Thursday, March 13, 2008
Young Leadership
- Trust must be earned again, and again…and again
- Last decade’s battles feel like yesterday
- My slow is your fast
Pardon me while I put on my "old fart" hat here, but I can vividly recall similar feelings and perceptions when I was in my twenties in ministry. Now in my fifties, I would respond as follows:
Yep, trust is often and easily violated. This has nothing to do with your youth and everything to do with experience. (Of course, those things do tend to go hand-in-hand.) Virtually anybody that has hung around for a while has learned that if someone is not actively earning your trust, chances are really, really good they are violating it, perhaps inadvertantly and without malice, but violating it nonetheless.
Yesterday's Battle Is A Lesson Learned. Or at least it ought to be. Indeed, we old guys can be fixated on stuff that may not seem relevant, but we are the ones that made it irrelevant to you and we intend to keep it that way. You would be wise to listen to us just a little and build a defense where we point.
Fast Is Also Mistake Prone. Not unlike a baby whose bones are softer and therefore less prone to breakage when a child falls while still learning to walk, youngsters in ministry can bounce back from mistake while we will break our hips. But worse, ministry mistakes are usually not just "ours." They tend to leave, at a minimum, a lot of hurt feeling in their wake, and often broken lives. Nope slow is good.
I am struck by how a different things look for a different perspective, whether that perspective is age, race, gender.... Analysis of those various perspectives is only good if it is used to learn how to work with the other and not as a weapon. Such analysis is fantastic if it is used to avoid the valuable lessons that the other perspective has afforded.
Technorati Tags:youth, age, generation gap, ministry
Generated By Technorati Tag Generator
