Principles of Effective Leadership - Lesson 18
Strategies and Leadership
In this lesson, you will explore the importance of strategic thinking and learn how to use a SWOT analysis to better understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of an organization. You will also discuss the significance of analyzing trends and how they can impact the future of education and ministry. By developing a clear vision and mission, you can turn ideas into reality and be prepared to adapt to an ever-changing environment.
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Strategies and Leadership
I. Introduction
II. Importance of Strategy
A. Developing a vision and mission
B. Turning ideas into reality
III. SWOT Analysis
A. Strengths
B. Weaknesses
C. Opportunities
D. Threats
IV. Trend Analysis
A. Identifying trends
B. Adapting to emerging culture
C. Impact on education and ministry
V. Developing Clear, Concise, Strategic Statements
A. Thinking in strategic themes
B. Connecting strategies with vision
VI. Aligning Strategies with Vision
A. Ensuring strategies directly support the vision
B. Avoiding ministry creep and overcomplication
VII. Make strategy a continual process
VIII. Submit our strategies to God
Dr. John Johnson
Principles of Effective Leadership
PC506-18
Strategies and Leadership
Lesson Transcript
Dr. John Johnson [00:00:01] Okay. You know, a statement I like to put they're right on strategy. Some page one is that without it, the vision will lack credibility. It remains an illusion. And the illusion is sometimes I think we let's say we take an organization through this lengthy process of making sure, okay, are we clear with our mission? Yeah. How can we work through all that? Everybody affirms that. And then you say we need to have more than a mission. We've got to think about our vision. Where are we going? And that's its own process. And sometimes it can take years. You reflect, you sense where God's leading. You call your leaders together, you work on the mountaintop, so to speak. You come down after a lot of processing that maybe takes sometimes weeks, months, and then get into ownership of the body. So by the time you get done with all of this, maybe you've spent two or three years and the temptation is to go, Hey, we got done, man, We got there. And then you realize now we didn't. I mean, all you have is something put in a file drawer. And even when you have strategies, it doesn't mean you're done, But at least strategies begin to make it feel like, okay, maybe this thing or well, just like the title of this book, Making ideas happen, when in fact the subtitle is Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, because a lot of vision just stays there. If somebody says, Oh, he's a great visionary leader, but if nothing really happens but he has great ideas, it's not a great visionary leader. Ideas are rather cheap and they have a high mortality rate. Physicians are the same way. Physicians have a high mortality rate. When you start getting into this process, you're starting to say, okay, maybe we're getting to some reality. So how do we become strategic then? Sometimes what I like to do is to say as we think about our strategies is to say, Let's do a SWOT analysis. You ever done a SWOT analysis or been part of one? A SWOT analysis is where you say, Let's try to figure out four important things as we move into strategies. We have a vision, but let's also do one more piece alongside of this, and that is let's talk about our strengths. If we're going to be really strategic, it's important we know our strengths. So if we say, okay, the seminary we're creating, we've got this vision of what we want it to be, we better stop. And as we strategize, figure out, so where are we strong at? And that's always a good place to start. When you do a SWOT analysis, don't start with weaknesses, so let's figure out our weaknesses. When you start with strengths, it sets a tone. The best SWOT analysis experiences I've I've had is when they start with really on pack and search. So what were we strong at? All of us have had a great educational experience and we all have the right degrees and that's a strength. You know, we're living in a city that demographics says will increase 100% in the next ten years. So in a growth area, that's that's a strength. I mean, that's we're looking at our strengths. We've got three of us that have been doing this for 20 years. We have some great experience to tap into. So you do all these strengths and as I put here, it sets the tone, relaxes defenses, builds optimism, and then you move to swot. W So what are the weaknesses here? What are the things we're not doing too well? What are our limitations, our resources? This is not a high money area. It's really hard to find people who have deep pockets. That's a weakness that could hurt us. We start looking at our weaknesses. We don't have a large number. It's going to be hard to create momentum. That's a weakness we have. We then look at all opportunities. What are the opportunities that are in front of us? If we seize them wisely, we can really do something if we go after them. So what are the opportunities in front of us? Here's an opportunity. We just read that in a Time magazine article that more students are going to Christian universities than ever before. There's kind of this reaction to a lot of secular universities where parents are fed up with paying thousands upon thousands of dollars just for their kids to go and be part of drinking parties and, you know, live in dorms that end up just being motels and etc., etc.. So they're seeing this huge amazing jump in Christian colleges. So we say that's an opportunity because they're going to be graduate. And one of these days and they're going to be more geared to go on in ministry. We might be on the edge of a wave. You know, we can look out there in the ocean and we see the set coming in and we can just like if ever ridden waves, you ride out there and you wait and you see the one coming that you know, if you catch it just right, it'll be an awesome experience. We see a wave. For me, it's an opportunity if we position ourself, if we don't get out ahead of it, and then we can't get there when it breaks or if we are not quite out there far enough and it breaks right in front of us. You know what I'm talking about. You done that. You had that experience. You get right there on the tip of that curl and you catch it just right and suddenly, whew, you're just headed straight down really fast. It's just the greatest thrill. But if you're just a little bit in front at practice on your back, you just kind of go a little bit and it all fizzles or you're patting like crazy. But you got there a little bit late and it just goes out in front of you and you just barely got there. Then you're just there. So this is kind of what you're doing here with the SWAT thing you're saying, okay, so what's the opportunity? Okay. How do we position yourself? Catch it just right. And then, of course, what are the threats? What are the things that might hinder us? What might get in the way? Well, one threat is. I see suddenly ten other people that see the same wave forming, and that's a threat. If they get in my way, I may not get the room, the lane, if you will, to ride on this thing. Or I might start to come down and I might have to pull back because suddenly I got two idiots in front of me or, you know, whatever. So what are the threats that are going to get in the way? Let's say the threat is to actually there is a declining I direct a doctoral program here Demon said was a season demons were sort of like the cash cow. I mean they started this program, made a lot of money for seminaries. It tapped into a whole bunch of pastors who wanted to have more education, wanted to have some credibility that a doctorate would give them without doing a Ph.D. So a whole lot of people jumped into the team and then other seminaries got wind of that. And so suddenly there are like 120 demon programs. Well, you kind of have fish that pond, you know. So what's the threat? The threat today is that there's not a lot of fish in ponds. That's a threat. We're gonna have to figure out what do we do with that as we begin to strategize, You're taking your group through thinking strategically now to get to the vision. Sometimes it's good to stop and say, so. Let's look what our strengths, what are our weaknesses, what are the opportunities, what are the threats? Those are another example of doing analysis, as do a trend analysis. What are the trends that are happening out there? We should be aware of Students are coming to school later in life. That's a trend, right? What does that mean? Well, that means more of them are going to be married. They're going to be settled. As John Ripley would say, they would be less inclined to make a major movement up route. When I went to seminary, most of us, just about everybody I looked around was 22. We were all college grads. We just jumped right into seminary. Most of us were single today. The average age, I think is 37. So we look at trends. The pattern is, is that students, as we're visioning the seminary, we're going to create here, that's going to be a trend. So it's not going to be offering classes every day. We're going to have to kind of put them on like two days a week so that students can do a lot of their other stuff, working, raising families the other days. That's a trend, right? That means education is going to have to look a little bit differently. I'm teaching more and more intensives. You know, this is kind of an intensive, but I just taught a course, a semester course, 8 hours a day for Thursday and Friday, and then half a day last Wednesday, two and a half days, a whole course. That's a trend. Students all come in and do this very intense thing and go back home. That's a trend. We're going to have to be aware of that online education. We're going to have to figure out how to do that well, because more and more are going to be inclined to do education that way. So we look at trends. What are the trends? What do we see out there before we do our strategies? What is an emerging culture? Tell us about how to do ministry in the future? Here's a trend Could large megachurches be dinosaurs in the future? Maybe the day of large church ministry has passed. How is it? I don't know. These are trends, seesaw patterns, which gets back to for us here. We're creating a seminary. What kind of pastors do we want to develop? We may say if it's trending this way, we may spend less trying to help them think how to manage and grow an organization. This course could become obsolete, but hopefully we can apply this to any sides of what we're leading. Something I put here that to that, Jack Welch warns, don't make strategy too complex. The more you think about it, the more you grind down into data and details. Try to be careful in that. So trends. What things should we pay attention to? Here are some. I read Eternity to postmodernity, whatever that means. What does that mean? What are the implications? We're almost from postmodernity to something else now. I think influx of ethnic groups attraction to smaller, more relational people, less inclined to give sustain thought. Implications for role of preaching. I've read in recent articles that study brain usage that people are less able to think deeply because their brains have been reprogramed or maybe in a program that's not the right word have been reformatted. Think about that. How has that happened?
Speaker 2 [00:11:51] Media?
Dr. John Johnson [00:11:52] Well, media for one, yeah. Media certainly is a contributor. But all of our connect points Twitter, Facebook, cell phone, texting emails, none of those go very deep. And so the brain is just used to this, this, this, this, this, this rather than this. So the actually brains are actually being reformatted. What does that mean for the future in terms of a how we do education or back to how do we preach? Will the day come that giving a sustained thought in 35 minutes be impossible for most people to track with because they don't know how to do that anymore? I was reading recently where they discovered that because more and more people are being dependent upon GPS, they're finding that people don't know how to think spatially. In other words, they can get in like a mall and get lost because their brain isn't trained to think that way anymore. That's weird, isn't it? That's scary. But because you start relying on some of this technology, you could actually be reformatting your brain so that you function differently. You know, there was an article in Atlantic Monthly some time ago entitled Why Google Makes US Stupid. And the point of the article is is that is it is reformatted how we how we go about getting knowledge. You know there was a day it's probably bizarre to you but when I took Hebrew and Greek certainly way before Bible works and all of these other shortcuts. I remember sometimes working on a sermon and spending 20 minutes trying to figure out, now is this a hit paleo infinitive or is this a participle? I can't tell by the form. It's really rare and I've looked to see how it's used. You might go, you would waste 20 minutes on that. But actually sometimes I look at that and that was really good. What was good was the whole time of processing. I'm thinking, I'm trying to analyze what is the writer senior? Why would he use that? What are the implications? Brain focused to go a lot deeper than it naturally does. It turned out that that forced me to process and the message was, I think got more in the interior, more like a sermon. Creation was more like a crockpot cooking all week instead of microwaving, which I don't ask if something is a hit by l infinitive, I just click on Bible works and here it is. Tells me the verses are right there. It's got it's done all the work for me. I used to when I was doing all of this work, especially in the New Testament. Whenever I preach the passage, I would always because to me what's really critical is to diagram cake, because here's the subject, and here's the verb, and the verb is where the action is right in a sentence. So you've got these other pieces, infinitives and participles, but this isn't where the action is. I mean, it's important, but here's what I want to get to. So I've got to figure out what the verb is, because the verb really defines the action of the text. Okay. And this is where you get the best in mining the gold, so to speak, that and that's what you're being most faithful to the argument if you're building a whole sermon on this participle over here. So you might miss the point. So I had to really work through this well today. So the Bible works. Click. Here's the whole diagram, top down. Now, in some respects that's really great. Saves me a ton of time, but do I think differently to get today because of that? Maybe it's only going to get more that way, you think?
Speaker 2 [00:16:30] Do you value more now or back then? I have more pride with it. When you started it out yourself, you spent 20 minutes. Yeah.
Dr. John Johnson [00:16:43] I don't know if I've ever thought it that way. Like more pride or. It's just.
Speaker 2 [00:16:48] I've spent some serious time on this. This? Yeah, well.
Dr. John Johnson [00:16:53] I still spend serious time, but I spend it differently. I may still spend the same amount of serious time, but it's more breadth and depth. I can get to the things that I don't have to go so deep on anymore because it's been done for me, and I don't know how much that's affected how I think maybe more than I think. But actually what scares me is even at this level of work, how many of the people I pastor and preach to don't do this. So I could tell like yesterday, you know, Ephesians four seven, Paul says we have been given the grace of gifts by the spirit. Okay. Fairly simple sentence. So my preaching point was we all need to be aware of the grace God's given all of us. Then verse eight, he goes, Therefore it says, and then he quotes Psalm 68 about God as this triumphant God who marches to Zion and links it to the ascension of Jesus, who then gives gifts, and then it comes back in verse 11 and some and he gave some of the pastors, prophets, pastors, teachers. So I get to versus eight through ten. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I'm going to lose them. What in the world is Paul saying? He goes off over here, You want to go to verse 11? What I'm saying it's a conflict because you realize, no, it's there in the text. It's there for a reason. Paul is actually building something. He's actually saying something significant about spiritual gifts. It goes back to who God is and what he did when he ascended into heaven. But you say, but will they will they last? Will they stay with you because you develop that? I mean, will they sit on the edge of their seats and go, oh, yeah, unpack that, or will they go, okay, where I. Maybe I'll come back with a cheesy story or something, you know, suddenly. Oh, you know, there was this time I would tell you about this. Did you see what would what happened in New Mexico last week? You know, suddenly people are. Uh huh. Yeah. You know, But, you know, as we look at the text, where Paul going? Uh huh, Yeah. Yeah. Oh, a funny story happened the other day, I got to tell you. Uh huh, yeah. You know, this way we are, right? Whether it be a day that the only way we can keep people's attention is with a narrative. A story? Well, I mean, would there be a day that you go. You know? So when's the last time you had an episode preached to you? Oh, wow. That was that was like, Oh, that's so nice, you know? And now we're, you know, we're into we just go from one gospel story to, you know, stories and churches.
Speaker 2 [00:19:54] I what I used to be more than oratory. Well, maybe we're moving back to maybe more of that.
Dr. John Johnson [00:20:01] But part of it is just kind of where things go and where trends are going. How do we adapt to it? Because things are always changing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:20:10] And then the typical example I think Jesus taught was for his primarily because people aren't good at keeping her from asking questions like, And who's my brother? And tell me a story. There's a Samaritan. I found this guy, I mean, especially in the world, has been how I think 70 plus percent is narrative. I think that kind of speaks to the fact that God knows how we understand. Yeah, I think we're just realizing that more and more in the age of high academic intelligence in the church is I think is starting to go back to the let's tell stories about God from the Bible. Yeah.
Dr. John Johnson [00:20:49] Well, I mean, I think it's legitimate, but I think if we go too far, it becomes illegitimate because I think we miss them. We also miss how God chose to communicate and actually, really some of it the real depth of how he chose to communicate. We may lose if we're not careful. Stories are great to tell, but it's the deep well of theology behind them. We have to also tell, or we've just told the story. Those are good examples. So part of strategy is doing this analysis. Number two, notice page four Develop clear, concise, strategic statements. So think and strategic themes. Facility staff in mission, for example, put them in statements. So here's an example. I'm not saying this is perfect, but it's fresh because this is just so you know, it's not theory. I'm teaching this stuff I do deal with in the church. So for example, with my staff, we sit down and the big bullet points is goes back to our vision. Our vision is we want to be this church of what we call radical connections in a disconnected world. Our dream is to be a place where there's just amazing connection. So as we broken our vision into five pieces, there are strategies I see. So I'll just use the first one. Our vision is to be a day. People in their deep, deep failures can walk in and find grace instead of what often happens. They come in and find restlessness. Oh, you're. You're not welcome. I'm sorry. But to more of saying, Hey, I find Grace when I come in here that's not going to just happen is the point. We're not going to sit around and go, Oh, well, that's a great vision. Let's hope for that. We have to put a game plan in motion. So we said we're going to really need to promote a resurrected living that reflects this kind of grace. We're going to foster spiritual healing and restoration. We're going to practice pastoral moments land on that. One of our strategies is we've said as a staff, always look for the pastoral moment. You're walking by somebody and say, How you doing? Oh, okay, okay. Stopping and saying, This may be a pastoral moment. Really? Are you okay? Well, not really. Be like me. This morning I checked in with my sister. She's driving cross-country with my mom and dad who are moving, and my dad's getting really difficult just with his aging. So I said, Well, hey, how yesterday go. It went okay. I said, okay, now tell me what really happened. My son, she opens up and breaks down and turns out it was an awful day. It was just awful day. I almost missed a pastoral moment with my own family because it would have been easy to go, Oh, well, okay. All okay, I got to get to class. Hope you have a great day. You know, keep pressing on to you. So part of our strategy is to say no, if we're going to be a place for failure, connect with grace. We've got to have like in tennis, way high up for people going through broken points in their lives, identify and enter into crisis points in people's lives to showcase grace and forgiveness. One of our strategies is that we're going to look for stories. When people say, Let me tell you, here's where I was and here's where I am. Whenever we hear those, we're going to selectively say, Hey, would you mind coming on on a weekend and I can interview you. Recently, a gal in our church, she will share with me. She started really memorizing scripture and she'd memorized a whole book of a Ephesians the whole book. I said, What is the story behind that? And she went back to when she used to be a witch. I said there, there's a great story. You know, so I have come up and I said, So how did this happen? I mean, so you were a witch? She said, Yeah. And she said, I was driving down the highway one day and I had this just strong sense. I need to find something about Jesus.
Speaker 2 [00:25:25] Alleluia.
Dr. John Johnson [00:25:26] Yeah, obviously. Right. The spirit of God just spoken to her heart. So she started following cars that had the Christian symbol, like, into parking lots so she could ask them. Some of them said, I don't know. And she even asked a pastor who couldn't help her, but then saw this truck that had this. I think it was sunshine something. But so in. And this guy eventually shared Jesus and she came to Christ. She memorized the Scripture to cope and get through her own healing. It's a great story, right? Our strategy is we've got to showcase that, to then say, you know, you might be here today and maybe you're just going through either deep doubt or discouragement or your own failure. Here's what God does see. It's a strategy that we're actually finding is pretty successful strategy, but it's helping us get to our vision. When I'm illustrating this with statements, not paragraphs, statements, and these become your game plan, then number three, and here's the key thing is then you've got to align everything you do around those. Because organizations are filled with parts. So what you have to do is to say something like this. Look. So here we have this mission and this vision and these strategies, and they all have to line up. So you can see on that we've intentionally aligned. You notice that. So we didn't just say, hey, let's come up with a bunch of strategies for our church. What we said is let's figure out how to get to our vision. So any strategy we come up with has to find its way back to the vision. If it doesn't, we're not going to do it. So actually, we don't lead with strategies. We leave again with the vision. So our vision is to be a church where grace connects with failure, which should be our strategies. What's our game plan? You see how that keeps us aligned? And if there's a strategy that doesn't find its way into our vision, we're just not going to do it. There's a book. Perhaps you've seen it entitled Simple Church. They've done a lot of research. Is the churches that are really counting have simplified because churches have a way of trying to do too many things, or they have a way of, I think, what he calls ministry creep when you have ministry creep is when you just keep adding to the layers and layers. But I think where people misread Simple Church is to say, well, let's just not do as many things we used to. Well, we can actually relax. No, that's not what he's saying. He's just saying make and make sure it all aligns. Keep it simple. Keep it aligned. So our church, we have this vision. It has these five pieces. Everything has to stay aligned to that. I think that's just really good. I'm not sure. I hope you don't feel like catch. Am I taking a course on corporate leadership for this? But my argument from the beginning is that churches could be more strategic. More visionary. I think they could do a lot greater things in the world, don't you? How many churches would you walk in? And you said, Can you give me your strategic statement? Would look at you and go, what? Or can you tell me your vision? Uh, I mean, our mission. And I think I told you once I called the 12 largest churches in Portland, and I said, I want to know what your mission is and what your vision is. Only one church could tell me anything beyond a mission. Actually, their vision was just a rehash of their mission. Only had more adjectives, let alone ever getting to the question. Tell me about your strategies. So alignment and then make strategy. Everyone's everyday job. It can't be implemented by the leader. It requires the contribution of everyone. Staff forward congregation Which means obviously there has to be buy in and then make strategy a continual process. And by that, for example, what we do every June, we take our strategic statement and we say, Are these strategies? Are there any that are no longer applicable? We get rid of them. We don't want to just keep adding layers and layers here. Is this a strategy that should change? Maybe Are trends or whatever telling us the strategy used to work, but it won't? Our mantra is something I've said before in this class and that is what got you here. Won't get you there. What got you here won't get you there. The strategies up to now may have gotten us here, but the strategies we have won't necessarily get us there. So when I say make strategy a continual process, constantly re review your strategies. And then submit them, of course, to God. Here they are, God. The plans of the heart belong to man. But the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. All the ways of man are cleaner in his own side, but the Lord weighs the motives. Commit your worst to the Lord. Your plans will be established. No land before God. Questions about strategies.
Speaker 2 [00:31:28] Russia oh five. Something I heard the pastor say is that kids are many principals. Are you ready to change? Principals never do. And I don't know if that relates to the of. Lower to earth. Bringing in the flood won't be enough.
Dr. John Johnson [00:31:52] Yeah. If we say a person stands by his principles, principle would be it may be almost interchangeable with the word values. Those don't change. We don't put our statement of values up and review every year. Okay. We had integrity, courage, loyalty. Anybody want to change those? Maybe this one doesn't apply anymore. Integrity. That's so seventies now.
Speaker 2 [00:32:22] Mission and vision. Do not change this vision.
Dr. John Johnson [00:32:28] Vision will like these five pieces that are this vision to be a connected church. I hope it does change someday. I hope we can say, you know, we've got here. So let's dream out ahead. What do we want to see in the future? Know, for example, in our church, we said we want to grow to a particular size. We can do that different ways. One game plan is we'll plant daughter churches, we'll have different sites, different campuses, or we're going to do video venue, or we're just going to plant new churches and let them go off on their own, which most of the time happens. We said, Let's build to the next level. Now, why did we do that? For us, strategically, it fits our vision. Part of our vision is to be in these global partnerships that we're doing around the world. And in order for us to do those well, we have to be at a certain size or we can't do it. We have to, in a sense, create a certain mass, if you will. My point is, is that that's our strategy. It's not to say that it should be the strategy of every church, just like our vision shouldn't be the vision of every church. What I've given you is an illustration of our strategy shouldn't be the strategy of every church. Every church is going to have a different set of strategies. The important thing is to have a strategy. So we didn't build a new sanctuary recently just to say, Well, we just wanted to have new space. It's all gets back to our vision and our strategies.
Speaker 2 [00:34:14] And mission is.
Dr. John Johnson [00:34:16] To worship God, teach the scriptures, love one another and reach the last. It's really actually pretty simple. When I came to village, it was there and didn't see any reason to change that. No more questions. You'll notice I give some case studies. You see those? Let me point out a couple of these. I think they're kind of interesting. Walgreen. Walgreen has this vision to be the best, most convenient drugstore with high profit per customer. That's their vision to be the best, most convenient drugstore with high profit per customer. So what they did strategically, their game plan is to systematically replace all in convenience stores with convenient ones. So I don't know what that made. Maybe there was one way out there off somewhere that wasn't convenient to anybody and said, Close that store. Then with drive thru pickup was not a great idea, but they had a problem. What's their vision? What is say the most convenient? What? But with high profit? Oh man, we're in trouble. Because you know what? In a drugstore brings the greatest profit.
Speaker 2 [00:35:38] By the registry.
Dr. John Johnson [00:35:39] Stuff, by the register and photo by photo stuff. They make a bunch of money off that. Well, they got all their people driving by to the pickup or getting their prescriptions. They're not going buy all this stuff where they make their money. That would be a great example of. So we're sitting around here, Adam comes up with this great idea, Hey, you know, convenient pickup. Let's say it's the first time anybody's ever thought of it, and we go talk about convenience. Then Marcia says, But Adam, I profitability and we're going to tank. How are we going to get them out of the car? How are we going to do that? I mean, this is the stuff of strategy, right? What strategies can we employ? Jesus. Jesus had his own strategy, didn't he? Remember, He sent the 70 out, says, Here's your strategy. Take just this. Go here. If this happens, do this strategic. He says to his disciples, Here's the strategy. Jerusalem. What, dear? Okay, so start local. Go global. Got to start this way. This is where it works. Okay. And God obviously does that starts Jerusalem, moves to Antioch, goes from there. Paul, was he strategic? What was his strategy? He go into a city. What do you do with this? He always went to the synagogue first. Why did he go to the synagogue first?
Speaker 2 [00:37:19] No promises.
Dr. John Johnson [00:37:21] And keep going.
Speaker 2 [00:37:23] Mm hmm. His people? Yeah.
Dr. John Johnson [00:37:27] He could talk their language. He's a Pharisee Pharisees, and he had the pedigree so he could walk in. People call this spot. So he had a platform. Now, he eventually got everybody upset and wanted want to kill him. But you look at all the cities, Antioch, the city and Corinth, all of these places. This is where he went first. The point is, he had a strategy. He had a vision. Vision is what was Paul's vision again?
Speaker 2 [00:37:56] The reach of the gentleman.
Dr. John Johnson [00:37:58] He had this dream. His mission? Yes. Part of preaching the gospel. The vision was, I'm going to go after non-Jews. Okay. Gentiles was his vision, his calling, his strategy. Interesting, though, the strategy. Think about that. His vision was reaching Gentiles. The strategy was to go to the synagogue. So you go, Well, then his vision and his strategies must have collided today. They did. Did they? If Paul was here right now, Say, Paul, what was your vision? I mean, what's the vision God gave you? Well, to reach the Gentiles. When did that happen? On my way to Damascus. Okay, so now you're launching from Antioch and you're going to all these cities and you go to the synagogues. That seems to be in conflict with your vision. If that was your strategy, wouldn't in your strategy, you want to be more aligned with your vision. How would you answer that?
Speaker 2 [00:39:09] You understand? I need to get the digits First Amendment. I think there's a priority in his mind.
Dr. John Johnson [00:39:16] But. But he was called to reach the Gentiles.
Speaker 2 [00:39:21] Did the Gentiles watch this mobile or even available? What happened?
Dr. John Johnson [00:39:26] Well, we get a sense that there were certain God figures who were not Jews who were in that context, which. Yeah, that's a good that's a good point. Just keep thinking about this stuff because maybe there's something really obvious right there that didn't conflict with his vision. Okay, Keep going with that, Adam.
Speaker 2 [00:39:47] So you go to synagogue. I mean, he's grown up in that environment, right? Mm hmm. Looking for educated individuals, trying to woo them over to Christ and then can partner with him to be more effective raising up leaders in that space. Yeah. So maybe me ask you this. Yeah.
Dr. John Johnson [00:40:11] So maybe he says, How am I going to reach any presidium? I know I'm called to this, but here the way I'm going to do it is to reach, first of all, my brothers and sisters over here. If I can reach them, the rest will take care of itself, because then they will reach these. If I just go into town and try to do that, I may not go anywhere. Makes sense. It'd be an interesting question to kind of study through the Book of Acts to see how his strategies because he was strategic and the vision. Let's do this here. It's seven after. Let's come back at 17 after, and then we'll try to move through objectives, talk a little bit about decision making, and then we're ready for Wednesday.
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