Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Leadership

Jim Collin’s Advice to Young Leaders

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Back in 2010, Jim Collins gave a brilliant talk on leadership at the Drucker Day Keynote.

The whole thing is worth listening to, but starting at minute 47 – Jim spends the last 10 minutes of his talk addressing young leaders – with 10 words of advice.

The best of what he says:

1) Build a personal board of directors
  • For me – this has come through seeking out meetings with great leaders. Not sure who to meet with? Ask a great leader – “who are great leaders I should learn from?” Cru staff – SPEND YOUR CRU17 DOING THIS.
  • As you meet great leaders, you’ll find leaders that really challenge you to grow and that, personally, you just like. Just give them a call every few months to see what they’re learning and what interesting problems they’re trying to solve. And ask them for help on a problem you’re trying to solve.
2) Turn off your electronic gadgets – not for others but for yourself. Great leaders take time to think.
3) Work on your three circles-
  1. What are you passionate about?
  2. What can you be the best at in the world?
  3. What drives your economic engine? What are you useful for?
    • This one is more difficult in ministry. Business leaders are driven by profit.
    • Collins says the question for non-profits is, “How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?”
    • I would offer that laborers is a key metric for college ministry.
    • Another possible measurement – staff to student ratio (how effectively we are delivering on our mission relative to our resources). How many students are involved per staff on campus? I’ve heard 50/1 is a good starting place.
  • These three build on each other – “Consistently well executed, accumulating one upon another, over a long period of time.”
4) What is your questions to statements ratio and can you double it? You spend way too much time being interesting. Why don’t you channel your energy into being interested. Learn from everyone you meet.
10) Prepare to live a life where at age 65 you’re 1/3 of the way through your work
  • This is definitely my goal! To live and do ministry in such a way that each decade builds upon itself and when you hit 65, you’re doing your best work with the greatest influence.
  • Love this from John Piper (that he wrote during the Presidential campaign of 2016) – Hillary, Bernie, Donald and Me. At age 70, his zeal and work output are ramping up!
Here’s Jim’s talk, starting at minute 47 when he begins to address young leaders:

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Read Through the Bible This Year

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4278335002_3e90e703c3_mNothing has been better for my consistency in God’s Word- leading to greater intimacy with God and understanding of Him- than having a clear plan for reading through the Bible each of the last five years.
 

I think the reason it is so helpful is simple, in the words of Robert Murray M’Cheyne:

“Time will not be wasted in choosing what portions to read. Here the question will be solved at once in a very simple manner.”

That’s it. Not having to decide what I’m going to read every morning- I just open up and let the calendar tell me what to read – is enough to reduce the friction on the tracks to get me going.  

Some tips and helpful tools:

  • Use a plan where you read from multiple parts of the Bible every day- that keeps you from getting bogged down in more difficult books (I’m looking at you Major Prophets). The Discipleship Journal and the M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan are excellent. The DJ plan has 25 days/month to give you some grace days. M’Cheyne’s method is everyday and reads through the NT and Psalms twice in a year, which I modify to read the NT and Psalms only once (to modify it, just read the first 3, instead of 4, chapters every day).
  • I highly recommend DA Carson’s For the Love of God Volumes I & II. Carson provides commentary and reflections on each day’s scriptural passages in the M’Cheyne plan. I just wake up and open up For the Love of God on my Kindle. It tells me what to read, and then gives me a brief commentary on what I read. It’s almost always insightful, and always short. For the Love of God is also available for free online.
  • I’ve written a short 2 page article on Spending Time Daily in God’s Word that gives a little more re the why’s and how’s.
  • The Gospel Coalition has a great initiative with resources for Reading the Bible in 2020 using the M’Cheyne method. 
  • My wife uses Dr. Constable’s FREE online Bible commentary as she reads through the Bible. Constable’s commentary is an unbelievable gift to the body of Christ – most commentaries are either unhelpful because they are: too obvious/short or too long/intense/parsing Greek.
    • Dr. Constable’s is like a best-of-commentary: he does all the heavy lifting, reading all the commentaries and presenting to you the best of what he found to be helpful. He’s my go-to commentary when I don’t understand a passage and he almost never disappoints. Just google “Constable Philippians” or whatever book you’re reading and it will be the first Google result.
  • The Bible Project has phenomenal, short (8 minute) summary videos for every book in the Bible. They illuminate how each book of the Bible tells one story of redemption through Christ.
  • You don’t have to start at the beginning of the year in January. And you don’t even have to finish the Bible in a calendar year (though it IS very doable; and having a measure of my progress spurs me on to keep going and not fall behind).

I’ve had a few friends push back on reading through the Bible in a year (RTtBiaY). They’ve said that it led them to duty instead of delight. They felt that they were merely checking boxes, rushing through the daily reading to get it done.  

All I can say is that it has had the opposite effect for me. Maybe it’s personality differences. For me, RTtBiaY has been incredibly motivating and life giving. I’ve found it also helps to give yourself plenty of time: if you only have 15 minutes to read, RTtBiaY will feel like duty and a checklist. But if you have 30min-hour, you can really soak in the Scriptures.

I’ve found a regular time in God’s Word, making regular process plodding through the entire Bible does not produce a rut but freedom. John Piper offers great insight on routine and structure in your Quiet Time:

“If your longing is to be spontaneous in the way you commune with God, then build discipline into your Bible reading and prayer. It sounds paradoxical. But it’s no more so than the paradox of corn spontaneously growing in a Minnesota field because of the farmer’s discipline of plowing and sowing and guarding the field. He doesn’t make the corn grow. God does. But God uses his farming disciplines as part of the process. The rich fruit of spontaneity grows in the garden that is well tended by the discipline of schedule.”  

Tim Keller, John Piper, my wife… All the great spiritual giants recommend RTtBiaY as a daily Quiet Time plan.  

My only regret is that I haven’t been doing this for the past two decades that I’ve been walking with God. Early on in walking with God I read through the Bible annually. But somewhere along the way I stopped.  

May we see Jesus more clearly in 2020 as we soak in God’s Word this year!  

What tools and tips do you have that have helped you read God’s Word?

  photo courtesy of Dwight Stone via Flickr

On Reading More- The Irreplaceable Benefit of Reading in the Life of a Leader

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In his book The Conviction to Lead, Dr. Albert Mohler highlights reading as one of the keystone habits of leaders:
  • Those who would lead with conviction must read with conviction.
  • When leaders gather, books are usually part of the conversation.
  • Leaders are ravenous consumers of historical biographies.
  • Keep reading and developing the skill of reading over your lifetime. We can train ourselves to enjoy reading.
9435974561_815b1cb291_zInsightfully, Dr. Mohler identifies what I believe is the irreplaceable benefit of reading in the life of a leader:

“There is no substitute for effective reading when it comes to developing and maintaining the intelligence necessary to lead. Leadership requires a constant flow of intelligence, ideas, and information. There is no way to gain the basics of leadership without reading. We simply cannot lead without a constant flow of intellectual activity in our minds, and there is no substitute for reading when it comes to producing this flow.”

Reading keeps my brain flowing with a flood of ideas and intellectual activity. Part of it is that it plays into my strengths – especially Analytical (I like to connect the dots in information) and Ideation (new ideas are exciting to me). I really like chewing on and processing new ideas.

This year I read three times as many books as last year. And I can definitely see the impact on my ability to lead from vision and fresh ideas.

 

A lot of what reading has done for me is captured in this Tweetstorm from Patrick O’Shaughnessy:
  • I’m often asked how I read so much and how I choose books. So, my I’ll try my first tweetstorm
  • 1/ I love @naval‘s idea to ask yourself: what that you do looks like hard work from the outside, but doesn’t feel like work to you?
  • 2/ For me, one answer is reading. In most down time, I read.
  • 5/ A new book often makes you realize something essential about an old book.
  • 6/ This is why knowledge compounds. Old stuff that was a 4/10 in value can become a 10/10, unlocked by another book in the future.
  • 9/ Usually, it’s some combination of books that has a non-linear impact.
  • 11/ When you start out reading, you are collecting distant dots in a constellation with no apparent connection
  • 23/ Ten years in, I now have an incomplete but dense set of interconnected dots. It is my most valuable asset.
  • 25/ Reading gets more and more enjoyable the more you do it.
His whole tweetstorm is worth reading for great tips on how to organize book highlights (in Evernote) and other tips on reading.

One of the main things I discovered this year in greatly increasing my reading – A new book often unlocks an older book you read. The faint dots in the constellation suddenly become more clear. Reading multiple books opens up powerful connections. Simultaneously reading Masterplan of Evangelism and Movements that Change the World was incredibly helpful.

Several have asked me what helped me read more:
  • I sucked it up and subscribed to Audible.com (a ridiculous $15/month). 16 of the 52 books I “read” this year were listened to on Audible. I’ve found one of the easiest ways to read more is to take advantage of dead time in my schedule – like driving and working out. 15 minutes here and there really adds up. I listen at 1.25x or 1.5x speed (depending on the narrator) and can get through a book every 3 weeks.
  • I started tracking what I read. For whatever reason, this really helped me. I like to keep score (I have ‘Competition- driven to win’ on Strengths Finder!)
  • I spent less time on Twitter (still a HUGE fan of Twitter though – see tweet storm above- Twitter spurs me on to be a better leader AND to read more books!)
  • I got up 30 minutes earlier and used that time to read.
  • For most of the year I read every night. A couple of years ago my wife introduced the new rule of “no blue light an hour before bed” = no checking twitter or reading online. I’m thankful for God’s grace through her! It made me take up the habit of reading before bed every night. A great side-effect: when my head hits the pillow I’m asleep in seconds.
  • I started asking every prodigious reader I know for book recommendations. Having a book I’m looking forward to makes me want to read more. And it has greatly increased the quality of the books I read – I’m reading the top books recommended by top readers.
I previously listed my Top 20 books list. Here’s some other good “best of 2016” book lists in which to find great books to read in 2017:
I’ve started piecing together books I want to read in 2017. One of my main goals is to increase the number of serious, Christian books. Much of my reading tends to be Audiobooks or light reading before bed – both lending themselves to an “easy reading” genre of fiction or historical non-fiction. I haven’t figured out a way to carve out more time to read books that require deep thinking and underlining/taking notes.

Here’s what’s on my list so far for 2017:
Devotional/Morning Quiet Time
  • Discipline of Grace
  • Courage and calling- Gordon Smith (Calling at different stages of life)
  • Gordon McDonald – Ordering Your Private World
  • The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine
  • Zeal Without Burnout (showed up on several best-of-year book lists)
  • The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson
Leadership/Growth
  • The Art of the Commonplace – Wendell Berry
  • Switch – Heath
  • Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future by Andy Stanley
  • Epidemic of narcissism
  • The Starfish and the Spider
  • Wendell Berry – Hidden Wound (his personal story of having black servants)
  • The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism – Yuval Levin (showed up on several best-of-year book lists)
Audiobooks
  • Invisible Man
  • Silence - by ShÅ«saku Endō
  • The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe
  • The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
  • Undaunted courage – Lewis and Clark
  • Command and control- re nuclear security
  • A Winston Churchill biography
I’ll leave you with this “encouragement” from Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, nominated to be Secretary of Defense by President-elect Trump.

“Mattis’s colleague reportedly asked him about the “importance of reading and military history for officers,” who found themselves “too busy to read.’” 
He responded:
“The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience, i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession…
As a result [of my reading], the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.
Semper Fi, Mattis”
Read the full transcript here.
Sobering words.

What were some of your favorite books you read in 2016? What’s on your list of books to read in 2017?

 

image courtesy of Pimthida

It’s December. You’re tired. And you should be. 

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It’s December and maybe your fall feels like:

As I’ve said before, College ministry is hard.

 

It can get discouraging turning over rock after rock with sometimes little to show for it. This fall I texted one freshman 6 times and got no response. On the 7th text he responded and we got lunch. I shared the gospel with him. I asked him how college has been for him spiritually – he said “I really feel like God is pursuing me since I’ve been in college. I mean – you’ve kept on texting me and I really feel like that was God pursuing me.”

 

In college ministry we’re constantly turning over rocks to see where God is at work. I love Winston Churchill’s “encouragement” – “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

 

College ministry is hard emotionally. There’s something incredibly humbling about having a too-cool-for-school 18 year old freshman smugly shut the door in your face as you attempt to tell them how they can know the supreme God of all creation.

 

On a deeper level, working on the cutting edge of culture can be exhausting. For most Christians, dealing with complex issues like LGBTQ, racial inequality, suicide, transgender, Trump, depression, and mental health are distant hypotheticals to yell about on Facebook. For college ministers, you interact with students on these issues as part of your daily job. 

 

Paul Tripp summarizes well the difficulty of ministry:
“There are few things that will reveal to you the full range of your sin, immaturity, weakness, and failure like ministry will. There are few things that will expose your weaknesses to others as consistently as ministry does. There are few endeavors that will put you under public expectancy and scrutiny like ministry does. There are few things that are as personally humbling as ministry is. There are few endeavors that have the power to produce in you such deep feelings of inadequacy as ministry does. There are few things that can be such a vat of self-doubt as ministry is.”

 

There are a few things that help me keep going.
1) It’s December. You’re tired. And you should be. You are doing ministry in one of the most difficult environments, on the cutting edge of culture – the college campus. The reason there’s not many people up on campus sharing the gospel in greek houses, in the dorms, on practice fields — is because it’s hard!
A recent survey of a college ministry showed that
  • 80% of team leaders would say “I feel overwhelmed by my job”
  • 75% expressed feeling emotionally drained from their work
  • the majority have seriously thought about quitting their job
Hopefully you find this oddly encouraging. It’s good for me to be reminded that I’m exhausted because what we’re trying to do is hard. And you’re not alone. We all feel it. 

 

2) Your job is complex. But that’s a good thing. You want some job complexity – it’s what makes your job fun. Meaningful work is always complex. You’re not screwing three screws into the back of a computer for 12 hours/day (as I did one summer in college).  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says meaningful work has three distinct qualities:
  1. Complexity
  2. Autonomy
  3. And a clear relationship between effort and reward
You (and your team) need those three.
To embrace the complexity.
To have the freedom to innovate and really lead.
But the last one is key. If all you and your team can see is the complexity and your ministry’s shortcomings, THAT is when discouragement sets in. Your team needs to see that you are making real progress toward a tangible goal. Even if that progress was learning 4 ways of how NOT to reach freshmen, that is success! You stepped out in faith and are learning. Which leads to number 3…

 

3) Celebrate! Last week my regional director sent to our regional team leaders an email that spotlighted what God was doing through the Central Arkansas team to launch a new campus and raise up 4 staff from that campus. I emailed their team leader about how encouraging that was. His reply - 
“I had two thoughts when I read this. 1. I didn’t know some all that stuff. 2. I need to learn to celebrate more!”
In the midst of the craziness of fall it’s so easy to let your less-than-stellar weekly meeting or flaky leaders to hide the fact that God is using you in significant ways to change lives for eternity. You’re team is intimately acquainted with all the things that are going wrong in your ministry. We need to stop and raise our team’s eyes to all that God has done.
Bill Hybels has some wise words on celebration: “How do you inspire people to stay on the journey from here to there?
Refill their vision bucket. Everyone’s vision bucket leaks. You have to celebrate every mile-marker you possibly can on the way to the destination.”
More on celebrating here.

 

4) It’s good for me to be reminded that it’s worth it. We delicately talk through difficult cultural issues with students. We boldly proclaim the gospel and often endure contempt and rejection. Many of us raise support and trust God to provide 100% of our livelihood.
Why? In Spanish, if something is “worth it” you say it is “vale la pena”. Literally - “worth the pain”. It is worth the hardships so that hundreds and thousands of future world changers can encounter Jesus. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory thatfar outweighs them all.” — I Corinthians 4:17. Faith is believing that in the midst of the hardness of ministry, it’s worth it. Christ is worthy of our lives. And we know that this good news WILL be proclaimed to all nations. And we get to be a part of it. Ministry is hard. But es vale la pena.

Read More Books and Less Blogs

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The past couple of years I’ve made a conscious effort to shift from less input to deeper reading.

I’m reading less blogs, bookmarking less web pages and reading more books (yes, I appreciate the irony that you are reading this on a blog).

It started in 2011 when I read Tim Challies’ book The Next Story. He illuminated a huge idol in my heart (and I believe a chief idol of our age)- informationism:

We have begun to believe that the accumulation of information somehow leads to wisdom, that more information will solve society’s ills and improve our lives. We place our faith in information.

We find joy and life in that information — not in using that information or turning that information into useful action, but simply in its constant flow.

Without the distraction of dealing with vast amounts of information and without overtaxing our brains with hundreds of sources of information, we will have the time to know more about less.

Success in life “is not in the accumulation of facts, but in living a life marked by wisdom, by the application of knowledge.”

What we are finding is that more information does not necessarily lead to more wisdom. In fact, the very opposite may be true.

More information may lead to less wisdom.

That last sentence rocked me. My voracious reading of new blogs and articles is actually making me less wise.

I want to know more about less. It was actually the very secular BBC that reminded me that, primarily, that means I need to read less “news” and soak in God’s Word more:

One of the more embarrassing difficulties of our age is that most of us have quite lost the ability to concentrate, to sit still and do nothing other than focus on certain basic truths of the human condition. We are reluctant to admit that we are simply swamped with information and have lost the ability to make sense of it.

The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of a critical transformation. Contrast this with how religions think of what is important. The great stable truths can be carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across hand-held screens. Rather than letting us constantly catch up on “news”, religions prefer to keep reminding us of the same old things.

It is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than St Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

This clip from Portlandia was me in 2009-2013 (and probably me still!):

Here’s what that has looked like for me. I have over 3,000 unread pages saved in Pocket (a save-to-read-later service)!

Not sure when this “later” is when I’m going to find time to read them.

In 2013 I bookmarked 1,500 sites that I never got around to reading. At that point, I was literally checking 75 blogs every week. I still read blogs but almost exclusively blogs related to college ministry (my field of work)

In 2014, I had 1,000 unread bookmarked pages.

And 500 in 2015. If you do the math, that’s not exactly a trickle – I’m still bookmarking almost 2 pages a day. But it’s progress!

I’m replacing those “must read” late-breaking-this-is-going-to-change-your-life blogposts and articles with the slow, harder work of reading a book. Trading candy for meat. Books make me slow down and absorb information instead of just letting information go in one ear and out the other.

Randy Gravitt says:

If I could choose only one habit to pursue growth it would be to develop a love for books. Reading requires focus and commitment. But the payoff is huge. If you want to jumpstart your leadership growth, spend at least thirty minutes a day reading

A few steps I’m taking to read more:

  • I’m tracking how many books I read each year
  • I don’t necessarily want a goal of number-of-books-read because, again, the goal is not more information input. It’s deeper, slower reading. Last year I read 17 books. And I want to read more this year. But I feel like a goal will make me rush through books instead of slowly absorbing them.
  • I’m not finishing every book I start
  • I’ve found one of the easiest ways to read more is to take advantage of dead time in my schedule – like driving. 15 minutes here and there really adds up. So I sucked it up and subscribed to Audible.com (a ridiculous $22/month for two books). I listen at 1.25 speed and can get through two books in a month.
  • I’m committed to reading every night. A couple of years ago my wife introduced the new rule of “no blue light an hour before bed” = no checking twitter or reading online. I’m thankful for God’s grace through her! It made me take up the habit of reading before bed every night. A great side-effect: when my head hits the pillow I’m asleep in seconds.
  • The trick is finding when to read the right kind of book:
    • In the morning I read a spiritually developmental book (right now I’m reading John Piper’s Bloodlines on ethnicity and racial reconciliation). I need to carve out more time for this category. I rarely read during the day.
    • In the car on audiobook I can’t listen to any book that I want to take notes on. I need a book that can just wash over me. That’s more of a story/biography. Shadow of the Almighty – the story of martyred missionary Jim Elliott was perfect. Though there’s plenty of quotes I’d want to underline, I’ve read it enough times that I can just let the story and Jim’s singleminded pursuit of Christ and the Great Commission wash over me. How We Got To Now was also a great one for audiobook. VERY interesting stories of the 6 most important innovations – great stuff to inspire your thinking and own innovation. But nothing much that I’d need to write down to remember.
    • At night, again, I can’t read any book that I’d want to underline or take notes on or that will get my brain’s gears turning. At night my goal is to unwind. So I stick mostly with biographies that inspire. “Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.” Harry Truman
    • Bonhoeffer was a great nighttime read. Or my current bedtime book- River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. On deck:
  • I’m keeping an Evernote on books I want to read in each of these categories (audiobook, morning, and night reading)

What about you? What helps you read more books?

In what ways have you bought into “informationism”?

Would LOVE book recommendations. List some of your favorites in the comments.