There’s a whole bunch of stuff that accompanies it. I’ll just use money as an example. We did a six-week series this year in January and February on money. I didn’t do a single talk on tithing, but giving was woven all the way through it as well as a
biblical model—something we called the Ten/Ten/Eighty Plan. So it was talked about, but it was never direct. We talked about
getting out of debt. We talked about saving. We talked about a whole bunch of stuff. Our giving increased by 30 to 40 percent almost instantly just through that one series. So I spent six weeks on it, leading the church through teaching. Now, concurrent with that we had Crown Financial groups started. We had debt seminars on Saturdays. The small groups were going through these things. We led the church to marshal all of its resources that fed off the series.
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There are certain series I have to do close to annually as a leader. Stewardship, serving, inviting your unchurched friends—building relationships and inviting your unchurched friends. When I’m doing my annual planning, those three things are non-negotiable because left to ourselves, we won’t do any of those. The natural flow of the depraved church—and every church is depraved—is to turn inward, to be greedy, to isolate yourself from the unchurched and hide out in your holy huddle and your Christian clique, to lose your hunger to take the next Kingdom hill and to grow old. As a leader, I have to be on the warpath through a whole host of things, not the least of which is the language of leadership, to keep the church out of those ditches.
Preaching: What’s the hardest leadership challenge you’ve faced?White: Self-leadership. Self-leadership is a hard one. The danger of ministry leadership is that people afford you an enormously high level of spirituality that you really didn’t learn. So those of us who are pastors or leaders are often treated like the fourth member of the Trinity. Truth of the matter is, they have no idea if I’ve had a quiet time of any significance in the last six weeks.
They have no idea what my prayer life is like. They have no idea what I’ve downloaded off the Internet in terms of pornography. They have no idea whether I treat my wife with dignity. They have no idea whether I’m in a good relationship or a bad relationship with my children. They have no idea. But I’m awarded this level of spirituality.
The danger of our role is that we could begin to believe our press reports and take other peoples’ perceived assessment of our spirituality as the truth of where we’re at and then begin to feast on it. That’s how so many good men end up in ditches, and everybody says, “Shock!” Well, no, they’ve been going that way a long time. They were like a cut flower. It was just a matter of time. Nobody’s going to own my spiritual life but me. So I have to own that. I‘ve got to be diligent on that. And it’s from that that I have the moral authority to then try to lead others.
