Paradigm shift

This is a challenge to think greater than you have in the past. We all have governing rules (paradigms) that put boundaries on what we believe is possible, acceptable, advisable, and even achievable. These paradigms provide the framework (rules and limitations) for our dreaming, thinking, and working.

Look at the two pictures. What do you see?













In both images, there are two different pictures. In the first image, you may see either a duck OR a rabbit. (hint: the ducks bill becomes the rabbit's ears). In the other: either an old woman or a young lady (hint: the check line of the young woman is the nose of the old woman).

What if the things that you've been told were impossible, became possible?

• what if running 26 miles was nothing compared with the hundreds of miles that some people regularly ran in Africa a century ago.
• OR when the clock revolution went from standard dial to digital
• OR when the Wright brothers challenged popular thinking to suggest and prove that man could fly

Often we're letting others define the rules, set by their own limiting thinking, dwarfed dreams, and personal convictions.

In ministry and leadership, what if we had a paradigm shift and broke the rules:

• truly lived like their is only ONE true Christian Church,
• this Church shared resources and cooperated together to fulfill the single purpose of sharing God's message and love with everyone in all of the world,
• in local churches, we chose to support the whole Church and refuse to compete,
• instead of counting how many people are coming to church, we counted how many are not and kept our focus on how we can reach more, i.e. not the 300 we do have, but the 60,000 we haven't reached yet,
• we saw every believer as a minister of the gospel and invested into their lives so that they would be fully empowered and trained to truly testify for Jesus,
• we invested more into the souls (Peter calls us "living stones") of the Church than we do into the brick and mortar of the churches,
• we worked urgently everyday, recognizing that the time is short and the night-fall is at-hand,
• rather than competing for the "best" program, sermon, video idea, we shared our ideas, training, leadership, and finances, so that the whole Church was strengthened!
  

We might just see a paradigm shift in how ministry in the local church happens if we started thinking differently and started breaking the rules.