Week Three -- Peace Under Pressure

What a powerful week... I'll attempt to convey how impacting it was! ;)

Our topic of the week was "Identifying the Pitfalls of Leadership." The teacher was Doug Toller, who pastors a church in Winter Park, about two hours from our base in Arvada. He's an amazing man of God, who lives with incredible transparency and humility. Listening to his testimony and life experiences was really inspiring, and it has positively challenged me in so many ways.

One of the main purposes of this school is to train us to be leaders who LAST; to develop our character and help us learn how to avoid the pitfalls that so many people in ministry sadly fall into. I heard the statistic that only 30% of people in ministry make it through life without huge moral failure. And so many of those things could have been avoided by making simple changes early on. Most of the time, people fall away from the Lord because of pressures, not theological issues. So, the heart of this week was to identify the pitfalls of leadership and have peace under pressure.

The areas of pressure we covered were:
-Pressure of Confrontation
-Pressure of Personal Surrender
-Pressure of Compromise
-Pressure of Popularity
-Pressure of Liberalism
-Pressure of Being Misunderstood
-Pressure of Constant Resistance

There is good news! Romans 5 reveals that God has a purpose for us in times of pressure and that is the development of Christ-like character! :) Praise Jesus for that.

A couple things I'm taking away from this week are:
~My beliefs and convictions need to be based on Scripture alone, not feelings. This seems obvious enough, but life would be a lot different if Christians actually did this. There were several moments this week that Doug taught a truth that seemed uncomfortable, but every time someone would object, he'd say, "Well, that's not what I said. That's what the Bible says here."  It was great. It becomes easy to compromise truth when you get into the emotional realm.
~I need to embrace correction because it develops character. I think the church generally shies away from correcting people because we live in a society where people are SO easily offended. They view correction as rejection, instead of seeing it as a way to improve their character and become more Christ-like.
~I was also really challenged to start memorizing more Scripture. I was blessed to go to private Christian school my whole life, so I did this a lot out of necessity (for Bible class and memory verse quizzes). But I've been really excited to start doing this out of desire and a longing to fill my mind with truth. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says to "take every thought captive to obey Christ." This is because the enemy loves to feed us lies, so we have to be ready to capture those thoughts and refute them with truth from God's Word. Even when Christ was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit for 40 days, the devil used Scripture to test Him! It's easy to manipulate Scripture by taking it out of context. We as Christians should literally train for times like this, so that we know the context, and know what the Word really says in times of struggle and temptation.

I'm incredibly thankful for this week and all that I learned about avoiding pitfalls in ministry. I'll carry these lessons with me throughout my whole life!