The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Month: January 2010

Declare Your Intent

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On January 26, 2010

In Confrontation

I have just finished reading The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, a book  Warren Janzen (our International Director) has been talking about.   One of the points that Stephen M. R. Covey makes is that one’s intent (motives) and how that intent is perceived by others have a huge impact on how much people trust us.     While we generally judge ourselves by the motives behind our actions, we judge others by their actions, and by our assumptions about their motives.     And those assumptions are often wrong.   But nevertheless, trust is damaged if our fellow workers or teammates believe that your motive in saying what you did or doing what you did was not to help or build them up but either to promote your personal agenda or tear them down.   So Covey says,  “People often distrust us because of the conclusions they draw about what we do.  It is important for us to actively influence the conclusions others draw by ‘declaring our intent.'”

Our teammates cannot read our minds.   Particularly if they come from another culture or sub-culture, there are a myriad of reasons why they might interpret the intent of our words and actions in different ways that what we had intended.   As a team leader, you want to encourage your team to work together to accomplish something great for God’s glory, but your words of “challenge” are heard as rejection and negating of their efforts to this point.    So we must “declare our intent“; we must explain our motives rather than just expecting our teammates to understand why we said what we did.

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Sabbath and The Covenant Community

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On January 16, 2010

In Covenant Community

As we seek to understand what it means for our mission team to be a covenant community, we need to go back to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament.  Their identity as a people was grounded in their special covenant relationship with Yahweh.   The Lord God made some special promises to them (redemption from slavery, a land of their own flowing with milk and honey, etc), and made clear His expectations of His chosen people (no tolerance for hedging their bets with the competition, obedience to the Law, etc).   As a sign of their mutual covenant, God gave them the Sabbath, both as a distinguishing practice among the nations, and as a scheduled life “pause button”, enabling them to refocus their attention on their relationship as a covenant community with their God

Because the Sabbath day was a sign of their covenant, the Israelites were to remember to observe Sabbath and keep it holy (Ex. 20:8), refraining from engaging in regular work on that day.  Neglecting to honour the Sabbath was much more serious than just indicating a tendency to work-alcoholism; it would demonstrate their disregard for the covenant itself.   By treating this day as ordinary, they were in effect telling God and the world that they did not consider their relationship with God to be anything special.

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The Priority of Trust

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On January 13, 2010

In Team Leadership

In his book, “Leading Cross-Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership“, Sherwood Lingenfelter says that the most difficult challenge in leading multi-cultural teams or communities is to build trust within that team or community.   So he places great importance on this leadership task of forming a community of trust, which he goes on to call a “covenant community”.  In fact, he goes on to say that “instead of giving first priority to attaining vision, meeting goals and productivity, they (leaders) must rather give highest priority to the formation of a community of trust and then to doing the hard ‘bodywork’ of creating both community and trust.”

This is not the typical advice we give to a new team leader, not even to a missionary team leader.   But when we have served on or worked with a team or church in which its members no longer trust one another, we quickly realize how absolutely essential the foundation of trust is for leadership and for teaming.   The community will not just be stuck in neutral if trust between members has deteriorated; it will start to fall apart and/ or destroy itself.   How ironical that a community whose very identity is defined by its relationship of trust to God (it is after all, a community of faith) can so completely lose its trust in its own leadership or membership.   Every action and word of the “opposition” becomes the subject of painstaking review and analysis for possible hidden meaning or negative connotations; nothing is taken at face value.   Somehow it seems easier to trust the God we do not see than our fellow brothers and sisters whom we do see, but are from a different culture or generation or family or race.

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