axiom

I recently finished my first book on the Kindle. I finally had the opportunity to read Axiom by Bill Hybels. You need to know that I’m a Bill Hybels fan. I’m amazed at how God has used him and Willow Creek Community Church to reshape how we do church. He’s a great leader. And literally tens of thousands of people have been mentored by him in leadership.

Here are some of the quotes that jumped out to me from this book:

  • “When handled properly, people are actually quite flattered to be asked to do significant things for God.”
  • “The nature of human beings is such that we tend not to drift into better behaviors.”
  • “The local church is the hope of the world! It’s the God-ordained redemptive agency that the future of the entire world hangs on.”
  • “Leaders, don’t ever apologize for the strength of feeling you have for the vision that God has put into your life.”
  • “Wise leaders understand that the single greatest determinant of whether followers will ever own a vision deeply is the extent to which those followers believe the leader will own it.”
  • “Train and embolden your staff members to grow their own leadership and then to shoot high when someone needs to be added to the team.”
  • “Incremental thinking, incremental planning, incremental prayers—it’s the kiss of death.”
  • “We watch for our heavenly Father to move and stir and act and call. And when he does, we humbly thank him with the only two words that could even begin to give credit to the one to whom alone credit is due: ‘Only God.’”
  • “What you value in your church must be raised up, taught about, and celebrated on a regular basis.”
  • “In almost every case, the ‘very best one’ is a fantastic leader who is already busy doing extraordinary work somewhere else.”
  • “Truly, most of the worst managerial calamities I’ve caused—ones in which people got deeply hurt—can be traced back to my being overly optimistic putting people in roles they were ill equipped to play.”
  • “I get up every morning with the confidence that if a bunch of smart people who love God, love the church, and love each other will devote adequate time to these problems, there’s no mountain we can’t move.”
  • “Part of the wiring pattern of leaders is that they have a huge bias toward action.”
  • “Author and consultant Patrick Lencioni says that many organizations are infected with ‘terminal niceness,’ which nets out in the inability to tell the truth to each other.”
  • “When things get stale at a church, it is a fair bet that God is not to blame.”
  • “The way I [was] doing the work of God [was] destroying God’s work in me.”
  • “If you ever find yourself consistently dreading your days, consistently feeling overwhelmed, and consistently dreaming of getting away (perhaps never to return), then your ministry pace and your ministry approach are probably killing what God hopes to accomplish in and through you.”
  • “They would rather watch their church close its doors for good than to face the real problems and take responsibility for fixing what is broken.”
  • “Leaders fight fear regularly. From time to time it gets the best of them, and leaders who were once willing to do God’s bidding no matter how risky become overly circumspect and start playing things safe.”
  • “Leaders have a responsibility before God to constantly get better, and one of the most reliable ways to do so is to read. Great leaders read frequently. They read voraciously.”
  • “We must fight for excellence because it is excellence that honors God. It is excellence that inspires people.”
  • “I woke up very slowly to the fact that nobody in my organization was going to fight for my family but me.”

The funny thing is I can picture Hybels saying all of these things. It’s as if he was sitting there on the chair next to me with his blue-button-down oxford speaking words of wisdom into me. We’d be crazy not to take advantage of the leadership lessons that Hybels has learned through the years. He’s not perfect. None of us is. But, you have to acknowledge that he’s one of the greatest leaders that’s ever offered his life to the Kingdom of God and the ministry of the local church. I’m certainly indebted to him for the leadership influence he’s had on my life.

“The local church is the hope of the world!”

Those words still stir me.

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