My personal assessment of Catalyst

• Andy Stanley talked about leveraging your power for the other people in the room. He used John 13:1-17 to show how Jesus did just that with His power. The big takeaway for me was this...To do anything other than leveraging the power that I have for others is making a public declaration that I am more important than my Saviour.
  

• I wrote this quote down, but I can't remember who said it. "True friends stab in you in the front!" meaning...they are not afraid to confront you with the truth when needed.

• I learned that Patrick Lencioni and I have the same personality profile of "ENFP". I could relate to all of the little rabbit trails he went down. I have the same problems sometimes. He spoke of three important truths. 1) Everybody has a need to be known. 2) Everyone needs to understand how important their role is. 3) There needs to be measurments of performance.

• Here is quote that was said during the Unchristian panel. "Christians are not hated for righteousness, but for their self righteousness!"

• Shane Claiborne said, "I cannot fully recover until I help my world to recover."

• Francis Chan is an amazing communicator. He hit the ball way out of the park when talking about our call/purpose as pastors and leaders. He talked about Jeremiah 1:4-5 and the fact that before we were born and still in our mother's womb, we were set apart for God's plan. He also talked a lot about the cost of following Christ and how our churches in America call for too easy of a commitment.

• Rick Warren had some good quotes...

"The Kingdom of God is wherever Jesus is King."
"Stop trying to change culture and start creating culture."
"Whenever God asks a question, it's not for His benefit."
"The first reformation was about creeds, the next reformation needs to be about deeds."

• John Maxwell talked about adding value to people. Some quotes about adding value from John...

"Just sow, and the reaping will happen."
"People who add value do so intentially, we're naturally subtractors."

• Craig Groeschel talked about three ways to become a practical athiest...

1. Start to believe our effort is better than God's power.
2. Start to believe that our private life doesn't affect our public ministry.
3. Start to believe that we must please people rather than God.

I'll blog more this week on some other great highlights!

Catalyst Recap

Catalyst was Great this year! There is so much information to digest. I think it will take me a month to sort through my notes and process it all.

The last session on Friday was incredible for me. Andy Stanley spoke about organizational systems. He said...

• There are organizational systems that are conducive to ministry and organizational systems that impede ministry.

• There are organizational systems that free leaders to lead and organizational systems that obstruct leaders.

• Systems create behaviors. We complain about how things are going in our families, our jobs, and our churches, but the results that we are seeing are a direct result of the systems that we have in place in our organization.

He talked about several components of a system. These components will foster the behaviors that you will see in your organization...

• Expectations/Rules

• Rewards (or lack of)

• Consequences (or lack of)

• Communication (content and style)

• Behavior (of those in charge)

He said that systems have a greater impact on an organizational culture than do mission statements. He said that it is the job of the leader to analyze the systems in the organization!