. Meanwhile, I was reminded of what Norman Grubb said, that the reason why people exist is “Not to become something but to contain Someone”; and that “there is only one Person who really lives in the whole universe, and we humans exist that we may be means by which He expresses Himself”; also the two “crashes” we experience – first the conviction of being a guilty sinner, and then the conviction that we are useless saints – that make it possible for us to contain Him, like Peter.

I shared all these with the prayer group… they responded with such open hearts. The Spirit moved with such conviction during our prayer, we just couldn’t stop… There was a deep cry from every one – that we are willing to receive His work in our lives to surrender us and purify us, that all our service to Him may be born from union with Him, and that we may be people of His presence…

We’re thankful for this breakthrough. His perspectives have always been so powerful in helping us to overcome life’s problems. Although these moments of breakthrough do not guarantee a problem-free life, we’re thankful for a deeper conviction of His faithfulness, and His commitment to take us through.