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What to Ask for for Christmas This Year

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Kiva gift certificates.

If you have thought before that you’d rather not just receive more stuff each year for Christmas, a good alternative is to ask for Kiva gift cards. Here are two benefits.

First, it’s a gift that enables you to help others.

Second, it’s fun. Figuring out the best way to invest $50 or $100 or more in some thoughtful entrepreneurs in the developing world is more fun than getting a new sweatshirt.

Nothing against giving sweatshirts and other such things. There’s a place for that, too. But it would be exciting and even more fulfilling to make “gifts that enable you to give” a larger part of our Christmas giving and receiving.

In South Africa

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I’m in South Africa for the next few weeks for the Lausanne Congress.

For this week, I’m with John Piper and some others from DG as he speaks at a couple pastors conferences.

Then, beginning Sunday, I’ll be in Cape Town for the actual Congress. It’s a gathering of more than 4,000 Christians from more than 200 nations to discuss the state of global Christianity and world evangelization. The first congress was called by Billy Graham in 1974 and was a major landmark in the progress of modern missions. The second congress was in 1989, and this I now the third. You can learn more about it from the Lausanne website and the helpful article in Christianity Today, The Most Diverse Gathering Ever.

While I’m here I’ll post some updates from the congress and possibly some various insights on issues of missions strategy, Christianity and culture, solving large global problems, and just being in Africa.

Seminar at the DG National Conference

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If anyone is going to be at the DG Conference this weekend, I’ll be doing a seminar on how the gospel gives us a new way to look at productivity and new reasons to care about productivity. Looks like I’ll be giving the seminar twice, at 1:00 and 3:00 on Friday (tomorrow) afternoon.

I’d love to meet anyone who is going to be there, so feel free to stop up after and say hi!

Also: I enjoy really, really hard questions. So come with the most challenging questions you have and I’ll be happy to give them my best shot.

Drucker: Management is a Liberal Art, Directed Toward Effectiveness

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This is a very good insight, from The Essential Drucker:

Management is deeply involved in moral concerns—the nature of man, good and evil. Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art. Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on ethics—as well as on the physical sciences. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results—on healing a sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a user friendly software program. For these reasons, management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance.

If You Don’t Like Your Work, Here’s What the Problem Might Be

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Daniel Pink makes the case very well in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that there are three components to motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

If you find your work unfulfilling or draining, it may be because it is lacking one of those components.

Autonomy
If you don’t have control over how you go about your work, or input in setting your overall objectives, you might be lacking the freedom necessary to feel ownership (and interest) in your work. People don’t like to be (or need to be) controlled. In general, when freedom diminishes, motivation contracts as well. When freedom increases (supported by helpful structure and systems), motivation tends to increase.

Mastery
If your work is either too challenging or not challenging enough, it is likely to become miserable for you. We like to be good at things. This isn’t some bonus luxury; it’s how we are designed. If you aren’t good at what you are doing — or if it is too easy to be a challenge — you will likely be unfulfilled.

If you feel like you don’t have mastery in your work, don’t automatically conclude that you are somehow innately incapable of achieving competence. Often, the issue is simply a lack of training or feedback. It’s unfortunate that many organizations are not proactive in offering helpful training (especially training targeted to the real needs of today’s knowledge worker, who often operates in highly ambiguous environments with very few structured and routine tasks). So you may have to get creative here in figuring this out. But the point is: don’t automatically blame yourself. More than likely, you can improve and accomplish mastery.

They key is to have work that hits you in the sweet spot — not too easy, not too hard. It should be a challenge for sure, but not so challenging that you are lost and spinning your wheels. The challenge should in fact be continually increasing, but only as you organically gain expertise and mastery so that you are up for the increased challenge.

Purpose
Last of all, you might not see or value the purpose in your work. Lots could be said here. Ultimately, you’ll want to find work where the purpose jibes with what you feel you were made for. But even if you are not in such a role, the doctrine of vocation can be helpful here.

The doctrine of vocation means that everything we do (that is not illegal or immoral!) is valuable to God and accepted by him if done in faith. The arena for serving God is not the fortressed life of the monk, but the everyday real world of work, home, and society. If we do our work as unto the Lord (Ephesians 6:7) it is valuable and accepted by him. This infuses even the most mundane, everyday activities with meaning.

3 Questions on Productivity

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Several months ago a friend of mine asked me 3 questions on productivity for his blog. Here’s what I wrote so that it is easily available here as well:

1. What’s the most common mistake people make in trying to develop a system for productivity?
There are a lot of wrong turns that people make here, but I think the biggest one is that they simply seek to make their system capture and organize their existing work. We shouldn’t first ask “what things are vying for my attention and how do I organize them?” Instead, we should first ask “what things are most important for me to be doing and how do I make sure that I am able to move ahead on them?” The former is reactive and the later is proactive.

2. In the last three months, what has been the most helpful insight that has helped you be more productive?
Peter Drucker’s comment that “effective executives put first things first and do one thing at a time.” My workload has been larger than normal the last few months, and that makes it tempting to splinter myself and move on too many fronts at once. Drucker reminds me to avoid this trap. First, you don’t have to do everything. Instead, identify what is most important, and start there. Second, build momentum by doing one thing at a time, bringing it to completion, and then moving on to the next thing (what’s best next). You might think this makes it take longer to do things, but it actually saves time. The scarcity of time is precisely the reason we need to do one thing at a time.

3. In a nutshell, what is the most important and fundamental principle for being productive?
I would actually say: realize that you don’t have to be productive. By this I mean: your significance does not come from your productivity. It comes from Christ, who obeyed God perfectly on our behalf such that our significance and standing before God comes from him, not anything we do. Then, on that basis, we pursue good works (which is what productivity is) and do so eagerly, as it says in Titus 2:14.

When it comes to day-to-day application, the main principle is this: The key denominator of effectiveness is not intelligence or even hard work, as important as those are. It is the discipline to put first things first. You need to operate from a center of sound principles and organize and execute around priorities. This means that instead of prioritizing your schedule, you schedule your priorities.

Giving to the Lausanne Congress

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In a little less than a month, the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization begins in Cape Town.

The first Congress was held in 1974 and is regarded as a milestone in the history of modern missions. Here’s a bit of the history:

In July 1974 some 2,700 participants and guests from over 150 nations gathered in the Swiss Alps for ten days of discussion, fellowship, worship and prayer. The Congress achieved an unprecedented diversity of nationalities, ethnicities, ages, occupations and denominational affiliations. In fact, TIME magazine described the Lausanne Congress as “a formidable forum, possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held.”

Congress participants heard addresses from some of the world’s most respected Christian leaders of the time, including Graham, Samuel Escobar, Francis Schaeffer, Malcolm Muggeridge, and John Stott. Ralph Winter’s plenary address, in which he introduced the term “unreached people groups” was hailed as “one of the milestone events in missiology.” In contradistinction to those calling for a moratorium on foreign missions, Winter argued that because thousands of groups remained without a single Christian witness, cross-cultural evangelization should be the primary task of the church. Dr. Scott Moreau (Evangelical Missions Quarterly) and Dr. Mike O’Rear (Global Mapping) have called the people groups concept “the most significant development in evangelical mission strategy over the last 25 years” (Moreau 1998).

Lausanne II was held in 1989, and the third Congress is next month. You can learn about the Lausanne movement here.

I noticed that as of last week, there are still some funds left to raise to ensure that the Congress is fully funded. This would be a worthy cause worth giving to, and if interested you can give online at their site.