Church Leadership

Most of us have never known a world without Billy Graham.

Graham came to international prominence in the historic Los Angeles Crusade in 1949. So if you are 75 today, he was already famous when you were just ten years old.

Billy is 96 now. His crusade days are long over. But his legacy stills looms large.

Personally, aside from members of my family and Jesus himself, no one has had a longer or stronger impact on my life and ministry that this man whom I’ve never had the privilege of meeting.

Many of us can say the same thing.

Last month, my wife and I had the chance to visit the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is a a fitting tribute. It’s down-home and simple, even corny at times, yet always done with understated excellence.

As we walked through the exhibits, I was struck by the realization that every Christian, and especially everyone in ministry, can learn several lessons from the life of this humble servant whose life still impacts the world.

Especially today, when it seems almost impossible to make a simple statement about faith without offending this or that ideological camp, Graham stands high as someone who set the standard for never compromising, but never causing unnecessary offense either.

As I ate a tasty, nutritious, modestly-priced lunch (of course) in the library’s cafeteria, I jotted down these 5 lessons we could all learn from the extraordinary life and legacy of Billy Graham.

I love learning the best ideas, methods and principles that I can find from as many people as possible.

But, no matter how good their idea is, no matter how well it’s working at their church, I’ve learned the hard way that my church isn’t their church. Because of that, I’d like to pass this simple principle on to you today, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did.

We need to stop playing H.O.R.S.E. with other churches and church leaders.

For those who don’t know what that means, H.O.R.S.E. is a game basketball players like to challenge each other with. The first player tries a trick shot, then the other players have to duplicate it. If they do, they stay in the game. If they don’t, they add a letter until they’ve spelled H.O.R.S.E. and they’re out.

This happens in the church all the time.

We go to a pastoral leadership conference, where we hear about a church that’s discovered a new way to do a certain kind of ministry, so we go home and try to duplicate their trick shot, only to fail miserably. Then we wonder “what’s wrong with me and my church that we couldn’t pull it off?”

After trying and failing enough times, many ministers find themselves leaving ministry entirely because they couldn’t duplicate the success of others. But we’re not called to duplicate the success of others.

Learning principles from other churches is great. But trying to copy their methods, programs or style is just the church version of H.O.R.S.E.

If you want to increase your chances of working with innovators who need guidance, instead of heel-draggers who need motivation, this is the best piece of advice I can give you. I now consider it to be one of my main roles as a church leader.

Find a way to say “Yes”.

Yes to people. Yes to their crazy ideas. Yes to their passion. Yes to something God may be trying to do through them that I just can’t see yet.