← GrowLeader Podcast with Chris Hodges
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- [00:01]
A
Well, hi, everybody, and welcome to the Grow Leader Podcast, where we grow leaders that grow churches by helping them reach their full potential. So glad to have you with us today. My name is Matt, sitting alongside the chancellor of Highlands College and the founding pastor of Church of the Highlands, Pastor Chris Hodges.
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B
How are you doing?
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A
Your titles are getting longer. I like it. Does your email signature have all that in there now?
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B
I actually was telling my assistant the other day, I mean, I needed to get new business cards because it says senior pastor. You know, there are still settings, by the way, where people ask for a business card. Did you know that?
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A
Let's know how do you even have a business card? No, I. In the bottom of my backpack, so somewhere.
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B
Exactly.
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A
It's in there. You were. We were at an event the other night, and you said you're talking about not being a senior pastor anymore. And you said somebody asked, hey, were you disappointed about not preaching so much at Easter time? And your answer was, no, I'm not.
- [00:49]
B
I don't miss it a bit. I'll say to every pastor listening right now, that's a hard job. And I knew it was hard. Of course, I was under the grace of God, the amazing grace of God to do it, but, man, I realized even how hard it was once I stopped doing it more than when I started doing it or was in the middle of doing it. So, anyway, so I pray for our pastor. I'm grateful for Mark Pettis, but I love my new assignment is what I call it, because my life is not my own. I belong to Jesus, and he can put me anywhere in his army that he wants to. I'm a deployed soldier in the army of the Lord. I mean that with all my heart. And so I see this as an assignment, not something I wanted to do. Now I don't get the luxury of picking what I want to do do. I belong to Jesus. And so I'm love. I love my new assignment. I love being a chancellor. I love a grow leader. We had an amazing time in Pennsylvania this past week. Unbelievable. Trained over a thousand pastors.
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A
I love regionals. I think they're. They're. They're the best. And all of you that come to the regionals, and you come up and you say hello and say, hey, we love the podcast. We. We. We appreciate you. And if. If you have ever have any hints or things you want to hear differently from us, we want to know because we want it to be tools that can help you out.
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B
And we got the Grow Conference coming up in about three months, and it's coming and then doing a lot of roundtables. There's a lot of tools that people that are listening may not know that exist to help you reach your full potential. So go to the Grow Leader website, tell your friends. By the way, I mean, I do a monthly mentoring call with a bunch of pastors that I love so much, where I teach for 20 minutes and answer questions for over 40 minutes. And so a lot of different tools out there to help churches grow.
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You really love it. I'll watch you get so excited. Every time we have pastors, it's wind
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in my sails when I'm helping somebody else reach their dreams and their goals, which is what I want to talk about today. We actually had a great ARC conference.
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25 years of the association of Related Churches.
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It's really something special and I'm very, very grateful for what God's done. 1,215 churches launched over these 25 years. And what a dream. And there were six founders, two are with the Lord, and four of us remain, of course, in an amazing lead team. But we had a fantastic conference, really, at the orig of it all, which is Charleston, South Carolina, with Pastor Greg Surratt and Seacoast Church. And I brought a message, Matt, you were there. That I had never really brought this way before. And when you do that, you're really not really sure how it's going to turn out. I said that on the front end. Like, man, I don't even know how this message is going to come out. I'm going to give you my best. And it was based off of one of the principles in my new book, Legacy Letters. And if you've been on the podcast recently, I actually taught, you know, some of the different principles. The first four are all lifestyle or time oriented, scheduling type margin principles that allow you to do the next 27. So really, I think you have to get the first four in that book right in order to live a successful life to be able to do the other ones. But the fifth principle, the first of that 27 that are left is the bucket list principle. And that is if you wanna start living, you've gotta start dreaming. And one of the things that I really try to stir inside of the hearts of pastors is to dream again. That the dreams are the language of the Holy Spirit, that having vision is really what faith is. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. And so pastors and leaders and business people, whoever's listening to the podcast today, if you're not dreaming, you're not Moving your faith. Cause you don't have to believe for anything that does exist yet it's the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So what faith literally is, is that I have this ability to have a God dream that is inspired by God. It's not just me wanting to do random things. These are things that God shows us by his spirit that don't exist yet that we have to believe God for belief, for money, believe for people, believe for opportunity, open doors. And honestly, this is very, very key. It's one of the most exciting parts of life and I'm even gonna go so far to can be the remedy to depression, just the mundane living. That's why the Bible says when you don't have it, where there is no vision, you perish. And perish is not the greatest translation. The NIV gets it really, really close when it says when you don't have a vision, you cast off restraint. In other words, it doesn't matter how you live. Wow. So you don't have. So I don't even mind saying yes to sin or yes. Why? Because, eh, whatever, what I do no longer matters. It nothing ever really matters. But when you have vision, it actually motivates you to live a life worthy of that calling. It motivates you to have a disciplined lifestyle that wakes up in the morning and seeks God and then goes after it and makes a masterpiece of every day. Why? Because they have something I'm chasing, something I'm dreaming about. I even love the way the message paraphrase says this verse. It says if people can't see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves. And in fact the word vision or dream in the Hebrew language. Go look it up pastors, in your Strong's Concordance or on Blue Letter Bible, which is where I look up Hebrew and Greek words. You go look up the word dream. Like out of Psalm 126. The definition is health. So crazy that the word dream is so closely associated to health. What brings you health that sometimes the translators don't even know which word to use there. So when the Lord restored the fortunes to Zion, we were like those who dreamed. We were healthy when we were dreaming. And now our mouths are filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Of course it is because you have something you're chasing. I mean, I'm here at the beautiful Highlands College campus and there's a lot of beautiful buildings by the grace of God we've been able to build. But man, I have this stack of of artist renderings on my desk of things we haven't built yet. I showed somebody today as I did a tour today for a group of pastors that were here from California. And I said, you see that area over there? And I held it up and I said, this is what it's going to look like now. I don't have the money for it. I don't really even have all the drawings done. I just have this artist rendering. But Matt, it has me giddy. I'm chasing after something that God's showing me.
- [07:15]
A
You made this comment the other day and you said that you're giddy the same way now that you were when you were planning Church of the Highlands 25 years ago.
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B
It's like the first day I moved to Birmingham. And I want that for every person listening. And honestly, can I say this? You can have that feeling again. And I think that's where health is, that's where life is. In fact, I can trace back to every place where I was in a funk or dying or just, maybe even a little depressed or just overwhelmed or burned out. And every time I had stopped dreaming, I had stopped, you know, chasing something that was God inspired, something that was God honoring, something that was eternally focused. So I'm not just talking about, you know, dreaming to take a trip or to, you know, to do something fun. I do have a bucket list with 103 items on it. I will admit about 30 to 40 of them are just for fun, things I wanna do, just for fun, places I wanna go, things, you know, I wanna accomplish. But the vast majority of these are God honoring, eternally minded, you know, things that would bring glory and honor to Jesus and finish the Great Commission, you know, and I'm. And I'm. And I'm motivated by it. I discipline myself to look at this bucket list. Every month I read through it all over again and just lord, how's this gonna happen? And you know, and pray and I get excited and I plan and we're gonna talk about that a little bit. But there's a lot of people listening today, Matt. I put em, you know, you could be in one of four different, not good places. One is where you have no dream and no dream. Isn't that like you've never had a dream. You just had one that probably totally died for some reason or another. And then I'm meeting people all the time that they have stopped dreaming because it creates more comfortable sailing. So it's just too dangerous to go into the deep end of that place anymore. So. And I Don't want that uncomfortable life. So you don't upset anything or anyone. You're just kind of coasting along. And, man, I'm just even praying. I know this is a podcast that just brings great information and conversation, but, man, I hope something spiritual happens at the end of this podcast where people say, man, I cannot live my life just coasting along. I need to dare, I need to risk, I need to sail again. A second one is a wrong dream. When I say a wrong dream, it's not wrong because it's bad. In fact, it can even be good. It's just not the right vision. I call it fun, but not fulfilling. So it's something you're doing, but it's not really what you were called to do. Or maybe you've fallen in love with something that has no fulfillment attached to it. Again, nothing wrong with that. But I remind people you were made for a whole lot more than that. I love quoting the DL Moody quote that says, our greatest fear should not be a failure, but of succeeding at something that really doesn't matter. So you're succeeding, but it wasn't what your life was really all about. The third one is a dying dream. So you have a. You know what your dream is? This one usually dies because of either trouble or delay. So the enemy loves to, you know. Well, there's a Greek word that literally means cut a ditch in the road. So he creates obstacles or barriers to the things we're trying to accomplish. And that's why we've got to be good at hurdling barriers and praying through obstacles and overcoming these. Because you have a dying dream. Or it can be just from delay. So there's no trouble associated. You just thought it was gonna happen a lot sooner than it is. And man, I know I'm talking to a lot of pastors now, and I thought we'd be out of this portable situation sooner. I thought, you know, we would have built this. I thought we'd be maybe a little bit larger than that. And I'm just encouraging everybody, don't let your dream die just because there's delay. I read the verse in. I'm gonna go ahead and pull it out. Cause it's at the end of the message. But I wanna just read it now where we talk about, you know, don't giving up on your dream. And it's just some pastor needs to just keep this in your arsenal. Out of Hebrews chapter 10. That we need to persevere so that when we've done the will of God, we will receive what's promised. For the Bible says in just a little while. Of course, I always remind people, God's little while and our little while can be two different little whiles because you know, he's outside of time. But he who is coming will come and not delay. And it says, but my righteous ones will live by faith. It means I'm gonna keep hoping for something that doesn't exist yet. And it goes on to say, and I take no pleasure in the person that shrinks back. But we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are sa. And so if you have a dying dream, man, this podcast was for you today. And then finally, the easiest one of the four, but still can create a casualty. We were talking about this before we started recording today is the vague dream. So you have one, but you just haven't gotten specific with it enough. So one of the things we do in our roundtables, Matt, is I do a vision exercise. And the vision exercise is to find out if a pastor has under visioned themselves or their church. And very few, if any ever really fully pass this little test. And here's how I do it. I say get a piece of paper out and just write down your response to this. A person walks up to you right now, hands you a $1 million check and says, man, do something that helps our church grow. What's your answer? Right now you got 10 seconds to write it down. And if you don't know what you would do with that extra resource that you weren't planning on, then you've under visioned your church. If you don't know what you're hoping for that you can't pay for now, same scenario, here's a million dollars. You can't put it in the church, put it in our city somewhere. Go help the hurting. If you don't have a 10 second answer, you can write down the paper. You have under visioned yourself of ways you can bless your city should God provide. Same thing for our country, same thing for the world. You cannot spend this in America. You have to take it overseas. Get as many people into heaven as you can with this mess. Million dollars, what's your answer? And if you don't have an answer, Pastor, you're under visioning yourself. And one of the best things you can do is find you, I'm going to talk about this in a second, but find you a place and a time where you can dream dreams, I call them million dollar dreams. Where you can where if some by Some miracle, a resource came your way, would you know what you would do with it? If they put it in a certain direction or a parameter, does that make sense? Yeah.
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A
And every time you do this exercise, it's always interesting to watch people's eyes get real big and go, man, I don't know. And I think that we even get excited about thinking about what we do for our ministry or our church. But health and ministry, health is so deeply tied to this. You hit on this a minute ago, and I think I've heard you say before, you know, in 2020, and when people go through rough seasons, a lot of times, your advice to somebody that's walking through a really, really challenging ministry season.
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Right.
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Dream.
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No, seriously. In fact, now I know to do it. I've been in ministry long enough to know when we were coming out of 2020, I was also on home, not because of COVID but also because of shoulder surgeries. I was depressed, man. I was really depressed. And I knew, though, I knew I better get dreaming again. And I literally called every one of the lead team members, one at a time, over to the house, but not to do work and to do, you know, the. I said. I said when we had our students pastor there, I said, what are you dreaming for? What can we dream together to see student ministry just be off the charts right now. And I just. And then our production person came in. What are you dreaming for? What would you wish we had that we cannot pay for? And we started dreaming. And I'm telling you, man, it was within a day, Matt. There was life back in my bones. Now, did everything come to pass? No. And it wasn't just pie in the sky, you know, dreaming. It was staying focused on what I call God honoring eternally focused, impacting culture, defying kind of dreams that really make a difference. And so in the talk that I did, the kind of the meat of this, for those of you guys that are listening this podcast, and we'll put this in the show notes, especially if you're driving or working out or whatever you're doing right now is listening to this podcast. But I love outlining passages of scripture. So even this, even this. Couple weeks ago, when I was speaking at Highlands, I outlined a section of scripture and pulled out points in Habakkuk 2 where we know the famous verse where it says, write the vision, make it plain. Right? We know that verse. If you look at the verses preceding it and after it, actually, there are five different actionable points that God was saying to Habakkuk about Dreaming or having vision. And I want to give those and make a few comments in the few minutes that we have left. And the first is he starts the whole passage in chapter two of Habakkuk, verse one. He says, and I'm gonna stand at my watch. One translation says, on my watchtower, at that station, at the ramparts. The ramparts, by the way, were always the place of battle. So it's clearly defining. I'm talking about, I'm gonna go to the place where I pray. I'm gonna go to the place where I seek God. I'm gonna go to my closet. He called it my watchtower. I'm gonna go to the place where I. Where I do spiritual warfare and fight the devil. And this is where dreams come from. And so point number one is we do what Habakkuk did. If you wanna start dreaming, you've gotta make room to dream. Meaning is, you've gotta get away from the noise of the world. You've gotta turn the world's volume down. I even write about that in Legacy letters, too, that everybody needs to find time in every day where you do what I call quiet your soul. And I love to do that. Of course, first thing in the morning, when I'm really going on a vision exercise myself, I actually get away to a quiet place. And it's a personal retreat day where I'm off my phone, I'm off of email, I'm off of text message. I don't look at the news. I spend time with God. But then I just write and dream. And I'm just encouraging some pastors to do this at your place of prayer. Jeremiah 33, verse 3. I love it out of the King James, Matt. It says, God says, call to me. I will answer you. But then I love the next line. It says, and I will show you so good great and mighty things that you don't know anything about. Wouldn't it be great that if we went to a place of prayer and we say, God, I'm calling to you. And he goes, all right, grab this picture. I'm getting ready to put in your mind's eye. Bam. And, Matt, you know the Highlands story, and you know the Highlands College story, the Girl leader story, the grow leader story, happened at a place of prayer where I saw us helping a thousand churches under a thousand break a thousand call to me, and I will show you great and mighty things that you know nothing about. And, you know, I just. I just. I'm a believer in it that if, if, if, if we can get Back to our quiet time. And I challenge the pastors at the art conference. How many of you listening have not been having that time with God? And how many of us are saying, well, God doesn't speak to me. He's not really talking much anymore. Not speaking. Well, maybe God doesn't have a speaking problem. Maybe we have a hearing problem. Maybe we have so many other noises going on in our head that we can't even hear the fact that God is speaking to you right now. If you would find the space today.
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A
Well, you even gave a really practical step. You said, hey, look, put your phone in another room and get an old school alarm clock. Stay off your phone.
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Yeah. Cause I maintain that one of the problems with people's quiet time is our phones. And a lot of us are using our phones to wake us up in the morning. So before you even get your coffee or head to that place of prayer, you've already noticed three emails or for some of you, 300 emails or 10 text messages or whatever. And so now you're already engaged in the world and the noise of life because of that crazy phones. I told the pastors, yeah, go to Walmart and get you an old school clock that wakes you up in the morning. And don't look at your phone until you've talked to God first.
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I think just the takeaway is dreaming comes from the spiritual 100%. It is a spiritual exercise to dream. And you keep a pad of paper beside you every.
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I have literally a journal and a pad of paper. I've got my best series ideas. I've got my best. In fact, I'm gonna go so far to say this, I don't know if I've ever shared this before. This is very pretty vulnerable. If I haven't heard from God in three days, I know something's wrong. Now I'm asking, have I quenched you? Have I done something that's offended you? And cause he's a speaking God, he's a call to me. And I will show you things, great and mighty things that you know nothing about. So good. You've got to set aside some time. The more quieter you can become, the more you're going to see and hear. The second thing he said in the passage is I will look to see what the Lord will say. Now you don't look for what people say, you listen for what people say. But that's not what he says. He says, I look to see what you say. Which means to hear from God, means to see, not just to hear. I will look to see. And what that means is, is God will allow you to see the dream so you make room to dream so you can see the dream. And so here's the simple question. What do you see? What do you see? What do you see for your church? What do you see for your family? What do you see for yourself? And you've got to get in that mind's eye. You've got. It's the spirit's eye. That was said of Jesus in Matthew chapter 9. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them and healed them. But he couldn't have had compassion. He couldn't heal till he had compassion. And he couldn't have compassion till he saw. And so it's just really important for us to, to see things. That's why even going to different places, I mean, I get so inspired, Matt, when I leave my place, when I go see other churches, when I maybe go to a conference, maybe when I go overseas and see a family living in a refrigerator box. I mean, all of a sudden I'm stirred to know what this can't happen on my watch. You've got to be able to see it.
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Yeah, I think it's so important to get out of our own environment, what we're used to all the time. Even at we're a multi site church. If I go to another campus, I come back with an idea and go, wait, I had no idea they were doing that.
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And that's not just an idea. I'm convinced it's a God inspired idea.
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That's great.
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I'm really convinced it's a God inspired idea. The next line of the passage then goes to. So now write the vision so you have to make room for it in your prayer place. You've got to see it. He speaks through vision, not just through audible words. He speaks in pictures. You get an open vision, right? Third thing is you write the vision, write the vision. So studies have shown this is an absolute fact, that you just sitting there dreaming about it, thinking about it, is not as powerful as you pinning it, putting it on some paper. I heard one guy say, Michael Corda said, don't just think it, ink it. In other words, I'm gonna go through the exercises of writing things down. You know, it was 25 years ago that six of us got together in a room and dreamed of planting 2,000 churches. We're not there yet, but we're 1,215 there. But I remember us writing it down. We actually wrote up some articles of incorporation. I remember when we were in debt. And people saying Highlands was in debt. Yes, we borrowed for the very first building, the Grants Mill building, when we built it in 2007. And I'll never forget, I was on a plane from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, this long 14 hour flight. And I got a piece of paper out and I just went, big vision. I don't even know why I did it, Matt. I just thought, if I could dream big dreams, how big could I go? And we had $17 million in debt, and I think we had about eight campuses and seven of them didn't have buildings. So I started doing the math on what I thought seven buildings would cost, added the debt, I threw in some dream centers, and it came out to a whopping 100, and something million dollars. And we didn't have anywhere close to having that. And then I started even mapping out that from that moment, 2012 to 2028, in the next 16 years, what could happen in 2028? Now we're not even to 2028 yet. And that vision that I wrote down on that paper happened in the next five. Completely out of debt, had built these buildings. And now today, honestly, we have all these other campuses as well. But I remember the day I wrote it down, I still had the piece of paper. I laugh now when I see what I wrote down there. And I thought I was just dreaming out of my mind something that. A dream that only, not only God could do, but God has to show up in order for it to happen. It actually, let me say it this way. I've dreamed that you have to involve God in order for it to happen.
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Well, tying it back to what you said earlier, then when someone comes up to see you and says, we're not
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this good, I want to be a part of what you're doing. Yeah, exactly.
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Well, what'd you do with this? And you're like, oh, let me show you.
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And not only that, when you write the vision and make it like those artist renderings of my office, I mean, it's pastors, you want to learn a little trade secret here. If you have any dream, get it in some kind of rendering place so you can show people, this is going to happen one day. This is going to happen one day. And they get inspired by the specificity of it, the picture of it. They can see it with you. It's so critically important. And we were talking before the podcast began. There are so many pastors that they're giving vision, but it's not specific vision, it's not clear bite size, you know, hey, we're gonna reach students in our city. We have a student's vision. Okay, well what can I give to like if I gave you $100,000. Oh, I mean, is that going to go to a student building? Is that for student curriculum? Is that for your student conference? And then we need to know our numbers, know what we would do if that. Would that make sense? Yeah.
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So there was saying, hey, we want to put a health clinic in this area. Well, that's vision. But hey, we want to provide year round medical care for 2,000 people that live in this city.
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And we have 300,000 toward it right now. And we need 800,000 more. Oh, that's that specific. I'm trying to really write the vision, get it down to one of the best. I went to a fundraiser once. I've never told this story, but I went to this fundraiser once and it was the most unique way of raising money. They actually dug water wells and built churches all over the Pacific Rim. They were in all of the countries near Japan, Thailand, Cambodia and all that. Okay. And, and it was millions of dollars worth of vision. Okay. Which that's that 30,000 hard to grab onto vision. Millions of dollars worth of vision. But they had this giant map on the wall with these little 4 inch by 2 inch magnets and on each magnet it said in the, you know, the whatever village of interior China, this well cost $10,000. Just that one. So you had millions of dollars of 30,000 foot view vision, but they had it broken down into bite sized. But if you want the well in this little village in the middle of the interior of China, it's $10,000. And I remember we were really focused on China at that time as a church. I literally went up and grabbed every magnet off this map wall that had China on it. I think I grabbed a little over $100,000 worth of magnets and projects. I took them off the board. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I remember coming back home with all this and I, and I said, because we had some money that we could give out of our missions account.
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Tangible impact.
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It's tangible impact. And they had it broken down to the $10,000 well in that village. That's what I mean when I say write the vision.
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That specific.
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Get it that specific.
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A
That's incredible.
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I love that. Get it that specific. And then this one's got a lot of, a lot of tooth in it. And honestly I didn't, I didn't teach it as much as I should have at the our conference because Then he says the next line is so that he may run. Who reads it? And that's the fourth thing you do. So you have to make room for the vision. See the vision, write the vision, and then run toward the vision, even ahead of its time sometimes. Because I feel so strongly about this that if we have a dream, you gotta start running toward it and trust the fact that many times it reveals itself along the way. That's great. So if you wait for everything to be there to start going toward it, you won't understand what's gonna happen. Like when we first moved into this facility, that is the Highlands College campus, we were just running toward one section of it to rent for a Sunday morning. So we were pursuing something vision wise when God had something more. And had we not come toward it, we wouldn't have realized that really God had the whole thing for us.
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Well, there's a book of stories like that. The Grants Mill building was going to be a 6,000 seat auditorium.
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Exactly.
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That entire grass area was going to be one room. And then the more you ran towards pastoring a city, the more God started
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to open doors and now it will stay a grass field. That's actually a vision that God pivoted on us. We were planning for it. We have the footprint of a 6,000 seat auditorium that probably will never get built. But if had we not run toward it, we wouldn't have known what we could do. Multi side.
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I love it.
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It's awesome. So you have to move the way I say it is, you have to wait. Don't just dream, wake up and do something, you know, move toward it every single day. In fact, I tell pastors all the time. Cause I had a pastor come to me at the conference and say we're out of seats. And I said, are you looking for other buildings? And he goes, we don't have the money now. And I said, but dreaming is free. Even if it costs you more than you can go find out what is available in the city.
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A
So that's a mindset though. Can you talk just for a second about scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset and why so many times as leaders, we can fall into a scarcity mindset.
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A scarcity mindset limits yourself to what actually can happen. Right? Okay. But there's verses that say that God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above. So if you only plan for what can actually happen, then you're building a vision based on what you can do, which will always be a scarcity mindset. An abundance mindset says There is. I serve a God who owns a cattle on a thousand hills. In fact, this is not just. That's a true verse, by the way. But that's not just good preaching, it's a fact. There's trillions of dollars changing hands toward causes right now. And you and I have done this exercise many times where every pastor would love to have a million dollar check, but a million in seconds is 11 days. A trillion in seconds is 35,000 years, Selah. And there's 70 trillion changing hands right now.
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That's incredible.
- [30:17]
B
So don't tell me that there's not enough out there to do every one of our visions that's so good. So what do we need to do? We need to dream and we need to run toward it. Don't have a scarcity mindset. Have an abundance mindset. And honestly, truthfully, guys, there's plenty out there for all of us to accomplish the causes that God has put in our hearts. Which leads to the last one. That clock is already in a minus category over there. But I'm gonna ignore it for just a second.
- [30:41]
A
That's your podcast.
- [30:41]
B
Thank you very much. And I wanna read it. For the revelation awaits an appointed time. It speaks of the end and will not prove false. Listen, pastors, listen. Leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, whoever's listening today, though it linger, wait for will certainly come and will not delay. So the way I say this one is that dreams are free, but the journey isn't. And then dreams never usually have the timing that you expected. So number five, don't give up on your dream. That's great. We'll put all these notes in the show. Notes so people can have this. Because trust me, the devil's gonna do everything he can to stop your dreams. Market is gonna happen. So what do we do? We just don't give up. And I'll close by saying there were so many times people have a hard time believing this. Cause they only see big highlands. But they didn't see the days that I felt like quitting. They didn't see the first two months of the church when we started with 400. Wow, that's a lot of people for a launch day. It really is. But they didn't see how we were at 70, literally two months later when we hit our first spring break and realized that everybody in Birmingham had a lake house.
- [31:47]
A
It's still true.
- [31:47]
B
What in the world? What in the world happened? They don't know the times when I was teaching relationships and Tammy and I were having some trouble. They didn't see the times, you know, when just things weren't working out the way we thought. And I didn't even read these at the conference, but I have these lists of people who could have given up. Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school and was called unpromising. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. Dr. Seuss's first children's book was rejected by 30 publishers. Get you some of that. 30 publishers said he's not a good children's book author. Newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he supposedly, quote, lacked imagination and had no good ideas. Albert Einstein, when he presented his PhD dissertation, the University of Bern, rejected it. They called it irrelevant and fanciful. So when you feel like giving up and when people are telling you it's never gonna happen, you embrace the difficulties, man. You just go ahead and just don't be afraid of failure. Don't give up when things are tough. Don't run when people are challenging. You just keep dreaming.
- [33:01]
A
So great. Such a great reminder. All of us need to leave this podcast and go write down some dreams. Would you mind praying for the people listening right now?
- [33:07]
B
Yeah. And honestly, I hope, I hope some of the pastors and leaders are taking some time off or planning it at least now as we get into May, June, July, and please set aside some, some time to have a personal retreat day and just dream some big dreams. Father, we call on you and we know you're an answering God and you're going to show us great and mighty things that we don't even know anything about that don't even exist that you want to happen in our culture, in our churches, in our world. And so, Father, I'm just praying that every person dreams big dreams. God, let every person listening start their bucket list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket. God, let us start living and being restored to health as we tap into what the Holy Spirit is saying and showing to us and to the churches, Lord. So I bless every leader that's listening, every person that that's part of the Grow Leader podcast family. God. And even as we step into these breaks times, I'm asking, Lord, that you refresh them in every way. And God, let us accomplish what you want done on this earth and for everything. We will give you all the glory in the name of Jesus. Amen.
- [34:12]
A
Thanks, B.C. we'll see you next time, everybody, on the Grow Leader podcast.