John Burke

• Intro: In Austin, the soil is missing some nutrients. Went to Garden Center, they told him to put manure on it, and he had wonderful flowers. Next year, he thought he now had good soil, so he just watered, but it didn’t work.
• Spiritual leadership is about creating the soil for God to grow the life.
• What kind of soil do people need to grow into the person God intended?
• This is messy (like manure). Had a man who was a drunk, who was sleeping with a girl who started going to Gateway. The guy’s community service supervisor suggested acting as if God was real and thank him. So he did, and started noticing coincidences. Now he’s leading others to God. But for a long time, he had uncomfortable views. Or, the woman who was a lesbian, came to Christ, but wasn’t looking to get out of the relationship. Eventually she saw herself primarily in a relationship with Christ and all on her own left the relationship and now leads gays to Christ.
• Are our hands dirty? People are messy.
• Grace is the way
• The world doesn’t do Grace. The world does Law.
• Many people do not experience grace from Christians
• If you had a Rembrandt covered in mud, we wouldn’t treat it like junk. We’d value it for what it could be.
• Do we value people first?
• Grace creates beauty out of ugliness
• We need to remove barriers to people receiving grace
• How do we do this? Get dirty and listen to people.
• Through listening to people, got asked two questions:
• How do you feel about gays, and
• How do you view other religions?
• So how we answer these questions will either remove barriers or put up barriers.
• [You can read some examples in two chapters from Burke’s No Perfect People.]
• We need to reconnect relationships
• Our fundamental problems are not that we do bad things. Our fundamental problem is broken relationships: with God and others.
• Jesus says “confess your sins to one another so that you may be healed.”
• What if we invite people and they don’t change? Then you’re just like Jesus (i.e. what happened with Judas)
• How do we create this soil?
• John 15:5: Stay connected to Me. Apart from Me you can do nothing.
• If we, as leaders, fail to help people stay connected, we are accomplishing nothing.
• Stay connected; fruit happens
• We must lead others to focus on this
• Spiritual leadership is getting people to do this together.
• Had an idea pop into his head to try an experiment: every 60 minutes for 60 days, reconnect with God.
• Even non-Christians benefitted (see John 17:7)
• www.soulrevival.net

Efrem Smith

• Intro video: has a multiethnic church that engages hiphop culture
• It seems that the more diverse we become, the more divided we get
• In U.S., was 1 child in 100 of mixed race. In 2000, was 1 in 19.
• We need to lead multiculturally.
• God is the ultimate multiethnic
• Sometimes we don’t step out and lead because we feel unqualified.
• It’s not about qualifications. It’s a bout being caught up with a force beyond yourself.
• Race, class, and place are disparities everywhere. But they need not be in the curch.
• The churches in the suburbs are better resourced and staffed than the ones in non-white areas, which is where the disparities are.
• We need to dwell with the under-resourced
• Storms are formed when high pressure meets low pressure. Maybe our race, social, and economic storms are God’s high pressure of what He wants to do with the low pressures of what we’d rather do.
• How does this work out?
• Need to create ways for people with different backgrounds to meet together and have reconciliation
• [Notes on an outline that I couldn’t figure out: beloved leader, abiding leader, confessing leader, perfecting leader]