The Leadership Summit

I had a friend from another church that had an extra ticket to "The Leadership Summit" that was being held in Fresno. The Summit is a live video leadership training event that reaches over 100,000 leaders world-wide. It's put on by Willow Creek Church with thousands of churches across the world hosting the satellite feed. One of the speakers I really enjoyed was a guy by the name of Craig Groeschel (He looks like Tom Cruise doesn't he?). Craig's the pastor of LifeChurch.tv, one of the countries first multi-site campus churches with over 50 weekend worship experiences currently at 13 campuses in six states ministering to over 23,000 people. He threw out five main points that connected with his new book, "It: How Churches and Leader Can Get It and Keep It". The one that really connected to me was his fourth point in which he asked us the question, "Are you willing to fail?" So many times we are afraid to try something new because we are afraid to fail. Yet, Craig says that failure is often the first step into seeing God. He pointed to the life of Peter and his many failures (boat, denial, etc.) that led to the ability to "get it" (3000 were saved, etc.). He said, "Most people don't know how often we failed.... Our first attempt at a video venue was a disaster. What we learned from the failure would have been hard to learn any other way. If you don't have "it" maybe you need to try something new- and fail at it. I tell our staff often, Fail! If you're not failing, you've stopped dreaming. You'll eventually stop learning. And you will stop growing." I pray that it can also be said of my life and the ministries at NC.