Live Blog From Catalyst ’14 – 45 Leadership Quotes And Lessons From Reggie Joiner

As a member of the Catalyst Blog Team and INJOY Stewardship Solutions, I will be bringing you live updates from the much anticipated Catalyst Conference in Atlanta, GA.  The theme for this year’s conference is Change Is Coming.

Catalyst always begins by conducting a series of Labs on Wednesday for church leaders.  Today’s first session was conducted by Reggie Joiner, Founder and CEO of one of my favorite organizations Orange.  As usual, he inspired and stretched us.  The following are 45 Leadership Quotes and Lessons from this amazing session.

Also, before reading, make sure you check out the announcement from INJOY Stewardship Solutions shown below about a FREE webinar I will be conducting on October 16th for churches needing to raise capital in 2015.  Now onto Reggie’s thoughts:

1. When you show up to an event like this, you’re going to be teaching us a lot of things. – Reggie to anyone 23 yrs of age or younger
2. We need to hold things with an open hand and be willing to change what needs changing.
3. 100 years from now the only thing that matters is someone’s relationship with God.
4. You Can Know God. The Creator of universe wants to have a relationship with you and me.
5. You Can Become A Christian In A Moment.
6. The Bible Is All True. You can trust the Bible as the final authority of who God is.
7. Trust Leads To Stronger Faith…The more you trust God the more you know God can be trusted.
8. You Should Enjoy Going To Church.
9. We should work vey hard to create environments people enjoy going to. The greatest sign of your church is people like being there.
10. You should measure how much people laugh.
11. Your Beliefs Matter. Your behavior will be determined by your beliefs.
12. God Has An Ideal.
13. God Is Good. His nature is fundamentally good and caring and loving. When life is mean and the world is evil there is something in the core being that one day God will make all of this right.
14. Just because things will be true doesn’t mean kids will be impressed. What matters is how we handle these truths.
15. It takes more faith not to believe (in Jesus) than to believe.
16. I have a hard time reconciling how some Christians just don’t think.
17. 5 years ago 17% of 18 to 30 years old said the doubted the existence of God. Today it is 32%.
18. 8 out of 10 people 18 to 30 years old say going to church is not important.
19. Sometimes in our zeal to fight for what is true, we don’t fight for the tensions that actually connect those truths to what is real.
20. When you remove the tension, you take away the energy. When you remove the tension, you remove the influence. When you remove the tension, you water down the truth.
21. Sometimes a truth can lose clarity when it’s divorced from the reality of the other truths that amplify it.
22. Tension doesn’t make a truth less true. It makes it more real. Your challenge as a leader is how to learn to hold on to complex and multiple tensions and make truths more real.
23. You can say. “You can know God” and also say, “God is a mystery.”
24. You can say, “Yes, you can become a Christian in a moment” and “Yes, it will take forever to figure out what that means.”
25. You can say, “Yes, the Bible is all true” and “Yes, everything true about life in not in the Bible.”
26. Kids when they grow up are going to face some issues not directly addressed in the Bible.
27. “The Bible was not written to tell you how the heavens were built. The Bible was written to tell you how to go to Heaven.” – Adrian Rogers
28. What if something contradicts what the Bible says? Go with the Bible.
29. We can’t make life truths the enemy of Bible truths.
30. If you’re a leader in the church you’re primary job is not to teach the Bible. You’re primary job is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.
31. You can say, “Trust leads to a stronger faith” and “Doubt can lead to a stronger faith.”
32. If you don’t let teenagers process their own doubt they won’t own their own faith.
33. It’s not the amount of faith you have that determines your walk with God. It’s where you put the little faith you have…It’s the object of your faith that makes the difference.
34. You can say, “Yes, you should enjoy going to church” and “Yes, you can enjoy living in the world.”
35. You can say, “Yes, your beliefs matter” but “People matter more.”
36. If something you believe causes you to be mean to people, then there’s something broken with what you believe…God cared more about people than the theology of the day.
37. You can say, “Yes, God has an ideal” and “Yes, God uses broken people.”
38. You can say, “Yes, God is good” and that means you should do good.
39. We are the biggest hypocrites in the world when we say. “God is good” and we do not do good.
40. We should do good to reflect His character.
41. It’s OK to believe like a Calvinist but date like it’s free will.
42. If you don’t say yes to the tension, you set kids up to reject what is true because of what they will experience.
43. If you don’t say yes to the tension, kids could grow up to become bad Christians or “that” Christian.
44. Don’t be irresponsible.  Don’t get stuck.  Don’t be a jerk.  Don’t be weird.  Don’t be threatened.  Don’t be an idiot.  Don’ be shallow.  Don’t be arrogant.
45. Don’t judge other churches and organizations trying to live in the tensions.

More leadership insights to come throughout the day.

Please join me on October 16th at 2:00 PM EST for a FREE webinar I will be conducting for INJOY Stewardship Solutions entitled How To Raise More Money In 2015 Than You Ever Thought Possible.  It will be a fun hour of equipping and training.  Click HERE or on the image to left to register today.